Vietnam arrival

1. 08:25 - 04/10/2005

“Whath that?  Nuclear physicth, ith it?” a young voice says a little too loudly from above my left shoulder.
  
Four hours before arriving in Hong Kong, most of the plane is in darkness, its passengers restlessly trying to grab some economy class sleep.  I gave up long ago as I have a Korean Jabba The Hutt character sprawled and gurgling next to me.  My only blessing is an aisle seat.
  
I’m reading an entertaining, untaxing novel requiring minimal attention.  At the beginning of each chapter there’s a small italicised question and answer blurb which forms the central theme of the novel.  All of these are heavily ironic, poking fun at an immature narrator.  The one on this page has something about physics.
  
Bold opening gambit, nuclear physics, I think of the lisper above my shoulder.  And one dismissed as not possibly being serious.  How could someone begin a conversation in a quiet, darkened aircraft at an indistinct but deep night time, about nuclear physics?  I decide to banter.
  
“Well, no, it’s quantum physics actually: my speciality,” I say in a low, quieter tone, hoping his pitch will follow mine, although the effect is also that I sound less jovial than I’d intended.  He’s a year or two younger than me in his earlier twenties.  It’s possible mild drunkenness exaggerates his lisp.
  
“Really?” he says, still uncomfortably loudly.  It’s like he can’t control the sound level as it blurts from the back of his throat.  Some people nearby shuffle in their seats.  He’s fascinated, apparently believing that nuclear physics really is my speciality.
  
I’m forced to concede my jest when he points at the small section at the top of the page of my book.  After I explain, he stays to chat, somewhat awkwardly, still too loudly, nursing his thimble of spirit.
  
He’s going to Hong Kong for the first time to meet his Japanese girlfriend, who he sees every six months in various places around the world.  It’s a cobbled notion of mine that any western man, particularly British or Americans - can easily land eastern girlfriends.  It’s not difficult.  To do with the difference / novelty factor which leads to many a holiday romance.  You often saw gawky looking guys at university with eastern girls, because they’re less aware of their gawkiness.  I tell him I’m just passing through Hong Kong on my way to Saigon.  He asks if that’s in China.  Vietnam, I correct him.  Still he prolongs the scene with his travel tales and profound observations that I’m largely unresponsive to, smiling politely until he’s finished, then he plods back up the aisle.
  
Will I have to meet and be pleasant to many similar types of over confident, over loud, well-travelled, yet slightly empty seeming?  I could dream up a sneering name for them like my Dad would - an oh-so-clever acronym.  He and I had parted with the regular rushed clasping tangle at Terminal 3’s pick up/drop-off bay several hours ago.

Now Hong Kong is beneath me, looking impressive and strangely accidental.  As if somebody has haphazardly scattered numerous well developed skyscraper families across a beautiful landscape intended for cute wooden huts and not many people.  I’d like to go back and see more than the airport one day. The city’s formation over a series of jagged coastlines and islands, often too large to be connected by bridges, is spectacular.  When we landed into the airport, I couldn’t stop looking out of the panoramic windows at the landscape.  I’d heard that landing in the old Hong Kong city airport was a spectacular experience and had been disappointed to learn it had relocated to a small island a short distance away, but this was impressive too.  I’m flying out now, away from Hong Kong, its surroundings and this breathtaking expanse underneath me.  Hong Kong will frame my time away as I’m due to stop through it again on the way back, but I’ll know practically nothing apart from the almost arrogant charm it commands from arm’s length.  “What, just because you came all this way, you expected us to live in wooden cabins?  We live better than you, you mugs,” it yells from the ground.   

At the gate to this flight onto Saigon there was a lady reading a book I’d recently finished.  I wanted to say something, speak to her about it, having enjoyed it despite myself, despite thinking it all implausible and rather silly.  I wanted to speak to someone, and speak to someone about that book because I hadn’t spoken to anyone about the book.  And, apart from the chap on the plane, I hadn’t spoken to anyone about anything for a while.  She got up and went to another gate for another plane.

I remain worryingly ignorant of what awaits me in the southern Vietnamese capital of Saigon, or Ho Chi Minh City: its official title.  It won’t be as developed and westernised as Hong Kong, I’m sure, but how much less?  Will there be pavements?  Boarding this aircraft, I began to feel more conscious of being western.  A handful of other tourists, but we were in the minority.  The natives looked bored to be going to Ho Chi Minh.  It’s not something to get excited about, judging by the look of them.


2. 18:16  04/10/05

During the descent through Vietnam, everything grows brown: bare, charred fields with strips of scorched yellow offsetting the dominant brown rivers.  Then the city: exposed blocks of vulnerable greyness, growing nervously.  Unlike two hours previous, no sparkling skyscrapers, no stylishly shimmering sea; a sluggish fat brown river and a clutch of average sized tower buildings mark what must be the centre.
  
Excited and scared to be exiting the last aircraft of my long journey, to be staying somewhere so incredibly alien, I trailed my fellow passengers into the disorganised immigration area.  Straggled queues led.. presumably.. to somewhere, outside?  I wasn’t sure.  It was impossible to tell exactly where or even if you were in the right one.  Britishly, I joined one and hoped.  Other western people were in it, but they were in ones to the sides of me too.  A pretty young eastern girl in the queue next to me selected Robbie Williams from her silver mini iPod.  A toddler bumped into the back of a short, sweaty young man with a large forehead who looked vaguely eastern European.  He looked surprised by the bump, and travel frazzled.  I exchanged a weak smile with him then selected Ian Brown’s F.E.A.R on my own ageing iPod, whose battery I was oddly proud to see was still hanging in there.  The American couple in front of me were gently reprimanded by the immigration official when they went up to his desk together.  He ordered her back.  She said something to me I didn’t hear because of my music, but I smiled anyway and half shook my head at the maddening beaurocracy of it all.  The immigration official had a frighteningly long hair sprouting from a facial mole.  He didn’t smile.

I was eventually passed through, collected my luggage and went to join another queue, which I wasn’t alone in being frustrated to see appear ahead of me.  What now?  One final baggage scan.   Half a dozen young men wearing identical T-shirts and baseball caps jumped the queue, unabashed.  Disgruntled murmuring amongst us patiently waiting folk, an effeminate western boy rebuked them in fluent Vietnamese.  They looked mildly apologetic, but not much, before still going on ahead of most people.  Bags scanned and passport checked a final time.  There was daylight ahead.
  
At a currency exchange counter I swapped forty quid I’d taken out at Heathrow.  Musty, mainly pink currency in return.  Then the searing blast of heat and a heaving swarm of people outside the main Arrivals door.  There must have been hundreds of people staring at anyone who walked out.
  
“Hey, taxi?!” a uniformed man emerged from the dense pack and shouted at me.  I looked up from studiously examining the floor, avoiding hundreds of pairs of eyes.  Yes, he had been shouting at me.  What other choice did I have?  I didn’t know anything.
  
“Mm, ok,” I muttered, offering the first example of my bristling Vietnamese language.  I’d half-heartedly tried learning token phrases for each country I would visit and now relied on a pocket phrasebook, knowing it was unlikely I’d develop the confidence to say anything more than hello, goodbye and thank-you.  I was already uncertain of the approaching character as he weaved through the crowd towards me, knowing he’d be out to fleece this stupid dumb westerner who clearly knew nothing, who would need two hours and a large calculator to do any currency conversion.  He appeared to be an agent of some sort and led me away from the doors, across the forecourt, away from the incomprehensible throng of people, to a taxi which already had a driver in.  He quoted a price I knew to be way over the odds.  I’d heard that the centre was only about twenty minutes away.  He said thirty-five.  Perhaps he was expecting a haggle but I conceded anyway; the taxi company had no competition.  I forked out one of my largest notes to him, still ignorant of exactly how much I was being fleeced for.  Better not to think about it.
  
He unceremoniously threw my backpack into the boot, then shut the rear passenger door behind me.  My driver was a young man with few English skills.  We spoke anyway, without understanding much each other said, both nodding and smiling frantically, picking up and dropping our own tangents between long periods of silence.  The view from the window of my taxi was mesmerising.  My first wholesome, mindbendingly rich flavour of Vietnam.   I didn’t want to miss anything.  I wanted to suddenly attain photographic memory powers, to remember each detail.

When you go somewhere new, anywhere you haven’t been before, however close to home, you’re naturally sensitive to differences.  Here, somewhere so far away, so different, it was more natural trying to look for things that were the same.  Sameness in such an alien, distant place was novel and kooky - Coke signs, aha!  A few dominant global, capitalist names, but difference was king.

Traffic apparently isn’t in need of order or rules, anarchy reigns, everybody has the innate ability to thread their bike or vehicle through the eye of a needle.  Even where squeezing through a gap doesn’t seem possible, where a fatality seems so inevitable you daren’t look.  These drivers need only a millimetre of space around them.  Any more than that is a luxury.  The drivers look accordingly concentrated and serious, yet never stressed or hurried.  Cars are few, with motorbikes and scooters ruling the road, packed tightly together, riders never with a helmet - a smog mask the most protection they have, chatting across the road with each other as they go, smoking, occasionally on mobile phones - despite the constant intrusive engine drones they’re immune to or have learned to speak over.  Most have motorbikes: scooters and Vespas, and laughably tatty machines which appear barely capable of making a sound or staying intact if you were to sit on them.  Less so of actual movement.  Not a Harley Davidson in sight.  Pedal bikes come a close second to their motorised siblings although few look what we would call modern.

