I like people more than places

I was applying for a job the other day, and the application form asked me the question ‘What inspires you?’.  And after I thought about it for a while, this is what I wrote.

People inspire me.

I’ve done quite a bit of travelling in my life, and although I like to go to new places and see new things, I’m usually interested not so much in where I’m going, as in who I’m going with.

When I was 15 I went to Neuschwannstein, the fairy tale castle from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but I can’t remember the first thing about it and I don’t have any pictures of it either.  What I do have pictures of are the people I went with (especially the girls), stood outside the castle, as I was generally more interested in them than I was in a building.

I also got to hang around Munich and the English Garden quite a bit on that trip, but I haven’t got any pictures of that either.  I do have some more pictures of girls though (I was 15, who wouldn‘t?, I tastefully decided not to photograph all the topless women I saw or the naked man who kept trying to get us to play badminton with him though, so I did operate with some semblance of decorum).

Similarly, when I went to India in January this year, although I went there partly to see the Taj Mahal (which included a 12 hour trip in a taxi there and back where someone tried to get me to pay money to look at a monkey and another man with a sword opened a car door for me at the services, and we had to fire our tour guide because we just wanted to enjoy it without words), I went there mainly to hang out with Dean (and briefly with Elsa), and while I was there I was more inspired by the people I met than the places I went to.

If I’d met Shah Jahan himself, and he’d told me all about his wife and what he loved about her, I probably would have understood the Taj Mahal more, but in the end for me, it was just a building, and not even an easy one to get to at that (and I had my polos confiscated by the Army).

On reflection that day I went to the Taj Mahal I probably should have stayed in the Hotel Ajanta all day.  I could have spent those 15 hours having a leisurely breakfast, lunch and dinner in the hotel, striving and failing to get the things I’d ordered but being brought other stuff instead, in that marvellously random way they used to feed me over there in Upsidedownland.

Sometimes I felt more like a friend or a member of the family than a paying customer at the Ajanta.  And not always in a good way. Sometimes I got the distinct impression that I was getting on their nerves asking them stuff all the time, and they wished I’d go away, and conversely I sometimes found their behaviour completely incomprehensible and sometimes I didn’t have a bloody clue what was going on.  Like I said, it was just like a family.

Also better than the Taj Mahal was the goofy waiter in the orange hoodie from the Hotel Godawari who brought me my Paneer Butter Massala, He was running around delivering dishes of food while a man was hammering a door frame and the restaurant seemed to be still being built around us.  It was so the opposite of corporate, and I really liked that about it.

I liked it more because it was such a contrast from the faux corporateness of the Big Bite in Meerut the day before, which was like Fawlty Towers, only with a much more rude man in charge.  I’m sure I’ll always remember the face of the waiter at the Big Bite who was so disinterested and surly, until we gave him a big tip that is (we were being ironic) and he suddenly turned into Mr Smiley Shakey Hands Man.

And I’ll certainly always remember the quizzical looks I saw on the faces of the local residents as Dean and I got ourselves funnelled by Google maps down the ever narrower back alleys of Delhi until we were virtually riding through people’s back gardens.

It was only when we got trapped with our fully laden bikes between a man pushing a cart full of bricks and an old lady in a chair that we realised we had our map set to walking directions rather than road directions.  Thankfully the old lady, politely and without any fuss, lifted her chair over her head to let us through, or we’d still be there now.

And that bloody rickshaw driver who tried to take us down the Spice Marrrket, and who told us ’You happy, I’m happy’ but then managed to disprove this by leaving everyone unhappy.  And the little leathery tuk tuk driver with the bad teeth who followed us round  for fucking hours near India Gate (it was like being tracked by Tommy Lee Jones US Marshall character in the Fugitive) until he got moved on by the Army.  And the other much nicer tuktuk driver who told us to catch the number 11 bus, and made sure we didn‘t forget the number by tapping us on both knees and saying one and one equals eleven (I thought it equalled two, but this is India)..

I do sometimes feel awed by buildings and other things made out of bricks and other construction materials, and although I was pretty knocked out by seeing the Berlin Wall in 1985 the reality of that divide came home to me much more powerfully two years later when I met a retired lady from Leipzig on a train who was going to meet her sister in the West.

She hadn’t seen her sister for 22 years because they were living on opposite sides of the wall when Germany was turned from one country into two.  The matter of fact way she told her story made the Wall more real to me than seeing watchtowers and guards and the Wall itself.

