[Malte Müller]

I think anything that you are passionate about qualifies as a hobby. I would draw the line between “hobby” and “interest” with the extend of contribution. For example being interested in politics itself is not really a hobby. Or anything else.

Doing sports – which I am not that into 😉 – is surely a hobby if you love doing it. My father played tennis several times a week and als in club competitions and it was clearly a hobby. For sure hiking and running therefore can be a hobby if you love doing that regulary.

Physical or not is not really a measure I think. Is reading or watching films or listening to music and talking about like here physical? Not really but it’s clearly a hobby 😉

By the way, Malte, I just became grand uncle to a little boy called… Malte!

Congratulations, Nils!

Malte is definitely not a common name in Norway (but more so in Germany and maybe Denmark?), and as far as I know there have never been any Maltes in my family, so I’ll have to ask my nephew where that came from. But I like it!

Yes, it is apparently from old Northern German and Danish (well, related languages of course). I don’t know how my parentst got to know it back then. But funny is that a friend of mine I went to school with is also called Malte. Was quite funny, to differ us wie always had the first char of our surnames appended 😉 Nowadays it is quite common here and given my “overused” surname there are even several namesakes (name twins?) even here in my city.

And I guess that ties in somewhat with the “old codger” topic of this thread: some of us are actually grand uncles now – not just uncles. 😉

So a sibling’s children got children? Yeah, we’re “old codgers” 😉 I can’t become grand uncle since I don’t have siblings. I am 2nd degree uncle as one of my cousins has daughters. And I am a kind of non releative uncle – a term for that is “Nennonkel” here, maybe translates as “named uncle” – to the son of a friend who sadly passed a few years ago.