The more people on a motorbike the better.  Young and old, friends, lovers, whole families nonchalantly cram on, babies looking out glazed over the handlebars of speeding, precariously weaving cycles.

Beeping isn’t an aggressive act.  Hello, I’m here, is all it means.  Road rage appears extraordinarily non-existent.  Buildings vary wildly from the ramshackle corrugated iron hut, just about upright, to the recognisably regular, sturdy modern bulk.  Little glitz, no neon, but an intensity of frantic bustling dusty life that, in my experience, had no comparison.  I sat in the back of the taxi staring out, petrified, hypnotised.  Sometimes a passing biker would see the pasty-looking westerner in the taxi window - did locals ever use taxis? - and take a second look.  I sensed our nearing centrality by the rosing height of buildings and an increase of western looking people.  Still not many: the occasional couple, or a single young person.  Then I passed a war museum, outside which an obvious clutch of them waited, adorned by cameras, sunhats and shades.  The taxi swung into the forecourt of my hotel after a ride of about twenty minutes.
       
*
 
Now I’m irrationally seething following a protracted tour of Ho Chi Minh City, getting fleeced for the second time in a number of hours.
  
My journey finally at an end, I reached my hotel room in the plush hotel I’d been advised to book by my travel agent, at around midday local time.  In the context of Vietnam it was an expensive room, with an en-suite, mini bar and television.  Determined not to even consider napping, I freshened with a shower, a shave and fresh clothes, before braving the manic streets.
  
For the first few minutes I could only summon enough courage to walk around the blocks, only crossing the fearsome, permanently jammed roads when strictly necessary.  I swore I’d be killed if I tried to be too clever, tried to cross too many roads.  The odds were surely stacked against me with the swarming volume of traffic as it was.  It brought to mind a childhood computer game where you had to cross a river packed with crocodiles, stepping on safe logs to reach the other side.     
  
Climbing into the seat of a large pedal cycle, I wondered if I had been wise in succombing to the fourth offer of a tour.  “3 dollar for hour,” he had reasonably quoted, before pummelling me with measured, luring questions as he pedalled alongside me, pitching his sale.  “Oh, ok then,” I finally submitted, willing to defer the responsibility of my direction and lower the chance of getting run over.  
  
The hour elapsed, but he continued showing me authentic Vietnamese pagoda after pagoda, temple after temple.  Some more impressive than others, many a fair distance apart.  The smell of incense in most of the square buildings lulled my senses, relaxed my already jetlagged mind.  This combined with my unerring sense of over-polite Britishness and I delayed telling him: Enough, I’m tired, take me home now - even when the second hour passed.  A tall, self conscious and over flamboyant temple with little artistic substance, claiming to be the tallest; then another,  smaller, flatter, red block with a wondrous amount of detail, locals on their knees, praying to Buddhas.  My guide sat in his cycle, relaxed, smoking, pointing me in the direction of other buildings of interest, although I’d lost enthusiasm long ago and wanted to go back.

I brainlessly agreed anyway and went plodding dopily off to the next temple.  Beginning to lose track of the number of temples I’d seen, I grew weary of getting rinsed of money again.  He pedalled, standing behind me as I sat fretting, between short, sporadically vicious thunder storms.  He had cycled around more blocks than was necessary to get back to my hotel, I was sure.
  
It had been around two and three-quarter hours.  I’d been stupid for letting it go on so long and was as much annoyed at myself for that as I was at him for overcharging me.  Amidst another torrential storm soaking us to the bone, we had a confrontation outside the hotel.  I was reluctant to give him as much as he asked, claiming he should have told me at the beginning how long the tour would be.  A local lady manning a nearby streetside drinks stall saw our stand-off, came over and mediated, successfully knocking his price down better than me.  Reluctantly, I handed over a still inflated fee, and stomped dripping wet into the plush hotel, attracting confused looks from the staff.

(I later guessed that this was because they would have expected to collect my room key from them, but I had accidentally contravened rules by taking it out with me).
  
I’m irrationally angry now because it was a decent, occasionally fascinating tour, taking in many different corners of the city - possibly ones less chartered by tourists.  And the traffic remained consistently captivating, terrifying, tipping back and forth like an hour glass, each vehicle a grain of sand, on each junction a hundred miracles, never even a scrape.  Several near-miss swerves when collisions appeared a certainty.  Heart regularly in mouth as I sat in my little priveliged shell, I’m amazed not to have witnessed a single accident.
  
My energy levels, momentarily boosted by the adrenaline of conflict, are now dipping again.  Ridiculously so for six o clock.  But I’m jet-lagged so it’s excusable.  My writing is dipping in and out of focus.  I should stop.

whatever that means

“I wanted to fuck you the moment I saw you,” she murmured into my ear.  Shit, really? Nobody’s ever said that before.  And this city’s been slicing my face into scabby pieces lately. Not wanting to alter the atmosphere in any way, I kept quiet and kissed her.

Conversely, I hadn’t wanted to fuck her straight away.  It was the Alice Band: an immediate issue which made me annoyed by my own fussiness with jewellery and accessories.  Back home Alice Bands were exclusively the staple of 12 year old girls or girly-haired European footballers.  Not women.

But by the time she breathed those words into my ear, the next morning, naked in my hotel bed, I did want to fuck her, very much. And I even liked her too.

She’d entered the bar and sat down next to me, wearing that Alice Band – worn to hold curly red hair.  She seemed nice, chatty, human and smart; neither of us perturbed by the unorthodox meeting, the loose online acquaintance but not actually knowing the first thing about each other.

We drank pints and ate burgers, drank more, conversation flowing easily.  She spoke amusingly and with the manner of a charismatic, obviously homosexual man: lots of back and forth shoulder tilting, flappy hand gestures and much use of air quotation marks, which I teased her about.  I was enjoying having company, conversing.  She was fun, the bar was cool and low key, the music good.  Although I wasn’t sure if this was just a pleasant couple of hours and we should be getting back: me to my hotel a few blocks east, her to her small flat a short train ride north.  It was more of a date than I’d anticipated when I suggested meeting up.  But that was fine, and became better than fine.

“Well.. I’m having a fun time,” she said, leadingly, so we moved on elsewhere.  In the next dark sports bar we had tequila and further strong liquors, discussing drinking, local politics, religion and family.  An hour later we tired of that bar and headed out, considering a next venue but not knowing where.  On the street it was bitterly cold.  She shivered and I put an arm around her.

Despite being the local, she was unsure where to go next. “Nothing.. funny, but we could just go back to mine, or..” she trailed away.  I suggested we go back to my hotel, a shorter distance away, just a few blocks.  Nothing.. funny either, I added, chuckling in my head.  She agreed.  In the room I generously poured from the bottle of Sour Mash bourbon bought from Moe’s Liquor Store in Sheboygan Falls earlier that week.

She flopped down onto the near-side of the bed.  I made to leap over and rest the other side of her, louche and athletic: a poor idea made worse by a misjudged leap and bounce off the far side of the bed and onto the floor.  It was clearly unintended and less than smooth.  She laughed.  We were both drunk and fuzzy.  I clambered back on the bed
and lay next to her, embarrassed and flustered, any cool I had extinguished in that moment.

We breathed and sipped at the bourbon.  What now?

“We could get naked and get in bed?” she nonchalantly suggested.

“But what would my wife say?” I whispered straightfaced.

A nervous giggle, a pregnant pause for thought.

My turn to laugh.  I assured her, agreed to her suggestion and hoped she’d take off the Alice Band.

*

Around midmorning, that stupendously filthy murmur suggested her headache had eased.  These were times of therapy for a man of fragile ego.

Midday saw glaring Chicago sunlight punish the curtains.  She rested warmly against me, now freshly showered and slowly preparing to leave. No great urgency.  I played with her hair.  The night before had been made easier by the transience of the situation: the time-sensitive One Night Only Offer.  Nothing had mattered all that much, nothing had any real consequence.  In two days’ time I’d be gone, a long way away, unlikely to ever return.

That’s unless feeling develops, if there’s any sense of mutual feeling, if raw is courage acted upon.  This is less likely with sober, pragmatic characters already encroached on their thirties.  Those who know they should stop playing games and start being serious, whatever that means.

Let it go.  Frivolously skim back across the ocean and remember it fondly.  Accept it for what it was: a night with someone you found you liked, albeit for a brief period, someone you had a good time with.  Be content to smile at the memory: that spectacular death of your cool; that you were both naked in bed before you’d even kissed; the quirky unorthodoxy of it all.  Be grateful for her unknowing illumination of your ridiculously unsuitable previous female hope.

Use the knowledge to go forward and hope that these type of meetings – for this isn’t entirely without precedent – isn’t as good as you can ever hope for.  Hope that you stop being so pathetically grateful for attention from any female with a combination of looks and intelligence.  Learn to stop excitedly sledgehammering square shapes into round holes like an overzealous recruitment consultant.  It’ll be fine, it can work, IT WILL WORK!

Move on now.

Let it go when you kiss her for the last time and smile and say something meaningless and she leaves the room and the heavy hotel door clunks shut behind her.  Let it slide and blur and fade.  Just like that.  Easy.

Lying there together in those final minutes, absently twirling one of her curls around a forefinger, perhaps it was because nothing mattered all that much, because nothing had any consequence: perhaps that made it sadder.

Wisconsin Wander: Day 2

Grey mist and drizzle met me as I pulled apart the curtains the next morning, any remnant snow finally dribbled away.  Having plotted a loose south-easterly diagonal return, I trailed the westerly edge of Lake Winnebago before pressing further south.