And I went to Venice once, but the thing I remember most isn’t the Bridge of Sighs or St Mark’s Square but running around with water pistols shooting at my friends and being shot at, and if ever there was a city suited to the use of water pistols, Venice is it.  And the lady who ran the ice cream parlour in Padua that was the first place I’d ever been that had 30 flavours of ice cream, and hanging out in the café over the road from the hotel with my friends, playing King of Boxer, where I kept getting knocked out by a little computer man called Brown Pants.  The people and the emotions I still remember, but the buildings I don’t.

The fact that people mean more to me than places is the very reason I can do a 100 mile bike ride and remember no scenery whatsoever but I can remember the cantankerous woman in the Ford Fiesta van who was driving round on a beautiful summer’s day in a car full of urinal cubes and toilet rolls, and who not only beeped at me, but stopped to make lots of negative comments about cyclists.

And I remember less about the views I saw on Saturday climbing Hartside than I do about the incredulous cyclist who was doing his best to smash up his carbon fibre bike at the café at the top by repeatedly dropping it on the floor.

And it’s probably why I like cycle touring with Ruth, rather than on my own, because it’s not what I’ve seen that counts, but who I saw it with.  Without someone to say ‘Do you remember that time that we….?’ to, I don’t think I’d want to go.

Yes, buildings are all very nice, and they’re quite useful for keeping the rain off, but in the end they’re just buildings.  And they don’t really inspire me.  But people do….

Anyway, that’s what I wrote, so that’s probably another employer I won’t hear back from……

Working in a factory - like Germany in 1987, except for the naked showers

I started work in a factory yesterday.  Making frozen desserts.  Yesterday I peeled about a thousand bananas and helped in other ways to make a job lot of banoffee pies.  I did most of the tasks in the production line, although I never got to feed bananas into the banana slicer, but that at least means I've got some goals left for the next time I'm in.

I have worked in a factory before, in Germany in 1987, although that one was packing powdered paint into sacks, and this was making frozen desserts.  Despite the different products, there were similarities.

The shifts are virtually the same.  6 till 2.  2 till 10, and 10 till 6.  Yesterday I was on a 6 till 2, so arriving at the work in the dark, and leaving in the heat of mid-afternoon.  Very like Germany.

I had to wear a white uniform, and standard issues boots.  Same as Germany.  I had to clock in, and out.  Same as Germany.  A large proportion of the factory staff are from countries other than the host nation, same as Germany.

The main differences were that I was working in a production line with others yesterday, so if I didn't keep up, it would affect the whole line, whereas in Germany it was just me and a machine, so as long as I'd emptied the machine by the end of the shift I could go at my own pace.

The other big difference was the absence of naked communal showers at the end of the shift.  In Germany these were necessary because you would be so completely covered in paint dust by the end of the shift that you had to go into a big shower and wash it all off.  And not just with a regular sponge, you had to scour it off.  You got so much paint inside your clothing as well that it was necessary to get someone else to scrub your back clean.  I am not joking.  So, a big communal shower, no clothes on, scrubbing each others' backs with the equivalent of a pan scourer.  And from experience I have to tell you, the thing you do not want in this situation, the thing you absolutely must not get, is an involuntary erection.  Anyway, enough about that.

So, thankfully, the cake factory, no communal showers.  Your feet get cold, especially if you're working near the freezers, and you do get some cake on you, but it mostly washes off quite easily, without the aid of stripping down to your birthday suit.

There are lots of rules, but these all make sense, as they are all to do with not getting food poisoning into the pies, and not letting foreign objects fall into the mix.  I have to say, from a lifetime's experience of eating pies, I consider both these things to be very good ideas.

Everybody has to wear a hairnet, but there is a very sensible colour coding system in operation.  Most people wear white ones, but supervisors wear red ones, first aiders wear green, and the people who come along to clean up and empty the bins wear yellow, so you know who's who, without having to know exactly who everyone is.

I didn't mind that the tasks were repetitive, and this was helped by the fact that you are rotated onto a different task about every half an hour.  I got a half hour break in the middle so I only had to get through 4 hours in one stretch.  There isn't a lot of time to talk, especially on some of the tasks, like the spreading cream around with the back of a spoon task, but the people I did speak to seemed friendly and helpful.  There's a quiet efficiency about the place, which I hope to emulate in due course.  I think I've got the quiet part right, I just need to work on the efficiency.

The main problem I had were that my feet were like blocks of ice.  The temperature at floor level is around 5 degrees C, because of the cold air coming out from the freezers.  This is especially noticeable when you're working near the end of the line, doing the finishing touches.  By then I felt like the liquid metal guy out of Terminator 2 after he'd fallen into a lorry load of liquid nitrogen.  When I started walking again afterwards, my  legs didn't exactly snap off, but I did have trouble getting them going again.  Thermal socks needed, I think.

