Oh yeah...
Oh no. Oh, shit. England were out.
I didn’t want to be there anymore but I didn’t know what to do. I’d slept quickly and well so hadn’t heard my hosts return. A snatched glance through the large clear window of their bedroom door revealed they were in, asleep, on a small futon. I left early, just for a trip into slow rising Sunday morning town, an internet session - flight searches, email, breakfast.
Never anticipated feeling quite so choked, deflated and empty by defeat. It had a greater impact on me than any other tournament exit because of my Semi Final ticket which would now never be. It was personal. Like anything you invest time and emotion in, anything which is deeply embroidered in your weekends and day-to-day life, football can powerfully dictate mood. It matters.
I digested this and an over-priced but good buffet breakfast outside a classy Bochum bar, trying to enforce perspective. My mobile bleeped and I knew it would be Esther, my host. Her message was all in block capitals, inviting me back for breakfast. Groaning at their hospitality and my own crapness, I replied that I had eaten and would go to an internet café before returning.
My emails home reflected my over dramatic misery and indecision. I learnt that another online host I was due to stay with in Munich had bailed on me. What to do? I would have been delighted to snap my fingers and be home but there were, predictably enough, no cheap flights available. Zero motivation for this whole trip now, I wanted somebody to take me by the collar and direct me.
After spending an hour with my kind Bochum hosts, this time accepting an orange juice and sympathy, I left for the final time. They had suggested places I could go to with my Deutsche Bahn rail pass and I settled on the 12.57 to Nuremberg. They also mentioned sailing a short distance away, but being isolated on a boat with them and the potential for ever heightened awkwardness didn’t appeal. I thanked them, apologised for myself, asked them to enjoy the English tea which I had brought for them, and left.
Feeling comfortable with and around them could have developed in time, but it was time I wasn’t motivated enough to dedicate.
On the train I pondered the small differences in the deliberateness of everything, hence its perfect efficiency, which flows through everywhere: the difference of humour, speech, a basic style of interacting. Everything from speech, conversation, penalties, good driving, popular slapstick comedy shows; it can appear almost unfeeling, robotic and charmless.
I was proud of our English fallacies: our nerves and awkwardness, our human weaknesses, our erratically channelled passion; that we find it hard to be so cold and clinical. You could push this argument down dangerous corridors to extreme, totalitarian limits, but I think there’s a grain of truth in it somewhere.
In a way it was more infuriatingly alien than the far-east, because they’re so close, but yet.. It led to fatigue and exhaustion when you wanted subtlety, irony, or dry sarcasm.
I wondered too at the still prevailing suggestions of war guilt. The inside of the Olympic Stadium is full of grey seats, apparently so as not to forget. Does this sober need to remember and not become colourful stunt imagination on a wider scale? Is this why they feel they must be so straight, so deliberate, why they mustn’t publicly, formally approach from leftfield? Do they feel a need for permission to think wider, to be dangerously opinionated?
And is to do so misunderstood or disagreed with? The fiercely contrasting 21st century look of the newly developed Potsdamer Platz area of Berlin with its dwarfing sky scrapers, I sensed was frowned upon by, or simply embarrassed many of the older generation.
The train journey south from Bochum to Nuremberg began to cheer me up and momentarily sieved my brain of football. A glorious day in Bavaria: pylons, windmills, chimneys, straight lines, wires, lush greenness, quilted fields, sloping hills, forests and blippy darkness as the train spurted in and out of hillsides. I selected rarely played classical music from my iPod – Beethoven and Bach – and gazed out of the window.
We stopped at small provincial stations once every half an hour. A pretty girl stood on the opposite platform, doey eyed at a carriage or two further down from mine, missing him already. I felt pretentious and cultured.
*
Eerie chills clashed with pounding heat as I overlooked Nuremberg’s Zeppelin field, Adolf’s podeum to my left. A mass of uncared for, weed ridden concrete and uneven steps leading up to the podium, which visitors were free to enter - although signs warned that they do so at their own risk. You can stand where he stood. Parts of the concrete stand had been demolished at either end due to their unsafety, according to an information board: one of a couple of token embarrassed boards, which briefly outlined the significance of the monument. The famed field it overlooked was even more anonymous, a large field apparently still used for concerts.
Seeing this monument, standing there 60-65 years afterwards - no great amount of time - was chilling, especially given its lack of attention or dress, its shameful unkempt nakedness. It wasn’t demolished for the same reason that the seats in Berlin’s stadium were grey. A short distance across the field, the brand new stadium which hosted World Cup games poked out: a naive child to a worn, bitter, convict grandfather.
Several hundred yards away was a large, serene lake. I took to it on a pedal bound. It ground itself in, the gravity of that concrete monument, that road behind it, those few large trees and everything they had witnessed. Where else have so many been so thoroughly brainwashed by so few, into believing, into being willing to die for such principles?
I splashed out on a hotel room in Nuremberg. Why should I always go for the cheapest hostel option? - I went for a perfectly functional hotel room instead, the cheapest Expedia could find me in the station’s internet café. An overhead television played the England team’s press conference from their Baden-Baden base, a teary David Beckham. The words were all in German translation. I still loved him.
I wandered round Nuremberg’s extremely pretty old town on my first evening, up the steep slopes and towards the castle on its cliffs: lofty vantage point views across the whole city, and further. Dinner, increasingly ubiquitous local wurst with potatoes and sauerkraut, was taken outside a small bar. A blonde waitress admitted to struggling with my accent. None had in the north of the country and I couldn’t discern a difference in her accent to theirs.
There was a fine breed of people around there, as many latin looking tourists as locals, and I couldn’t help individually admiring most of them. Very few are out of shape. When you’re a child in the early summer months you might idly squat the odd fly or ant. Then, suddenly, a nest has hatched under the patio and they’re everywhere. Local, natural, immaculate blondes were equally everywhere, or so it seemed to me. Was it wrong to imagine them in a nazi uniform being strict and demanding? I wondered how mechanical and deliberate and German they’d be in bed. None offered as much as a passing glance, unless I looked too long, paralysed - then their look was usually one of disgust.
I hadn’t had a conversation worth the name since my hosts in Bochum - and grew sick of the words bouncing exclusively within my own head, and off the pages of a notepad. I wasn’t confident that anybody who was worth speaking to - ie. not English or American - would understand me, and nobody looked like wanting to speak to a lone man.
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