Around mid-morning I stopped at the town of West Bend.  (It seemed to me from the map that the river bore East at this point, but who was I to quibble?)  This place reminded me of an hour spent in Fort William, Scotland.  It was based next to a river, there was a lingering grey mist, the size of the place was small and there was almost nobody else on the streets.  However, there were no surrounding mountains here.   The place was ghostly but part of what these trips are about: the missable in between places as well as the big, swaggering ones.  I took a coffee and read my book in a small diner where I was served by a Hispanic waitress.  She wrongfooted me with a “gracias” when I handed over the money.  “Cheers” was my charmless reply.

Several wrong turns and U-turns alongside large fields finally put me on the freeway back south towards Milwaukee.  Driving with only a loose sense of direction means you tend to make plenty of quick decisions.  You beat yourself up for taking a wrong turn, before finding that you weren’t wrong in the first place and in trying to correct a perceived error you’d totally screwed yourself.  Then you go momentarily mad and angry, which never helps anything.  Darkness unavoidably invokes a greater sense of jeopardy, panic and uncertainty, as it did during my previous evening’s acquaintance with the suburbs of Oshkosh.

The freeways were simpler.  I let myself be sucked into the heart of a misty downtown Milwaukee over the freeways, not a little smug that I was reading all the signs correctly here and everything was going smoothly.  You just need to be cool and focused, I pompously applauded myself, entirely forgetting the numerous U-turns and frustrated wails while sitting stationary next to desolate fields the previous evening.  The large freeways better signposted, more intuitive.

I parked at the lake-front art museum with little intention of going inside the museum.  Has the internet killed museums?  There’s a sense of stumble-upon discovery which perhaps isn’t as possible when browsing online, but it’s not like you can touch anything and the exhibits are often predictably samey.  Narrow, inhospitable stone corridors led me up from the car park, offering a sense of the forbidden, and up towards the museum entrance.  I walked past it, marvelling at an impressive white bridge structure which turned into a walkway above the road, and led into downtown.

With its clutch of tall tower buildings, Milwaukee had the sense of a scaled down Chicago, and was also bisected by a fat, Lake Michigan-fed river.  Big but not that big.  I paced round awhile, took pictures, took a coffee, then headed back to the car, wanting to give myself at least two hours to make it back to Chicago.  And I needed to top up on gas in order to ensure I returned the vehicle with a full tank.  Stress was simmering.

The ride back in was fraught, the density of the rush hour traffic immense.  After avoiding the tolled routes by taking smaller roads, I headed back towards the freeway, laboriously programming the SatNav system with my final address.  It delivered the route, but not before further stress and panic.  The car was due for return at 5pm.  At 4.40 I was still some way out of the city, and still needing to get gas.

I exited the slow, by now almost bumper-to-bumper freeway, which erased my route from the SatNav, found a gas station in a suburb and failed to figure out the prepay credit card system.  I wanted to ask a customer on the other side of my pump but he seemed to be chatting, possibly flirting with the woman in the vehicle behind him.  I finally secured his attention; he looked and shrugged.  Ask inside.  Thanks.  I asked inside the kiosk and a guy swiped my card, before realising it wouldn’t work because the petrol nozzle wasn’t in its holster.  I went to return the nozzle into the holster and the payment went through, allowing me to buy the ten bucks’ worth of gas.  I felt stupid and panicked.

Having re-found the freeway, I painstakingly re-programmed my route: C-H-I-C-A – while weaving between traffic.  Yes SatNav, it was the passenger at the controls, not the driver.  As if.  Once finally programmed (about four minutes which felt like an hour) I repetitively tapped its View button to reassure me I was heading in the right direction.

Gradually the city loomed up through the darkness around me, a gigantic, sparkling, throbbing, beautiful, terrifying urban monster.  Its dazzling scale made me feel proud of humans, as if approaching a space station.  Wow.  Look what we’ve done!

Lulled by my reverie, I grew confident.  SatNav lady seemed sure everything would work out, it’d all be ok.  It was only 4.50.  It might be ok.  I hit downtown proper at about 4.57.  As the crow flies it would’ve taken two minutes from there.  As the traffic moved, jerked, honked and crept, it took about thirty.

“The tank full?” asked a young girl at the Hertz desk who I hadn’t encountered before.  She didn’t mention I was half hour late.  I said yes and she wished me a good night.

‘Stoked’ by my success, not dying or crashing or having too many people beep me, I paced off back down Michigan Avenue, ever-teeming with shoppers and tourists.

Pictures from the trip can be viewed by clicking these words.

Wisconsin Wander: Day 1

As on the previous day, when I’d visited the large hotel to check my reservation, the Hertz car rental desk was unmanned.  A young black guy joined me to form a two person queue.  He mentioned out loud, to himself but not really to himself that he really needed to move to a warmer climate when he graduated.  I was happy enough to nibble at the conversation bait and he told me about his study in Chicago, a general degree which would allow him to teach.  He ultimately wanted to build his own school for under-privileged kids in Central America and strongly believed in a hands-on method of teaching employing music and touch.

A harried Hertz man returned to the desk and with minimal fuss, printed out forms for me to sign and told me to go wait outside for the car.  This was the quickest, least paperwork-intensive car hire I’d ever experienced.  So much so that when the Hertz man’s colleague brought down a small red Toyota Yaris from the car park, I just got in.  Then I realised I didn’t know what any of the main controls meant, never having driven an automatic vehicle before.  I beckoned a parking attendant over for a quick overview.  Drive, Reverse, Park – was apparently all I needed to know.  Don’t worry about the rest.  With that I pushed the stick into drive and took my foot off the brake, which itself seemed to roll the car forward, gently easing myself into downtown Chicago traffic.

It was fine, all fine, keep on the right, it was all going to be fine, just concentrate, keep on the right, head for the Lake, hug it and head up the one side, simple, easy, cool.  I gripped the steering wheel tighter than necessary.

I slowly grew into to the Yaris and understood that driving it was easy; boring in fact.  Automatics neuter the driving experience; they do everything for you and give you less control, like holidaying with a tour guide.  Not once did I go to depress an imaginary clutch, although I did flap my left hand into the door from time to time, flailing for an imaginary gear stick.  I also kept approaching the vehicle from the wrong side, expecting the driver’s door to be where the passenger door was, which didn’t make me look too clever.  On a freeway I was momentarily alarmed to be overtaken by someone casually reading a newspaper, before realising it was a passenger.

With the assurance of an appropriate section of map spread haphazardly out across my lap, I covered minor roads skirting Lake Michigan, up through suburbs with Scottish names, Highland and Glencoe – where I stopped for a coffee and to applaud myself that I wasn’t dead.  This Glencoe wasn’t much like the Western Highland mountain range where I’d driven a couple of years ago.  Like much of the drive over the two days, it was a flat and unremarkable landscape.  The later plains of Wisconsin mimicked this and chided me, as if I’d landed in London and decided to take a trip round East Anglia.

Still it was experience and the towns were interesting, many with a makeshift retail park feel to them, quirky stores like the dogs’ hairdresser ‘Canine Coiffeurs.’  The welcome signs also amused with their exact population figure: CITY OF NEENAH, Population 56,723.  (That one isn’t accurate).  They made me want to add a few tally marks to the sign or run to the Police station screaming I’VE FOUND ANOTHER ONE!!

Priority at open crossroads without traffic lights also foxed me.  It often seemed that nobody moved at all, so I did.

Next stop was a small park on a tip of Lake Michigan near the city of Kenosha.  Thick snow still lay on the ground and the closest edge of the water speckled with mini icebergs, as had been the case all the way down in the city.  When the tide swept in, lapping sounds twined with the clinkling of ice, like rippling shattered glass or a wind chime.

From here I found the highway and ignored numerous junctions to drill on through Milwaukee, an impressive cityscape not on a par with Chicago but still not inconsiderable, before eventually stopping again at the small Wisconsin town of Sheboygan Falls.  This was a very small town, replete with a Simpsons-esque Moe’s Liquor Store, where I bought a bottle of bourbon.  Moe wasn’t very chatty when I complimented him on his strong range of liquor, or he didn’t understand my accent.  A middle-aged lady assistant in a neighbouring gas station where I took a leak and got a cup of tea was much perkier.

It was hit or miss whether people understood my accent or not.  Earlier in the trip I had to say ‘beer’ to an American air stewardess three times.  She looked at me like I was retarded.  I don’t have any strong regional English accent and don’t know how else to pronounce the word.

Now the light was beginning to fade beautifully.  It had been a clear, cold, blue-skied day despite constant radio warnings that cloud was heading in.  The radio stations had offered a strong sense of the locals, particularly a warm, mumsy DJ improbably named Robin Rock.  She kept thanking her listeners for “working with” her and spoke a lot about her teenage daughters and how they’d do backflips if they won the station’s big competition prize of a trip to Disneyworld.

This reminded me of the chatty old lady sitting one seat along from me on the short connecting flight from Minneapolis to Chicago.  She’d been excited to tell me and the girl sitting next to me how she was going back there soon, this time to see ‘the adult things’ which the kids don’t like.  Interest piqued, I had bitten my lower lip slightly and enquired further about what exactly ‘the adult things’ at Disneyworld were.  Apparently reading descriptions in the galleries and things like that.

The radio songs didn’t range too widely:  old classics to Americana, with edgier stations going for tracks with indulgent, rapidly boring guitar solos.