Anyhoo, there it is.  I've done a day, and it was fine, and I'm going back to do some more on Friday.  I'd like to have warmer feet next time, and I'd like to be better at using the back of a spoon, but apart from that I have no complaints.  Especially not about the lack of showers....

I used to be a genius - not any more

When I was younger one of my favourite quotations was from Mark Twain.

it went like this:  'When I was 14 my father was such an idiot that I could barely stand to have the man around, but by the time I was 21 I was amazed at what he'd learned in seven years'.

The height of my own genius was 18.  Probably on the bus on the way back from having 3 months in Germany.  Hey, I'd lived and worked abroad, mastered a new language, and now I'm off to University.  What a genius.

I used to think that courage was a thing you needed to be able to do stuff.  But I realised on that Germany trip that courage is not having the courage to do things, but doing them anyway.  After 25 years I'd forgotten that but I've been remembering it recently, and I think that was what got me on a plane to India.

Another thing that happened to me when I was younger was that I used to play football, and in the long days of the summer holidays I used to play football all day.  And sometimes early in the day I'd feel tired and my legs would feel heavy, but after a while I got beyond tired and I could just run and run.  And sometimes I'd still be out after dark, although playing football at that time of night could be dangerous because you couldn't always see the ball until it smacked you in the face.

The reason I remembered feeling like that, is because that's pretty much how I felt when I was cycling on Thursday.  For the first 30 miles or so I felt pretty weary and didn't think I'd be able to go the distance, but then I got into that magic place that's beyond tired, where your legs feel like they could go on for ever.  And even when I got to the pub at 8.30 at night I felt like I could keep going.

This week I've been feeling pretty down, indecisive about my future and some of the time when I've been alone I've been a bit despondent.  Worrying about what job to get, where to work, how to spend my free time, worrying about my home, and about my eyes.  All the usual crap.  But when I was out on my bike none of it mattered.  It didn't matter where I lived, or whether I had a job, or what I was going to do in the future.  Because I was out on my bike, and it was great.  It was almost Spring, and my winter hibernation was nearly over.  It was still cold, but inside the cold was the promise of better things to come.

And it was the same when I used to run around kicking a ball aged 14. Nothing else mattered.  Not exams, not my crazy stepdad, not the kids who lived in my street who wanted to chase me because I went to a school where I wore a blazer.  None of it.

That's what exercise with a purpose can do for you.  Some people think kicking a football or riding a bike is pointless.  What do they know?

So what happened to me for 25 years?  Since I was a genius.  I think for some of that time I lost my way.  But I'm getting better again.  I don't know as much now as I used to, but that's because I found out about a load of stuff I don't know.  A bit like Donald Rumsfeld, I now know more about the stuff I know I don't know.  I've still not caught up with the stuff I don't know I don't know, but I'm sure that'll come later.

In those 25 years what happened was that I did some stuff.  I succeeded at some things, and I failed at some things, although often it's hard to tell the difference, because it's just a matter of perspective.

Judging by the standards of the outside world, I've been failing at a lot more stuff in the last few years.  Especially getting jobs.  Before 40 I'd hardly ever been turned down for anything.  Now it happens to me almost every week.  But filling in job applications is getting easier.  Because I don't write what I think they want to hear anymore.  I write what I want.  I don't try to pretend I'm something I'm not, because I figure if they don't want me as I am, they probably wouldn't want me trying to be somebody else either.  As John Vernon famously says in the film Airplane.  I don't do impressions.

It's possible to get better at failing I think.  And I think I am.  Now I laugh when I get turned down for stuff, whether it's a job, or whether it's just a bowl of porridge.  It doesn't work to take myself too seriously.  And although I've had a meltdown in the last few months, I did find a couple of things out.

One is that you don't need courage to do things.  You just have to do them.  And the other is that getting out there and exercising, whether it's running around with a pointless football or riding a pointless bicycle, is the best way to help you feel better on the inside.  Of course it helps that it's nearly Spring, although I'm not going to use my new found energy to do myself in, as some depressed people do.  I'm going to get better.

1983 - Avoiding Swingball in the English Garden

After the trip to Munich in 1983 I wrote a book about the trip.  It was only an exercise book with about 32 pages so it was hardly War and Peace, but it had a poem in it.  The whole book is of course lost now, and if it's ever found I doubt The Time Team members of the future will be knocking each other out to get their hands on it, but I've had a go at recreating the poem.  Some of it rhymes and some of it totally doesn't but I haven't got hours to sit around trying to shoehorn phrases into it that rhyme with Badminton and the word incriminating, so just pretend it's one of those modern poems that don't rhyme because the person who wrote it is so clever it doesn't need to.