Fearing darkness, and the distance I had to cover the next day, I impulsively decided not to go as far as the next big city, Green Bay.  Instead I took an A-road to chase the dipping golden sun across a wide expanse of plains towards Appleton, on the other side of Lake Winnebago.  Although I missed out Appleton itself and found a couple of small, hospitable seeming towns with a pleasant buzz of life about them: first Menasha and then Neenah, where I stopped.  Disappointingly no motels or any places of accommodation other than a Holiday Inn could be found.  So, after a brief stroll I headed on.  Growing faintly edgy about a final destination with the draping darkness, I flicked on an internal light in the car and studied the map to see Oshkosh was the next large looking town.  There was bound to be something there.

By this point I was tired and not thinking straight.  I spent about ten minutes finding the correct direction out of Neenah, then at least twenty more getting lost in the suburbs of Oshkosh, eventually finding its downtown area and only hotel.  It was more than I had wanted to pay for a room but my will to look further had evaporated.

Later in the trip it was explained to me that the place-names had connections with the native Indian past and weren’t, as I had suspected, made up by drunken infants. You often forget about the historical significance of the Indians to these parts.  Or at least I did.  There’s a theory that the word “Chicago” has native Indian origins, while the overtones in Milwaukee are even more obvious.

An evening stroll up an icy, sludgy Oshkosh Main Street suggested more life than I’d imagined from my route into the downtown area: plenty of samey dark bars with neon signs advertising the same drinks.  One dumping of snow seemed to have lingered for days across a vast global latitude.  I stopped in one and chatted to a welcoming barmaid who served me a small bottle of Newcastle Brown of the type they don’t serve at home.  A symptom of the tipping culture is that it makes you think naturally friendly people are just playing for their tip, even when they might just be naturally friendly.  Young guys sat round watching sport.  I intermittently chatted to the barmaid, watched the American Football and Basketball playing on the screens, (however much I tried, I was unable to cultivate any genuine interest), and flicked through a Harry Hill jokebook app on my iPod.

Another bar further down the street had more people and a faux urban kind of buzz about it.  I took a Guinness and again sat at the bar, this time with a music fanzine – it seemed the area had a vibrant scene.  I spoke to nobody and shortly after headed back, nothing challenging my suspicion that I was one of about four guests in the large, deeply uninspiring hotel.

Pictures from the trip can be viewed by clicking these words.

departures

Don found himself in the low-ceilinged check-in area, shuffling forwards towards a desk with other blank-faced people.

”Can I see your documents, Sir?”

Don puts some papers which were in his hand onto the desk in front of him,

“Do have any further emotional baggage to check-in, Sir?  Or is it just the one bag?”

“Just this,” Don hears himself say.

“Did you pack it yourself, Sir?  Do you know what’s in it?  No sharp regrets or painful confessions to anyone?”

Don pauses for a moment before shaking his head unconvincingly.

“Very good, Sir.”  She efficiently labels the package and places it on a conveyor belt.  “Is it just that with you as hand luggage today?”

In his right hand Don sees a plastic yellow bath duck.  He nods, dumbly.  She smiles at him, endeared by the object.

“Well you take care now, won’t you?  Enjoy your flight.”

Don mumbles his thanks before moving aside, following arrows to the security gateway.

“Everything on the trays here please,” a faceless person in a white all-in-one outfit says.

Don places his yellow bath duck on the tray, finds a tube of female lip gloss in his pocket and puts that on there too.  He goes to take off his shoes before realising that he isn’t wearing any.  The conveyor belt accepts the tray and pulls it through a scanning box.  He walks through a narrow doorway.  Two faceless men nod their assenting and he passes on to collect the duck out the other side.

A seemingly endless white corridor greets him, stores selling with mostly indistinct and non-utilitarian items lining the sides: memory sticks and adaptors are two items Don can make out, so he buys one of each.  A faceless person’s eyes crinkle towards him as he takes them to the counter.

Don flushes with panic, fearing that he might have to give up the duck as payment.  The faceless person holds out their arm and swishes the memory stick in front of Don’s left nipple.  A bleeping sound echoes from the vicinity of the fingers and the person nods, then repeats the process with the adaptor.  Don feels violated and confused and amused.  It finishes by saying “Thank you Sir, enjoy your flight.”

Between the stores are instructional screens with banks of numbers and destinations.  Hell, Heaven and Limbo occur the most frequently.  Don was told his destination was Heaven.  The screen says the next departure is in 47 minutes from Gate F.

He walks aimlessly up and down the white corridor, past departure gates where faceless people crowd, clamour and squeal against an invisible screen.  He sits down near Gate F to inspect his adaptor and memory card: small items which don’t look capable of much.

The 47 minutes tick down and a small flurry of faceless people join Don.  He shyly nods and smiles in their direction, wondering if he too is faceless.  They don’t return his gesture and sit down.  Two faceless people stand behind a desk, waiting, the doorway behind them sealed shut.

dangerous tides

Barry was stung with new waves of emotion as he carefully negotiated the car back into its space outside his flat.  Stunned relief, mainly; as well as gratitude and a lingering incomprehension.  He sat in the newly silent car for several seconds, air freezing around him.  He contemplated the past few hours and called himself lucky stupid, lucky fucking idiot, out loud.  And he breathed.

He’d had plenty of time to ponder alone in the single ward, waiting three hours for a two minute chat with the Doctor.  Yes he was fine now, yes he wanted to go home.  He had enough time to almost forget the afternoon completely, pawing through niche interest magazines and old newspaper supplements, hearing the raucous applause from the television in the waiting room next door as game show followed game show.  He had time to grow bored and tetchy at the long wait.  It’s best, for your own peace of mind as much as anything else, the Paramedic had told him.  His mind was tetchy when it should have been immensely grateful – which it was, but it still became tetchy again.

*

I could really die here, Barry had thought to himself as he thrashed around in the freezing sea, fully clothed, a large coat on and his camera still around his neck.  This could be it.  Time up.

His head went under for a moment as he prepared a heaving diagonal stroke towards land.  He recalled that handsome lead actor from the film he watched the evening before.  He’d played a wayward character whose life was belatedly showing signs of coming together when it was snuffed out.  Life does that, Barry supposed.  It’s uncaring about human self-regard or interruption.  It can end whenever.

Drowning though? he argued, pushing more water behind him and gasping for air, feeling with his toes for rock, land, anything beneath his feet.  Nothing.  Drowning: really?  That was a horrible way to go, traumatic and slow.

Barry stopped paddling for a moment and treaded water, took a deep breath and yelled for help as loudly as he could.  Hearing his own foghorn blare out tightened the terrifying grip of reality and he began swimming again.

Seconds passed, or minutes.  Who knew?

Faintly aware of a podcast still chirruping in his right ear, he heard a shout returned from land: “..on its way!”  That should give some cause for hope.  He unpopped the earplug and instantly came to terms with the probable death of his new iPod, BlackBerry and camera: beloved gadgets.  He'd trade them.

Was it payback for the disproportionate glee he took from that part of Rich Hall's comedy set a few days earlier?  He had satirised Irish news coverage, and particularly the headline "Cork Man Drowns".  Barry hadn't considered the plight of the man (apparently named Bob), or even wondered if it was comic fiction or not.  It hadn't mattered.

Barry switched from his favoured front crawl to a breast-stroke.  Parting the waves seemed more effective that way.  Should he take his coat off?  No time.  The current still swept across him, demanding.

So he worked.

Was he making any ground?

He must have been.

Anything beneath his feet?

Nothing.

He spat out cold salty water and wished he’d wake up.  This could NOT be happening.  Not to him.  Wake up, wake the fuck up.  It was all too real.

At no point had Barry considered turning around and going back, or even waiting on the island and calling a rescue boat for help.  It simply never occurred to him as an option.  He had imagined that he might have to wade a short distance across the rocky causeway which connected to the mainland, but the water would be no higher than his waist at most - and it wasn't THAT long a stretch to land, then he’d make the ten minute drive home in wet pants.  No massive deal.  He had been impelled forward by his nervous misguided momentum, blind panic and the lunatic strength of his conviction.

Until he was swimming against a reverse current.  Holy fucking cow, he was swimming, in all his clothes, a large coat, a camera round his neck, his iPod still playing.  How the hell had this happened?

This could really be how he was to die.




The light had been sharp and bright all afternoon, the sun dazzling off the ocean to give a not inconsiderable glowing warmth for the time of year.  A peculiar zen-like state had blanketed him as he sat on a rock an hour before on a different stretch of the bay, a gentle hangover from the night before slowly subsiding.  It had been an enjoyable evening with football team-mates he didn't know that well.  The echoing din of a nightclub often left him with an unusual acoustic clarity the next day.

Now in the sea, beating against waves, that blissful calm and peace appeared foreboding, a punctuation mark.

Was he making any ground?  Perhaps, and people, distant dots were racing down the rocky beach towards him now.  One with something, a leash of some kind.  But, hang on… there, there it was.  Like a high-rise suicide in reverse, he found rock beneath his toes.  Beautiful rock, and a more of it, toes to feet, more of it still.  The surface dipped suddenly and a rock thudded into his knee but he felt nothing, numbed to the pain.  He might not die!  Back to wading, wading.  The men were upon him, the leash thing now unnecessary.  Barry staggered bambi-like, up and out of the water.  Ocean slopped off the shoulders of his thick coat, his knees buckling under the weight.  He fell back down and wanted to stay lying, spent on the rock like a beached whale but a voice told him to get up, keep moving, he wasn’t safe yet.  The voice was right.  He rose again, accepting the props of two men either side of him, one of them the owner of the voice, and carried walking up and away, freezing and soaking head to toe.

A small crowd of thirty or so had gathered in the main pub for the nearby caravan park.  Mostly young, pale faces gawked at him and he half covered his own, humiliated by the attention, trembling and exhausted.  But breathing out, breathing out.  A siren grew louder.

six people behind

There she was again.  About half a dozen people behind him in the passport queue, snaked back around the partition.  Had she noticed him?  Should he try and catch her eye?  He turned his eyes back to his book and shuffled forwards again, smiling at the old lady in front.  They had exchanged a few words when her husband was allowed out of the longer queue to pass through the empty gateway reserved for those with new electronic passports.  “Just make sure he doesn’t get on the wrong flight now,” he'd told the lady.  “It’s ok, I have his tickets.  He can't go anywhere,” she said.

Now he glanced back over his shoulder at her again, she was looking away.

“Maybe see you on the flight back,” she had said when the taxi dropped him off a week ago.  They’d shared a cab because no buses were forthcoming.  Her friend was going to take an earlier return flight, she’d said, so now she was travelling alone.  He didn’t find her attractive but she’d appeared clever and chatty a week ago, she was around his age, and he’d barely conversed with anyone for a week, not properly.

He shuffled forwards again, the old lady in front was beckoned to have her passport checked, before passing through to the gate.  He resigned the pretence of reading the heavy book, and waited.

For fifteen minutes he sat under a small television screen with his laptop, half watching football highlights, half checking his emails, surprised there was a free connection in the lounge next to the runway.

Realising he was still quite alone and the seats around him hadn't filled with other waiting passengers, he checked over his shoulder.  Fellow passengers were already queuing for the door, staff were tearing ticket stubs and people were slowly trickling out onto exposed concrete, towards the metal vessel.  Still the queue back into the lounge was bottle-necked, a mess of fifty or so people straggled back out.  Seats near the line were occupied by those apparently unfussed about the choice positions aboard the aircraft.  He had wanted a window seat for the return flight but this now seemed unlikely.  He slumped down onto a seat and waited for the clot of people to thin out.

She was sitting on a seat backing onto his.  “Oh, hello,” he said, genuinely surprised because he hadn't noticed her when he'd decided to sit.  “Hi!” she smiled, though she couldn’t have escaped if she’d wanted to.  She wore wooden jewellery – earrings and a necklace.  He didn’t know what he thought of it.  Ikea?

They exchanged the story of their week, fast-paced and generally positive.  He grew giddy with freely speaking to another person, aware of speaking unnecessarily fast, blurting.  He slowed and let her speak.  He noticed she was reading a chunky serious book he’d also read and would comment on, if time and circumstance allowed.

They kept chatting: the holiday, areas of the island, walking, the day when it rained, tourism, travel, vehicles, motorbikes, driving.  This took them through the door and out onto the runway where the plane waited.  They took the rear staircase into the aircraft, had their ticket stubs checked a final time and looked for seats in the mostly full plane.  There weren’t two together anywhere, even across an aisle.  She took an aisle seat; he found a window seat further down with extra leg room, sandwiched between an emergency exit and an old couple.

*

The aircraft came to a halt at its destination terminal and the aisle seated passengers lumbered out first, unlatching the overhead compartments to withdraw their hand luggage.  They stood waiting while the window-seated sat waiting, and the middle-seated hovered half up, half down, waiting.

He saw her standing waiting further back.  They exchanged brave, tired smiles.

During the flight he’d considered giving her a business card.  Her line of work wasn’t far removed from his.  He had clients like her employers.  He had no other ulterior motives, although if she did, would he be averse..?  She was bright and interesting.  He often wondered if he could convince himself to do that, compromise on physical attraction, block it out and pretend it wasn’t an issue if there wasn't any, as long as someone, one reasonable enough person liked him.  If he could go through the motions because it was better than continued, protracted, maddening solitariness.  Perhaps he could do it, for a while.

Finally at the aisle, he turned to collect his bulky hand luggage from the overhead locker.  Just out of grasp, it was slid in his direction by a fellow passenger: the nervous looking young man who he’d almost dropped the bag on when hoisting it into the locker before take-off.  He’d put an apologetic hand on his shoulder and said that he thought he’d distract him from any fear of flying.  People around them had laughed.  There was a warm buzz.  He felt briefly liked.

Now standing in the aisle with his bag, he realised that he was about half a dozen people in front of her again.  Would he stop somewhere and give her his card, mention business, 'if your employer needs..?'  He paced down the aircraft, down the steps, across the new exposed concrete, into a door and on down the long connecting corridors.  He felt free and fast, unshackled by too much trailing hand luggage, children, babies or companions to keep pace with.  Finally he was halted by the final passport control.

It wasn’t long before she joined the same queue, snaked about half a dozen people behind.  Another exchange of tossed eyebrows; this whole passport nonsense eh?

He was summoned, boredly checked and waved through.

Having no other luggage to arrive on the carousels, there was nothing stopping him from walking out and away.  But he paused, waited to see if she’d enter the baggage area soon.  She wasn’t that far behind, after all, only six people or so.  He waited for ten more seconds, gave up and passed under the Nothing To Declare sign.

getting away

I solemnly kicked the tyre one last time and told it not to be flat when I returned.  It rested snug and full on the gravelly airport car park, but at half past eleven the following Monday night I did not want to be calling roadside rescue.  On discovering the flat tyre, a neighbour had loaned a fancy electric pump, I had pumped the tyre, and despite parking it a short limp away from the closest garage overnight, pumped it had stayed.  By not reporting the previous evening’s finding to a garage, it was a possibility I was gambling with and an outcome for which I should be prepared.

In the litany of queues which led to the aircraft, in front of me was an unnecessarily urgent, twitchy woman, the air of spinster about her, but with a man her age; and an elegant, attractive, solo-travelling woman was at my rear.  I knew which I preferred to be sitting next to, and which not.

As it turned out, it was neither.  By the time I boarded the sleasyjet budget flight, only aisle seats remained.  I plonked myself next to an affluent looking couple and, specifically, a man with a boastfully loud voice and proud collar and tie.  I was sure to give him no encouragement at all to speak to me, nodding a polite hello before opening a book.

The book was David Mitchell’s latest, highly rated, booker nominated effort.  Only a short way in, I was struggling and disappointed with it.  Little was going in.  Half way through the flight I swapped it with Tom Perrotta’s debut (awful cover), which I’d picked up cheaply a couple of months earlier.  As predicted, it was an easier read.

A sense of traveling inside a flying television advert was transmitted through most of the journey; that relentless cajoling of Stewards and Stewardesses to buy unnecessary and overpriced items.  I’d never heard the term ‘ad-funded’ applied to flights, but saw no reason why it wasn’t.  It seemed equally as applicable here as everywhere else.  I wanted them all to leave me alone, yet there were folk like the affluent, proud but airy couple next to me who appeared to buy almost every time.  Drinks, snacks, lottery tickets.  “You’ll buy anything, won’t you?” I cheerfully commented to my neighbour at one point.  Not sure he was too pleased.

The other surprising source of amusement was a generally well behaved eighteen month old.  Confident, loved an audience, did little short of marching up and down the aisle towards the end, introducing herself and waiting to be cooed at – which she predictably was.  I saw her father donate her mother his iPhone across the aisle, and attempt to entertain her with.. photographs (photographs?) – apparently unaware of the glut of iPhone applications which cater to tots.  I donated my iPod, pointing out the Wheels On The Bus app.  This was gratefully accepted and kept the infant entertained for a good half an hour.  Further tips were given to mother and father when the plane came to a halt.

My hefty sports holdall had survived the crate size test without too much of a squeeze at departure, so had been allowed aboard as hand luggage, much to the surprise of my neighbour when I swapped Mitchell for Perrotta.  “However did you get that on as hand luggage?  It’s massive!”

This allowed me what would’ve been a quicker exit, had it not been for my need to buy a plug adapter, forgotten twice earlier in the day, and the need to rehydrate – having spurned all offers of heinously priced sleasydrinks.

Once this was done I exited the building and broached a hazy, sticky evening.  No buses or commercial bus stops were quickly evident.  I saw the two plain girls who’d been sitting around me on the plane inspecting a solitary signpost.  “Have we figured it out yet then?” I asked as I approached.  They turned round, smiling and human.  One of them was half Portuguese so spoke the lingo.  She also dressed like an old lady, a cardigan done up to the neck.  We agreed to share a cab into town.  During the twenty-minute ride I chatted with the other one in the back, a London born software engineer.  Smart, well-travelled, interesting, not quite as plain as her friend.  There was the unspoken potential of swapping details and meeting up while we were both in the area, and I was clearly alone.  I considered offering a card but didn’t.  We settled up the fare at a narrow old street which the cab driver assured me led to my hotel.  “Maybe we’ll see you on the flight back!” one of them said.  I nodded maybe, waved and clunked the door shut, before embarking on yet another frantic inventory-check of pockets.  I had everything, yes, didn’t I?  Yes.  I had everything.  They drove on.

The cab driver was correct; it was an easy, short walk.  I was greeted by a plump, professional native receptionist with huge breasts and a low cut top.  All that quite necessary leaning over the desk at forms was rather traumatising, the dark lolloping parting staring me out.  Paperwork completed with the minimum of fuss, she handed me a key to Room 101.  I knew a few people who might put me there.