Avoiding  Swingball in the English Garden

In 83 we went to Germany
but it wasn’t football and it wasn’t a war

There weren’t any tanks and there weren’t any trenches
We sat on the grass, there weren’t any benches

The most dangerous thing we faced all trip
Was a naked German with his designs on a game of Badminton

As we sat on the grass and politely declined
His penis swung dangerously near
We made sure we reclined. 
Bloody hell it’s supposed to be badminton not swing ball
I didn’t yell after him.

We got to see German girls breasts and underarm hair
The English kept their tops on, it wasn’t fair

We used to go swimming in the English Garden
The water was cold, I lost my trunks
I was fully naked but no-one saw
because my penis had shrunk

(Except Helen Winn, but she would have needed an electron microscope to see anything incriminating.)

I got lost going to see Tootsie,
the police couldn’t find me
A young English idiot in a stripey top
asking for directions in broken German
It should have been easy.

We saw the castle from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
But I haven’t got any pictures
Because I mostly photographed girls then
(And also  I’d have had to be miles away to get the whole castle in
and I only had a crap disc camera and it wasn’t even any good at photographing stuff close up.)

There was one girl in particular
She was called Pamela
I liked her but she liked Darren more
So I had a lemon ice cream
To commiserate myself with.

It was okay in the end
Because I was friends with Darren too
And we went out for a picnic together

I proved I could handle rejection like a man,
a skill I would need a lot in later life
Not just with girls but with interviews.

I was always trying to be funny then
Just like I do now
Sid was there
he was trying to be funnier
But he cheated by taking a Monty Python book
I had to make my own stuff up

After we came back we mostly lost touch
But then we waited 25 years and they invented
Social networking.

So I got to reminisce about 83
With Pamela and with others

About being thinner
And about going to Germany
Not for football, and not for a war
Where there weren’t any trenches,
And there weren’t any benches
And there weren’t any tanks, except for the memories.

Munich 1983 - Eating lemons and looking at boobies.

Going to Hannover in 1985 wasn't my first exchange trip to Germany.  I went to Munich in 1983 when I was 15.  Again it was the same story, they came over here for two weeks in April, and we went there for two weeks in July.

The English half of the exchange didn't exactly run smoothly.  I had exchanged letters with my exchange partner Josephine, so I knew how tall she was, how many cats she had etc.  This was supposed to help with the ice breaking disaster that is speaking to foreigners when you're 15.

Oh No, they've sent the wrong German!

So in April about 30 Germans came pouring through the ticket barriers at Leeds Station, and one by one we identified our exchange partners and went home.  Eventually there was just one girl left, but it wasn't Josephine.  It took about 30 minutes of hand gestures and pigeon German / English to discover that Josephine had decided to stay at home with the cats and instead they'd sent a sub.  In my case it was Friederike Merdan (or Fri for short), a stripey trousered girl who not only was not Josephine, she didn't know any of the other Germans because she was in the school year above the rest of them, so taking her out in groups wasn't easy, as she didn't really have any particular desire to mix with people she didn't know.

Having fun on the way to Neuschwannstein - notice the bicycle bell balanced on top of a half eaten apple and a tennis ball

I managed to pretty much get by a whole fortnight just by introducing her to people who commented on her stripey trousers, and that was pretty much the end of the conversation, and on to the next trouser admirer.  I did my best with her, and so did my mum, but it was like pulling teeth out of a crocodile's head.

When I got to Munich I had the same problem in reverse in that she wasn't friends with any of the other German exchangers, so she didn't really want to meet up with them.

Eventually after about 3 days, I decided that I knew which U-bahns to take to get about, and so I would be fine going out by myself.  And I went off to meet some friends to see Tootsie (Dustin Hoffmann dubbed over in German).  I didn't have a bloody clue what was going on in the film.  Dustin kept dressing up as a woman and hanging around with Jessica Lange and going on the swings and stuff.  That was pretty much all I could figure out.  About halfway through the film, Dustin's roommate (Bill Murray) is talking to him, and he appears to be eating lemons off a plate.  Steve Hills leaned over to me, and he said 'That guy's eating lemons!'.  For reasons still unknown to this day, this was the funniest thing I'd ever heard, and the rest of the film I couldn't stop laughing.  Unfortunately I was laughing totally out of sync with the funny bits in the film, which the Germans were laughing at.  They kept looking at me, as if I was noodle doodle.  I was.

After the film, I went and got on all the right trams, but then when I got off at Schwabing station, I realised I didn't have a clue which direction to set off walking in.  Never one to give up easily, and without the phone number of Fri's house, I walked round and round and round for 2-3 hours, asking for directions in appalling German.  In the meantime, Fri had called the Police and they were out looking for an English boy in a stripey T-shirt.