Room 101 turned out to be rather better than just one room of bad, wrong things cast into oblivion for all of time.  A large, high-ceilinged, ensuite bedroom adjoined a separate kitchen and living space, enabling me to cook from my paltry canon of meals and keep a reasonable amount of food.  This cheered me, although this was tempered by finding that the power-points failed to match the adapter I’d bought in the airport.

However, that provided the next exchange of note.  After a small grocery shop at a nearby supermarket I asked the checkout girl who was dutifully packing my bags for me.  A short girl with a pretty cherub’s face, she somehow immediately knew my nationality and spoke to me in perfect English.  I explained the plug dilemma and she wanted to help so much I was almost compelled to hug her.  I said that I’d looked in the appropriate aisle but I didn’t see one, so not to worry.  She seemed sure there were and, as there were no other customers, we walked back over.  She was crestfallen to find there were none.  I was sad and touched that she was so sad for me and I wanted to take her home.  The customer service difference compared to back home bludgeoned me over the head with a baseball bat.

Zigzagging back through the muggy damp, hue-moistened streets to my apartment, I was stopped.  “Eh, Amigo,” the handsome young guy of a handsome young couple said to me, before opening a map to consult.  “Ai! Ingles, desculpe!” I shook my head, he tutted and shook his; his cute girlfriend smiled and we walked our separate ways, me floating lightly on the perverse thrill of being taken for a local here of all places, where most people are tanned and beautiful.

Travelly twaddle

Apropos of nothing, here's another 24 hours from last summer's South Africa notes.  It grazes issues of drinking, irritation with other tourists, masculinity and contemporary South African racism..

--------------

Yesterday morning Paul ferried us from our modest house down to the guest lodge where we were charged with presenting camera-trap images to imminently departing guests: an airline pilot and a doctor. Both were decent seeming folk who were probably suffering little personal impact of the recession.  An uncomfortable bumpy ride in the back of a jeep later, the seated areas filled with guests and Stella, and we were out of the conservancy where the guests had deposited their hire car.  We bid them goodbye and safe onward journey before continuing ourselves into the town.

In a small blocky house within a small blocky suburb Stella and I received a presentation from The Snake Man, an expert in reptiles who keeps roughly a score of wild, deadly poisonous snakes in his house.  These included an apparently housetrained Black Mamba which he had reared from an egg, and one which roamed loose in the house – the deadliest of them all, but entirely tame.  Or so he assured us, waving his fingers and poking around the sinister smile of the snake.  Not massively fussed on taking the trip, I was a little bored throughout, even though it lasted only an hour.  Stella was characteristically enthused, voraciously taking notes for improbable future reference back at her school in Botswana.  She remains tiringly smackable.

This was underlined again afterwards. Martin and Paul had driven on after leaving us with The Snake Man, and headed off to collect Martin’s brother, Gavin, who had spent the previous month nocturnally tracking wild dogs via webcams.  Their three hour round trip gave Stella and I plenty of time to kill in the small town.  Hopefully no industrial riots would pass through the town, like the week earlier.

The khaki uniformed Snake Man dropped us in the smaller of the two main shopping centres.  Stella and I went first to an American themed diner for a coffee and stunted chat, then visited an internet café a few doors down.  My inboxes were again devoid of interest or hope.  We then we headed to the larger shopping centre, five minutes and a couple of blocks away, to mill around the Spar supermarket and buy a few items.  I walked too fast for Stella.  As usual, I asked if the pace was ok and she wheezed yes, fine, cough-splutter, she always walks this fast. Only briefly did I succeed in losing her.  For the remainder of our dead time we spent a little too long in the garden of a coffee shop, reading paperback novels, all possible conversation long since exhausted.

A couple of hours later the horrible Land Rover, now containing Paul, Martin and Martin’s brother Gavin, pulled into Spar car park to collect us.  From there we were transported to a bikers’ bar, where Martin, Gavin and I alighted, and where we spent a handful of hours and several beers, enjoying the change of scenery, if not the density of burly bikers and leather.

Gavin was nineteen and dopey in the style of a less developed Joaquin Phoenix.  Pale through his recent nocturnal work, he had a large, effortlessly well-conditioned frame and sprigs of hair sprouting from his chin in a desperately try-hard attempt at a goatee.  He had little of interest to say and a not particularly compelling style in which to say it.  Reunited, the brothers changed the unrealised dynamic Martin and I had developed.  Their conversations were immature and rather boring, depending much on well-worn Cardiffian phrases such as “Aeyy,” together with a clenched fist of buoyance meant to indicate that something is good.

The sun dipped, a small handful of females were surreptitiously ogled for little reason other than they were female.  One barmaid bore a passing resemblance to Angie from Eastenders in looks and style.  We’d been trapped in the secluded conservancy valley much too long.  The bar’s music was predictable modern rock while a home camera clip show played on a loop, interspersed with local advertisements for mechanical services.

Martin’s phone rang and we were beckoned outside and back into the Land Rover where Paul had come to collect us with his young friend around Mart’s age.  We headed 4 kilometres out of town to a farm, stopping once en route at an off licence for further alcohol supplies.

A slippery wet dog tongue greeted my ankle as I put my foot down on the gravel of the farm’s drive.  The rest of the dog appeared equally good-natured, and led us indoors.  A main farmhouse building, it soon became clear, was a part-renovated barn that only revealed itself fully the further into the building you went.  Immediately inside the front door was a homely kitchen and lounge, where the young chap’s parents sat watching the rugby on a handsomely sized television.  The whole place wore the look of a long-term project subjected to sporadic bouts of effort and money.

Paul set about making a large saucepan of chicken curry and rice while his young friend led us further into the building to show off his room and a genuinely impressive set of speakers.  Corrugated iron roofing and incomplete brick walls surprisingly didn’t detract everything from the comfy homeyness.

We sat in his room drinking beer, admiring his photographs, an ex-girlfriend in a frame and on his computer.  He was a good looking young guy who looked like he might have done better, yet he was still clearly hung up on her.  We talked of regular young man things: sport, music, girls.  A couple more of his friends arrived and more beers were drunk.  I was feeling their effect by now and was well ready for the food when Paul began scooping out dishes of curry.

We ate hungrily, watching assorted sport on the man-of-the-family’s cable channel.  There was considerable banter about fighting and the danger of trouble down at the bar we had just left and would shortly visit again.  Martin and Gavin, apparently seasoned fighters trained by their father, gave typical Cardiff bravado.  I sat quietly, not fussed enough about the potential confrontation not to go back to the pub, wondering how much of it was masculine bullshit.

Still struggling to correct his nocturnal body clock, Gavin passed out in our new friend’s bed.  Paul and the parents remained when the rest of us clambered into and onto the back of another Jeep, before speeding coldly through the night back into town.  There was never any hint of trouble or violence.  More drinks were drunk, locals were met, girls were admired – only a handful spoken to, all were aloof.  It became fairly busy with well age-mixed clientele yet a gender disparity weighing heavily on the side of males.

Obviously there were no black people: customers or staff, the apartheid in bars seemed as strong as ever. Casually flippant racism throughout the young was still rife too, and the use of “Kaffa” quite common, even by the otherwise genial Paul.  African black people from the area were considered a race apart, different from any other sort of black person, cleanly pigeonholed, bracketed and dismissed.  “They don’t help themselves,” was a frequently used allegation when we passed them at roadsides.  It wasn’t unlike the attitude towards Baboons.

Paul returned to the bar to join us and act as our taxi later on.  His ever-present Khaki uniform was covered by a plain fleece top and he sat with us drinking coke, looking bored and sober.  The unremarkable music stopped, lights came on, drinks stopped being served, yet there was no mass exodus.  The barstaff came and joined us.  A young girl we had admired in the bar in the late afternoon and who had worked until closing, had also enjoyed a brief stint working at the lodge.

Finally we left, crumpling drunkenly into the Land Rover.  Paul’s young friend passed out on the way back to the farm, me wedged in the middle helping to keep him vertical as he swayed right and left, front and back.  Back at the farm, now 4am, we swapped him for Gavin, ate remaining cold curry and played with the soft dog.  Paul sat watching the cable TV sport, not seeming to mind the lateness or feel any sort of urgency about getting home and sleeping.  I had never imagined being able to sleep while travelling the long, steep, violently bumpy track which led to our conservancy, but as I recall little of that trip aside from intermittently lolling forwards and headbutting the soft seat in front of me, I must have.

Brixton

Noticing on a mobile maps application that the connecting A-road between Clapham Common and Brixton didn’t look all that long, I dismissed my fear of traffic in these parts, picked up my cycle (with its increasingly ineffective brakes), and aimed myself in the direction of where the A23.. no, the A32..  that big green road should be.  I wish my brain stored A-road numbers more effectively.  Middle-aged men pride themselves on such skills, but it’s not developing for me.  Yet.

Brixton was a place I’d meant to check out for a long time, thinking a gig would summon me there at some point, but with two weeks remaining of my London stay, it still hadn’t.  I popped in my earphones and began to weave between people sprawled out on the common and those loping through the sunshine towards the Ben & Jerry’s festival gate.

Then watchfully, I pedalled out into the snarling, give-no-inch traffic.

The connecting A-road was simple and not long; little more than a five or ten minutes spin between residential streets which slowly opened up and out.  I freewheeled down an incline into what I figured must be the centre, a heavily made up bottle blonde with hoisted short skirt to my right: either seriously craving male attention or a prostitute.  She stood out, not least because this didn’t appear like a place for such dress or try-hard glamorous style.

I dismounted at the base of the hill, looking over a surprisingly cultured looking, arty plaza; well- polished buildings neighboured less well polished buildings.  Two bike locks felt appropriate all the same.  The new sense of place was vivid, despite the proximity to the white middle-classness of Clapham and its own urbane pretentions.  Brixton had fewer, didn’t need them.

The concentration of ethnic minorities was immediately striking but the place had a vibrancy and creativity about it which other strongly black places like the downtrodden feeling Seven Sisters Road in Tottenham didn’t.  Here there were artistic hubs, even iconic places like the Academy, places of obvious congregation, wide open spaces next to narrow market streets which could quite easily fool you into thinking you weren’t in London, or even England.

I walked up the street with my earphones in.  A young black man walking at a similar pace said something.  Hello?

I unpopped my earphones: “Hello mate.”

What did he want?

“How’s it going?” he said.

“Um, good.  You ok?”

“Yeah I’m good.”

“Good.”

Perturbed by the exchange, I stopped to look at my phone and he kept walking.

Young people were, by and large, pretty.  Most looked like they were, or should be in a band.  This was a south of the river Camden, possibly with an even richer mix of people and less contrivance.  Most of these people weren’t essentially rebellious angsty middle class kids who studied other people slightly too hard.

In a narrow market street dense with butchers and meats and rivalling scents, a woman wheeled a trolley in front of her and out across the road.  A second glance revealed her to be wheeling a sack, out of which poked the rear end of what appeared to be a serious looking snake.  I couldn’t imagine this happening in Richmond.

It can be easy to feel like you stand out in your ethnicity when displaced from a native white middle class domain, especially if you’re naturally self-conscious, self-aware.  But the truth is that there are many places where nobody cares.  Places like Brixton.  I could totally understand for young and zesty folk, for those who seek and embrace life in all its forms, Brixton could be a place to live unjudged and unhampered, and to feel a rugged texture of experience.

Londonderry, Paddy's Day Eve 2009

Londonderry, or Derry, seems one of those historically critical cities which somehow still manages to sit below a general coverage radar.  A solidly walled central city slashed in two parts by a lusty thick river which makes a stream of the Thames.  Its topography too is rich, providing many lofty platforms for numerous sentinel cannons.   Steep central streets exaggerated a sense of caution as I ascended the hill at twilight, a group of adolescents walking down.  It feels both protected and homely beneath the gradients and abrasively exposed by the epic River Foyle, another town relentlessly buffeted by the unforgiving Atlantic.

During my few hours pacing the city at an odd, in between time when the streets were mainly empty, I was stopped and asked for directions three times.  The first, a French couple of pedestrians for the best route to a restaurant; then a priest and his companion from a car: where a certain street was; then on my way back to my brick-mobile, another car abruptly halted and a pretty girl (as most seem) poked her head from the window.  We only exchanged greetings before I explained this was the third time I’d been stopped and, as my accent probably suggested, I still wasn’t local I’m afraid.  I would’ve liked to prolong the altercation if I was able – my phone has maps on it if.. –  geek.  Maybe there’s something about a lone, pacing chap, which indicates that he’s local.

My current host at this dowdy Motel a few miles out of Londonderry was the second person today to assume I was on business.  “Just put your company name” the man of apparently few words asked as I signed in.  I did so, not bothering to explain I wasn’t on business.  The young chap from the car hire place had initially done the same, making me think such a leisurely solo road trip isn’t the most usual use of leave.

*

Earlier today I skirted the east coast of Northern Ireland, up and away from Belfast – after accidentally heading in the opposite direction.  It was an averagely pretty coastal ride to begin with, nicely rugged in parts, if constantly bleak and grey – consoled only by the dramatic violence of cloud formations.

I was surprised how quickly I became accustomed to my surroundings, the boring vehicle, the coastal path and greenery.  How soon it felt ordinary.  This could have been due to the boringness of my boxy, clunk-click drive.  It looks like a snubbed nose and handles like an untrustworthy go-kart.  You have to lean into tighter corners, as if driving a Lego brick.  It’s a new enough model, just a shit one.  I’ve approached it in car parks slightly nervous, faintly embarrassed of its dinky toy car appearance.



After a short walk I drove on, forcibly reminding myself that at least I wasn’t in a grey tower block in West London, getting frustrated and annoyed at my colleagues.

Approaching the much hyped Giant’s Causeway, I decided to turn in, then quickly baulked at the fiver entrance charge and did an immediate U-turn.  As I drove on I felt silly, that I had missed out on what most people who visit the area say is the jewel of the region.  Not sure how though.  I’ve seen plenty of grand coastlines in and around this region.  What’s particularly special about that bit?  Maybe I should’ve just paid a fiver rather than have it nag at me afterwards.

I stopped in Coleraine, another historic if roughly forgettable town, and mooched around there beneath the murk before taking a Tesco pitstop for supplies.  Since I’ve been here the sky has hung heavy with a stubbornly dull clouded gloom.  A gloom of the kind which would usually warn of an imminent downpour at home, but doesn’t necessarily here.  It lurks above, breaking now and again at the whim of the dictatorial Atlantic, which irresponsibly spits its bile at the first land it reaches.  You wonder if this perpetual gloom weighs heavily on the people beneath.  If it presses and unsettles and makes people bitter and resentful.  How much of a year does this weather take up?  Who’s to say scepticism, pessimism and bitterness aren’t discouraged by the consistently bleak press of gloom?  Could violence be one symptom of that?

This is my final night of pre-booked accommodation and I’m faintly nervous of panicking about the lack of well-placed B&Bs, multiple rejections possibly just for looking a bit sketchy, alone, male, youngish, not on business – and nobody giving much of a shit because tomorrow’s St Patrick’s Day and everyone’s on a mission to get shitfaced.  Around Derry, Paddy’s Day’s status became even more obvious: the decoration – high street bunting now decorates every small town – every pub looking that touch more Irish, like Irish pubs everywhere in the world, uber self-conscious and made up, the whole country a bride.  Paddy’s Eve events were being promoted around the town and pedestrian traffic on the streets was just beginning to pick up as I made my way back over the sloping cobbled streets to my car, apologising to lost people for not being local.

____________

The post, St Patrick's Day 2009 follows on almost directly from this, should you feel so inclined.

Semi Final 2, Munich. (World Cup 2006)

It cast a grey fug over me for most of the following day, the female failure of the night before.  With little else to think about and nobody else to speak to, I pondered it torturously as I walked around a huge, empty sunbaked park.  I was an over-hasty idiot who felt his delicate pride had been slighted.  My only chance, and a half decent one, and I backed down, walked away.

Wouldn’t do that again.

Towards the centre of town, a series of elegant spires and jagged edges, I found a beautifully sociable beer garden with a warm, buzzy atmosphere.  Green leafy trees overhung multiple, standard pub benches, while two swiftly managed hatches sold a neverending supply of beer in an extraordinary range of glasses and long, thick, mustard-laden wurst.  You picked your size of mug from one hatch and paid at the next.  It was predictably efficient.



On the bench next to mine a lone girl stopped, sat down and began chatting to two young male American tourists.  They all seemed to get on splendidly, oblivious to the bitter envy-rays my eyes spat at them from across the path.  I sat alone on my table except for the apparently obligatory old man I might someday be.  It’s always such fairly nondescript middle-aged or old men who sit on my table; it was the day before when I’d stopped here.  It’s always them who end up sitting next to me on planes too.  Never the cute girl from the departure lounge who was sitting alone, flicking through Cosmopolitan.  That girl sits down the plane and across the aisle, next to someone who could well be me and mightn’t even look dissimilar, but isn’t me.  It’s the version of me with the luck who trails the real me about the place rubbing my nose into the floor.

In the Munich Fan Fest for the Portugal-France Semi Final I saw the boys from the previous evening and quickly passed with a nod and chipper “all right, boys?”  Partly because I was still smarting, partly because I was embarrassed of myself for leaving like that, and partly because I didn’t want to know if she and James actually did...

I strolled around the old Olympic fan park, the highest hill affording an impressive panorama across the city, the distinctively sharp-edged Munich Olympic stadium at its centre, where England had famously beaten Germany 5-1 in a 2001 World Cup qualifier.



Back inside the surprisingly modest Munich fan park itself – some scale shy of Berlin’s, I said no more than a word or two to those around me while supporting Les Bleus to their almost entirely forgettable 1-0 win over Portugal, (despite wearing a cloyingly talk-to-me intentioned England top, and France and Germany coloured flowery wrist chains).

At the full-time whistle I said something, perhaps felicitations, to a French supporting young girl in front of me, who turned out to be German.  I teased her about the flexibility of her allegiance; she looked for a name and number on the back of my England shirt.  There was none so we deduced that I was nobody.  We chatted for a short time near her timid looking friends, a couple.  (Is it more ok for Germans to hang out with friends who are couples?  Is there less awareness or awkwardness about encroaching?  Or are they less uptight about that kind of thing?)  She thought me amusingly odd to be alone.  I considered lying and making up some lost friends; didn’t bother.  With the sun fully dipped, the weather turned eerily gusty, dust and dirt whipped up uncomfortably from the bank where we were standing, blowing grit into faces and eyes.  I offered myself as a shield and she held me close to avoid getting dirt into her eyes.  We continued chatting.  She held tighter as the wind whipped stronger.  Stewards soon began to shepherd people out and away.  Her friends’ plans of what they were doing weren’t clear.  Nobody seemed to know or be terribly fussed about where I went and my new friend made no appeal for me to stay with them, she seemed genuinely ambivalent.



I walked away, hating myself anew.  Couldn’t you just grow some bollocks?