I went all the way to Neuschwannstein but all I got was pictures of girls

After a process of eliminating every street in Munich one at a time, I found my way back to Fri's apartment.  She opened the door, gave me quite a lot of abuse, and went off to bed.  It was about 1.30 in the morning.  I should have been back by 11.  Her mum called off the police and I went to bed.

For the next 11 days I barely spoke to Fri, but having learned my way round Munich the hard way, I became happily self-reliant.  Although we didn't speak much, I did regularly see her naked body go past me in the river in the English Garden.  It wasn't officially a naturist resort, but every girl who wasn't English walked around topless, including Fri.  There's a fast flowing river in the Garden, and we used to go in it all the time.  You got carried downstream by the current, and then you had to grab onto a bridge and drag yourself to the bank to get out.  Once or twice I lost my Speedos during the exit from the water.  Unfortunately on one of these occasions I was seen by Helen Winn, and even more unfortunate was that in the cold water my penis had shrunk to the size of a peanut.  Not a good way to impress the girls.

Messing about in the English Garden - with all our clothes on

Unfortunately, on one of these river rides, Stephen Holliday hit his head on the concrete bottom of the river bed, underneath a bridge and he had to go off to hospital to get his nose fixed.  I just had an e-mail conversation with him this week, though, so I'm pretty sure he's over it now, although he's not quite got over being buried in potted plants whilst out of his tree on Apfelkorn in Hannover, but that's another story.

Here we are on the way home.  That's Steve on the left, with the broken nose

There was a German man in the English Garden, who used to go round the park completely starkers, holding two badminton racquets and a shuttlecock, and shouting quite loudly 'Wer spielt Federball?'.  I always tried to decline politely without making eye contact.

As well as dossing round the English Garden, we went on a coach trip to the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Castle at Neuschwannstein, which was incredible.  If only I had better pictures of it, most of the pictures I took were of Pamela Pirie and Emma Helliwell, although I don't know why I bothered.  I should have got more scenery in, because both of them would rather have seen me shot into space than go out with me.

Here's one with me in.  Can't believe I was ever that thin!

On the last night, I spotted Pamela snogging Darren Zimmermann in a doorway and I knew my chances had finally fizzled out to nothing.  Darren was about 3 years older, and he could dance and cut his own hair.  He knew I liked her, and he felt a bit bad that he swiped her out from under my nose, so he invited me out for breakfast in the English Garden the morning we went back to England, and he brought a picnic, and it was the most gentlemanly way for him to have handled being the better man, and I really liked him for that.

Gratuitous Picture of Pamela's legs - thankfully we can both laugh about it now

It was a fantastic two weeks.  I got to travel round one of the greatest cities in the world, completely independently at 15 years of age.  The weather was beautiful, and there were topless girls everywhere.  I even managed to totally avoid playing badminton with a naked man. 

At the end of the two weeks Fri gave me a lift back to the airport, and we parted on good terms.  I think she forgave me for sparking a man hunt, and if the truth were told, I think she'd quite enjoyed not having to look after me much.

It wasn't the perfect holiday, but it wasn't far off.  

Berlin 1985

When I was 17 I went to Berlin.  That was in the days when West Berlin was completely surrounded by East Germany.  We went on a coach from Hannover, during our school exchange trip..

At the border with East Germany a very serious looking man got on board and had a good look round the coach to make sure we weren't hiding anything.

The main difference once we left West Germany was that instead of seeing Audis, BMWs, and Mercedes on the Autobahn all we saw were Trabants, and about every third one of them was parked up on the hard shoulder, with an East German looking under the bonnet to see what was wrong with it.

I expected East Germany to be very grey, and I was quite surprised to see that it had grass and trees that were made of green, as I'd almost been expecting them to be grey too.

I remember seeing children waving and smiling at the coach from the side of the road, and thinking that they looked happy enough.  They just looked like children anywhere.  And when we got off at the services to go to the bathroom, the tarmac looked like tarmac you might see in the West, and it felt the same under our feet.

I sat next to Paul Edgar on the coach journey and at one point he managed to explode a can of Coke all over my passport, which made it all a bit sticky and it's still stained to this day.  But I did get a stamp on it at the border, which is about the only stamp in it.  Most countries in Europe don't seem to bother, they just wave you through, but in East Germany they had a good look at us on the way in and out.

Upon entering West Berlin it was back to Audis again.  No more Trabants.  Everything was brightly coloured and obviously very Western.  They used to call West Berlin the Schaufenster (shop window) of Europe and it was hard to escape the conclusion that they were rubbing the Easterners noses in it a bit with all the bright colours and the consumer goods and the brand names and the windows full of stuff.  'This is what you're missing', they seemed to be saying, 'we've got different kinds of ketchup and everything'.

My schoolfriends and I had a few hours to spare in Berlin that day, and so of course we decided to go to McDonalds, which caused our teacher Mr Kino to despair of us.  Something about coming to one of the world's great cities and choosing to spend time hanging out in a burger bar.

Then we saw the Wall.  We went up on a viewing platform and had a look over at the Brandenburg Gate, and into the No Man's Land with the Russian guard and barbed wire which surrounded it.  Near the viewing platform were some graves of people who'd died trying to cross over and a tat shop selling cheap souvenirs.  I didn't buy one.  The Wall was massive.  About twice as high as us.  Every so often an American jeep would go past, with troops in the back and a big gun.  On the Eastern side were the watchtowers, looking imposing.

We went to Checkpoint Charlie and thought about going over to the East, but there was a minimum currency exchange of about 30 Marks to go over, and nothing to spend it on, so we decided not to go.

Then we went to the Reichstag and had a look over to the East.  It was such a contrast to what you could see in the West.  I'd heard that on the Eastern side you weren't allowed to live within a couple of miles of the Wall, so the buildings immediately on the other side of the wall looked derelict.  A few broken windows and loose curtains blowing in the wind.  In the distance, you could see the occasional tram but no people.  The trams were a dirty red colour, everything else looked grey.  More like the grey I'd expected when we were on the coach.

It would have seemed impossible at the time of our visit, but the Wall only lasted 4 more years, until glasnost, perestroika and Gorbachev.  I met a lady on a train in 1987 who was from the East.  She had just reached the age of 65 and was allowed to travel again to the West.  She was going to see her sister in the West, for the first time in 22 years.  She seemed very matter of fact about it, but to me, always having lived in a country where you can move around at will, it seemed extraordinary..

Berlin in 1985 was like coming face to face with history, and it wasn't like the history you learn at school, this was history happening right in front of your eyes.  Everything from 1945 onwards had led up to what I saw  right there.

I've been fascinated by Berlin ever since.  I've read lots of books about it, both during and after the war.  About the Berlin Blockade, and about the Wall, and the stories of people who it trapped and divided.  It's probably the most strange and unnerving place I've ever been to, and I'm glad I got to see it with the Wall in place.  I hope to go back sometime soon to see it all joined back up again.



If you liked this blogpost, you might also enjoy this one

Germany 1985 - Boris Becker, Handel's birthday and Escape to Victory - the Rematch

My first German exchange trip was in 1983 to Munich.  I got given the wrong German and then I got lost and had the German police looking for me, and then I spent two weeks photographing a girl who ended up with someone else, and I also laughed inappropriately at someone eating lemons in the cinema, but overall I still had a really great time, and so in 1985 when I got the chance to go on another German exchange, I of course said yes.

Again the format was the same.  The Germans came over to England in the Spring, and we went back there in the summer.  For some reason we were sent over to Germany on the cross channel ferry in July without a teacher to keep an eye on us, and if there's ever a situation that is bound to end in disaster, it's probably seven 17 year olds on a ferry for 4 hours with unlimited access to the duty free shop.

(The full story of having to drag my drunk school friends off the ferry can be found here)

The German leg of the trip was timed to coincide with the end of the school summer term, so we got to spend some time going to lessons in the Herschelschule in Hannover as well as hanging around in Germany being teenagers.  The best thing about school in Germany is a thing called Hitzefrei.  If it's too hot, you don't have to go to school, and they let you go about 11 in the morning.  We had Hitzefrei almost every day while we were there. 

The whole trip was amazing, although I wish I'd been kinder to my exchange partner Sebastian.  In my defence I was 17 then, and in many ways an idiot.  I was particularly rude to him regarding his taste in music, which I was unnecessarily scathing about (Judas Priest I think).  And that was coming from someone who was into Def Leppard and ELO, so I should have kept my mouth shut.  But the first few days were the best of all.

The first Sunday I was there was the Men's Wimbledon Singles Final (from Wimbledon) and against the odds the unseeded German Boris Becker was in the final.  This was in the days when the Germans were normally about as competitive as the Brits at Wimbledon.  I sat and watched the final with the entire Barth family and almost unbelievably the 17 year old Boris won.  It was extra special watching it in Germany, but it was also the first time I'd seen someone my age or younger win something big in sport.  These days there's only archeryists and crown green bowlers who are older than me in sport.