My feet took me back to the town and into a local feeling karaoke bar, on which sat a brochure of awful songs, matched by some equally bad singers.  Wearing an England top, my nationality was obvious as I sat at the square bar in the middle of the room, pawing through the brochure, half glancing up at the confident young barmaid who showed the odd uncaring indication of drunkenness.  She even contributed the occasional track from her bar.  One young local chap talked to me about the football, and was physical in his gesturing.  I nervously wondered about his orientation but he did nothing to clarify and eventually left me alone.

A girl then chatted to me, drunk but confident.  She said something suggestive.  Overweight and pierced, she looked and behaved like she’d experienced her fair share of wurst.  I didn’t warm to her, although I likely would have if she’d been an attractive tart.  I cursed my inability to compromise and numb myself, instead emitting accordingly uninterested signals.

She discomforted me into moving bar.  Another club; non-karaoke, surprisingly busy.  I glanced enviously at two young men wearing England tops, with two presumably local, attractive girls.  They both seemed fairly advanced with their partners and my envy surged again.  Could’ve been me last night.  More Other-version-Me’s with luck.  Nobody spoke to me there, but there was more to admire so I stayed awhile, bored, sad, perving.  My huge hostel and shared room wasn’t enticing.

This was supposed to be the day / night / week of my year / life.  And it had mostly been shit.

I was due to return to Berlin on the Deutsche Bahn and fly home from there in another 48 hours.  48 hours was AGES, especially with a 10 hour train ride and more accommodation to sort out.  Baddiel & Skinner came on once more and I moved for the door.  Morning was cracking the sky as I walked away.  I decided to head for Munich airport after a few hours’ sleep.  I was coming home.

Semi Final 1. Munich (World Cup 2006)

Onto Munich on the trusty Deutsche Bahn south.  At each stop between Nuremberg and Munich the female train announcer finished her spiel with, “to departing passengers, we would like to say goodbye!”  It was delivered in a half sinister fashion which made me imagine her firing a gun into the heads of departing passengers.

Approaching the door of my towering chain hostel on the fringe of central Munich, a sign hiring out bicycles caught my attention.  Reasonably priced, I thought.  A searing heat surged into the tip of my exposed big toe and I came to an abrupt halt.  I looked down to discover I had just walked into a concrete step.  It stung deep, causing waves of improbably acute pain to course through me.  Crumbling in half, I whined gently and concentrated on not swearing, before eventually exhaling.  For several moments I stood still, petrified by the level of pain which could be sourced from a toe.  I was perversely pleased to find that the cosmetic damage matched the pain.  Blood trickled from beneath the corner of nail and onto my sandal, forming a dark red sticky puddle its rubber sole.  My toe grew numb and the nail quickly began to darken.

Despite there being people present, sitting at tables of a bar outside the hostel, nobody appeared to notice.  I whined a bit more, negotiated the step and walked gingerly into the lobby.

I was given another room which, as in Nuremberg, was quite probably the furthest distance away from the reception.  I grazed my injured toe on one of the many steps up to the fourth floor and bleated in expectation of a pain which didn’t quite transpire, then felt foolish.  Five-minutes battling with my roomcard and feeling stupid led me to conclude that it definitely didn’t work, so I beckoned a cleaner from down the corridor to help me.

It wasn’t the best half hour ever.  If I’d been arriving in Munich for an England World Cup Semi Final, none of this would have happened.

*

Before the game I found a pleasant public riverside spot near the centre of Munich.  People sat on the grass enjoying the early evening sunshine and relaxing with a beer or some food, and friends.  It felt novel, being able to sit down somewhere pretty and not feel obliged to spend money on refreshments.  People Watching was rich.  A larger middle-aged lady was topless and blomonche-like; an old man taking a dip in the surprisingly healthy coloured water – in contrast to Berlin’s river – looked like a prune, stretched and skinny, what little flesh he had sagging from his torso; other younger, attractive people were more aesthetically pleasing, but less interesting viewing.  I dozed, listening to Ray LaMontagne on my iPod, feeling my toe tingle and throb.



The Germany-Italy Semi Final was played in Dortmund, not far from Bochum and Gelsenkirchen in the north-west of the county, where I had travelled from.  I watched the first 90 minutes on a large screen, hoisted high up in a crammed beer hall.  It was the quarter of Munich where several such beer halls seemed to be located, although I'd stumbled across it completely by chance.  Several revellers cast fleeting, suspicious eyes over the 3 Lions crest of my old England T-shirt.

Amidst the excitable partisan bustle, hooting and clinking of the beer hall – a long conglomeration of open bars and restaurants – I was growing quietly angry by the amount of refereeing decisions which were going Germany’s way: the bookings they didn’t receive but which I felt they merited.  Michael Ballack’s recklessly outstretched leg which took out a full-flight Mauro Camoranesi; Jens Lehmann’s errant punch which connected only with an Italian forward.  Neither were given yellow cards.  Italy looked the better, more inventive team, especially in the first half, and despite my setting I wanted them to win.

No goals arrived inside ninety minutes so I walked over to the main Marienplatz square for the extra-time period.  A large crowd sat and stood beneath a modestly sized screen outside a bar on a warm midsummer evening.  Bottles of beer were sold from a crate on the floor.

Italy scored two well-deserved and beautifully crafted late goals towards the end of the second period of extra-time, sparing yet more penalties.  Pockets of Italians rejoiced, the vast majority of natives experienced that familiar sagging.  They were understandably crushed and the atmosphere in the square drooped.  This was supposed to be their tournament, the one they hosted and owned and played well in; the one which meant the German flag could be freely and openly waved again, a justifiable united patriotism.

But now that was all over and I was pleased Italy won.  While  chatting briefly with an Italian fan outside the bar a local girl approached.  On discovering our allegiances she was only half joking in her dismissiveness, turning her nose up and quickly walking away.

An amiable France fan then joined us, sympathetically and equally briefly.  The Italian left.  Only now was this old England T-shirt paying dividends for speaking to people; people who otherwise wouldn’t have spoken to me.  I wished the Frenchman bon chance, we shook hands and he disappeared down the steps to the S-Bahn.

Another group approached: English, no colours – about half dozen of them enjoying a laddish holiday.  We had a decent football chat in the square and, after I explained my situation, they invited me to tag along in their search of a decent club.  We were directed a few stops up the S-Bahn line to a segregated bar/club area with an oddly temporary caravan park feel.

There weren’t many people around; it was too early at 11.30pm or the Germans were sick with defeat and not feeling like partying.  Or both.  Led by our main spokesman, a small, confident, geezery but likeable black guy whose name I’ve forgotten but we’ll call James, took the responsibility of asking people where was best.  Especially any passing girl.  One, who was appended to a quiet couple, gladly advised us.  She was German, confident, a little nutty and drunk, but fun and she spoke great English.  She totally contradicted my earlier pontifications about German roboticness, straightness.  As with many, she wasn't immediately striking, but once your eyes settled there was a definite appeal:  thick curly blonde hair, an open approachable face.  I don’t recall precisely what I contributed to the consultation – a few lame jokey interjections perhaps – but after she advised us of two places to try, she made a point of saying she liked me because I was typical English.  She asked my name and I asked hers: Jen (she abbreviated for me from something less pronouncable).  She offered me her cheeks to kiss, one at a time, which I did.  And we parted.

After finding our first choice was apparently “members night” only - we went onto our second choice.  Jen and her couple friends were already sitting at the bar as we entered.  She enthusiastically threw her arms around me when I entered with our group: “you came!”  We bought drinks and the boys gave me raised eyebrows.  The place was dead; she was the only single girl in there and chatted with an old man at the bar for a time.

I willed him to fuck off.

They chatted for ages.

The unmistakable opening bars to the Baddiel, Skinner and Lightning Seeds’ 3 Lions England football song were played, and she leaped down from her barstool to join us in arms-over-shoulders/ round-waist-dancing.  We chatted for a while afterwards and she was all over me.  Was she touchy-feely with everyone, or did she want me to make a move?  Was she giving signals?  The other boys were now giving me how-the-fuck-did-you-do-that? glances and unbelieving shakes of the head.  I wasn’t even close to the best looking of the group.  We hugged as she clung onto me but I never made a move and we didn’t kiss.

She went back to the bar and her friends, leaving me still quietly confident.  “I think you’ve pulled mate,” one of the guys advised.

James went to join her at the bar, started chatting, pulled up a stool.  Hello?  He’d just been talking to me about his girlfriend of three years.  Seemed the faithful sort, although I had only known him for an hour.  I had no right claiming any ownership of her but still I felt disgruntled.  Evidently so, as the other boys noticed me glancing at them.  I overheard one of them saying, “well he never actually pulled her,” and he was right.  I hadn’t.   Bollocks.  It wasn’t my style to battle, go over swinging my bollocks above my head to prove how much worthier I was.  Nor was diving straight in, which was maybe what I should have done.  She put an arm on his shoulder to lean into his ear.

Bastard.  I couldn’t watch this.  It was still otherwise empty in there.  Perhaps it was all innocent and they were just chatting and she was clearly very physical, but...  If it wasn’t I couldn’t bear to see them actually...

She laughed, he laughed.

Terrific.  They were getting on great.

I shook hands with the other boys and left, passing behind the backs of the happy fucking couple.  I despondently walked away, through the weird complex and back to the station, defeated again, out on penalties in the quarter-final to an equally capable competitor after not playing especially well.

day after penalties (2006)

Woke early.  Where..?

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.