The evening following the final we were off to something called the Handelfest.  It was a massive celebration to mark the 300th Anniversary of the birth of Handel (you know the Messiah guy).  There was lots of music of his played and an enormous firework display and it was incredible, but almost as incredible was that every conversation that I overheard wasn't about Handel, it was about Boris Becker.  There were elderly Germans everywhere just unable to contain their excitement at what they'd seen.  And it was great to be there.

The other day of that trip I remember the best is the day we played football against the German army in the park.  It was so not Escape to Victory you wouldn't believe.  I'm not sure what the German army were doing in the park.  We were there on borrowed bicycles having a picnic and enjoying the evening summer sun.

Somehow we got talking to them and they challenged us to a football match, but they were so gentlemanly they agreed to play in bare feet, so as not to kick our shins to pieces with their army boots.  They also shared a crate of beer with us, which they had brought along.  I think even with the bare feet they probably won, but the result didn't really matter.

I have no idea why I felt like this, but I can remember reclining on the grass, after the barefoot football match, probably a bit drunk on beer (but not a horrible kind of drunk, just that kind of drunk where you love everybody) and I remember looking up at the sky and enjoying the warmth of the summer evening, and feeling happy enough to die.  I know that sounds bizarre.  Don't get me wrong.  I didn't want to die.  I just felt like it would be a good time to go.  I didn't see how it was possible to feel any more content than I did in that moment, and I thought it would be a good time to slip away.  Being pleasantly tipsy in a park, in a summer evening, having run around a bit playing football.  I didn't see how it could get any better.

Despite the perfect-ness of the opportunity I didn't die on my back in a park in Hannover in 1985, although I might well have done a couple of hours later.  Instead of popping off, I jumped back on my borrowed bicycle and my friends and I rode erratically around the streets and cycle paths of Hannover back to our host families.  We did some absolutely crazy cycling manoeuvres and were lucky not to arrested for being drunk in charge of bikes, but luckily there weren't any police or cars around, so we didn't get either arrested or run over.

The rest of the trip was fantastic too.  Going to school with lots of guys in denim who looked like Jim out of Taxi and lots of tall girls in three quarter length trousers (including Heike Sander, who I briefly fell in love with but only from afar, I managed to take her picture once, that was all).  Catching the underground from terminus to terminus on the spotless German underground system in hour after hour of pointless 'Bahnwanderungs'.  Having a dancing competition for hours in the local disco with Andy Ramsden.  And that isn't even mentioning the most incredible part of the trip, which was the day trip to Berlin, to see the Wall.  I'll have to write about that another time.  It was possibly the most unreal experience I've ever had.

(I did eventually go back and write about Berlin and the blog post for that can be found here)

Going to Berlin proved to be a very good reason for not dying the week before in the park, as have countless experiences since, but I hope when I do pop off, it's in as nice a place as that, surrounded by friends and after having had so much fun.  

Germany 1987 - The least stuff I ever had

After I left school I intended to go to University, but I ended up taking a year off instead.

When I did eventually go to Uni, I ended up leaving after a term.  Mostly I regret this, but the amount I regret it is directly proportional to how unhappy I am at the time.  And the unhappiest I am is when I've got a job I hate.  So I'm okay for at least the next 3 weeks.

During my year off, apart from being the co-creator of the board game Year-off, I did do some other stuff aswell, including going to work in a chemical plant in Duisburg, West Germany (as it was then).

It was hard manual labour, but I got to eat sausages at break time, and I was looked after on the whole by my work colleagues, who were a mixture of Germans, Turks, Poles and other Eastern Europeans.

I lived with a German family, including Horst the father who was quite an angry man, and he was also pretty racist.  He was from Berlin and he grew up during and after the Second World War.  I got on really well with him at first, but then I invited my mum and brother over to visit and I was showing off a bit at the dinner table and talking to them in English about chocolate spread and I offended him with something I said, and things were never the same after that.  We sort of patched it up before I left but things were never really right again between us.

I went over there on the Transline 24 hour bus from Leeds.  It didn't go to Duisburg, but it did stop at the ice rink at Krefeld, which was a few miles away.  Give him a ring, he said, when I got to Krefeld, and he'd pick me up, or rather his daughter Ellie would.  

The bus got to Krefeld at 5 am, and it wasn't until it was disappearing round the corner that I realised I didn't have any change for the payphone.  I only had notes and the smallest I had was a 10 Deutschmark note which was worth about £5 then.

It's not the best introduction to living in a foreign country to be hanging around outside an ice rink at 5 in the morning, accosting strangers in broken German trying to find somebody with change for a fiver.  

Eventually around 6 someone took pity on me and gave me some change for the phone, and I thanked her and then managed to arrange my lift.

Horst and his family lived in an apartment near the chemical plant in Duisburg (he had 5 children, but only the youngest Nicole was still at home) and I rented a room off them on the floor above.  I could see the Rhine out of the window.  I had my own sink and toilet but a lot of the time they invited me downstairs for meals and let me use their bathroom.

For 3 months I lived there and all I had was what I had been able to take in a suitcase.  Some clothes, a copy of Wandering by Hermann Hesse, a Walkman and a few cassettes.  Back home, my brother had taken the bedroom that I'd vacated and what possessions I'd left behind would probably have fitted into a shoebox.  

Horst lent me a bike, which I used sometimes, but mostly I just walked everywhere.  I got nearly all my meals at the works canteen or at Macdonalds, I did a heavy manual job, lifting sacks of powder onto palettes and most days I went into the centre of Duisburg, which was about a 3 mile walk each way. 

On my days off, I got the train to other cities, like Hannover, Dusseldorf and Essen and I just walked around there for hours on end.  I didn't buy maps, I just walked around and found things out by looking.  In the 3 months I was away I lost a stone and a half in weight, and when I got back I was the thinnest I've ever been.

On my travels I met a beautiful girl from Dortmund called Britta Biernoth who worked in the travel agents in Duisburg, and by a process of hanging around in her shop asking pointless travel questions that I didn't really want to know the answers to, I got to know her well enough to ask her out for coffee.  It was Britta who stopped me taking sugar in tea and I always remember her surname because it means 'the necessity of beer'.  I used to meet her on my days off and sometimes we'd go out for lunch, and one day I went to Dortmund with her to look at Leeds Square (I'd been to Dortmund Square in Leeds and I wanted to match up the two).  It wasn't a romance though.  She was a few years older than me and she had no shortage of male admirers, most of whom were at least 6 foot 5 and drove Porsches or bought her diamond earrings, but we got on pretty well.  Come to think of it, the guy with the Porsche might have bought himself the diamond earring, I can't remember now.  

When I left Germany after the 3 months, I stayed at her parents' house in Dortmund the night before, and caught the bus home from there.  Her mum gave me a lift to the bus station and on the way pointed out all the buildings that had been newly built after the war because the Allied bombing had destroyed the ones that were there before.  

Apart from being a bit lonely while I was there, I was pretty happy on the whole, and being there with only what I could put in a suitcase for 3 months made me realise how little stuff we actually need.  

There's some stuff I like having, like plates and bikes and cups and forks and shoes and things to sit on, but I only like having stuff that gets used regularly.  I can't stand keeping things that never see the light of day.  Which is why I'm always trying to throw stuff I don't use away.  It's tricky living with other people though, because sometimes I want to throw their stuff away as well.

One thing I do know though.  I'd take experiences over possessions every time.  

How I used to befriend strangers in the days before the internet

In the days before the internet, things required a bit more effort and creativity than they do now.

For example, if you had to do a comparison between New York and Calcutta for your homework, you had to get your ass down to the local library and thumb your way through the Encyclopedia Britannica to find stuff out.  This included using a few skills which are falling out of fashion these days, eg walking, reading and thinking.  I got 19 out of 20 for that homework by the way, so I must have been able to do all 3.

Meeting and getting to know strangers also needed a bit of creativity too, and a little known thing called 'Being able to have a conversation' used to come in useful.  A good forum for having conversations in my youth was the ferry from Dover to Zeebrugge.  I used to go to Germany quite a bit in the 80s and we mostly travelled on the Transline buses.  These took about 24 hours to get from Leeds to Northern Germany and they required a 4 hour ferry crossing aswell.  They were brilliant for talking to people, because they couldn't get away.

Although it seems unlikely now I actually made some friends this way.  And one of them I'm still in touch with, although it took Facebook for me to find her again after losing touch for a while.

She used to be called Ute Fehn and she was from Stuttgart.  We got talking on the back of a cross channel ferry.  It was in the early hours of the morning and it was dark so we couldn't see each other for the first 3 hours or so.  In fact it wasn't till 5 am that I found out she was dressed in yellow.  

Because I couldn't see her my first impressions of her were that she was funny and kind and had a nice voice.  Oh and also that she was German, although I'm not sure she is any more (I think she might be American now).

I've met other people in similar circumstances, but I can't go on about that now, because Ruth has invited Graeme round for coffee, and I didn't know, because I wasn't looking on Facebook, and even though she's in the same house, she failed to tell me...Ah, it wasn't like this in the olden days.  Actually I take that back, it was, friends turned up at your house unexpectedly all the time then, because it was easier to go to their houses than use the bloody massive phone with the dial on...