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a sleeping dog before it and ruddy-faced yeoman customers swinging steins of beer. We ate sausages
with dabs of mustard and drank many beers. It was all most convivial.
I remember sitting there late in the evening, glowing with drink and thinking what a fine place this was
and what good, welcoming people the Austrians were - they were smiling warmly at us and occasionally
raising glasses to us in a toast - when the Germans leaned forward and told us in low voices that we were
in danger. The Austrians, it seemed, were mocking us. Unaware that two of our party could understand
every word they said, they were talking freely - every one of them: the men, the women, the landlord, the
landlord's wife, the whole fucking village - about taking us out back and, as Gerhard translated, 'of giving us
a hair-cut and running us through with zer pitchforks'.
A roar of laughter passed across the room. Gerhard showed a flicker of a smile. 'Zey say zat perhaps
zey should also make us to eat of zer horse dung.'
'Oh, swell,' said Katz. 'As if I haven't eaten enough shit on this trip already.'
My head swivelled like a periscope. Those cheery smiles had become demonic leers. A man opposite
toasted me again and gave me a wink that said, Hope you like horse shit, kid.
I turned to Gerhard. 'Should we call the police?'
'I sink zat man over zere
is
zer police.'
'Oh, swell,' said Katz again.
'I sink maybe we should just go to zer door as
quietly
as we can and zen run like, how you say, zer
clappers.'
We rose, leaving behind unfinished beers, strolled casually to the door, nodding to our would-be
assailants as we passed, and ran like hell. We could hear a fresh roar of laughter lift the inn roof off its
moorings, but no one followed us and the soft squish of horse shit between the teeth remains for me - thank
you, God, thank you, thank you, thank you - for ever in the realms of the imagined.
As we lay in our sleeping bags in a dewy meadow beneath a thousand stars, with the jagged
mountains outlined against a fractionally less black sky and the smell of mown hay hanging on the still night
air, I remarked to no one in particular that I had never seen such a beautiful place as this.
'Zat's zer whole trouble wiz Austria,' said Thomas with sudden passion, in one of the few times I
actually heard him speak. 'It's such a lovely country, but it's full of fucking Austrians.'
I travelled the next day to Salzburg. I found it hard to warm to, which surprised me because I had fond, if
somewhat hazy, memories of the place. It was full of tourists and, worse still, full of shops selling things that
only a tourist could want: Tyrolean crap and Alpine crap and crap crap and, above all, Mozart crap - Mozart
chocolates, Mozart marzipan, Mozart busts, Mozart playing-cards, Mozart ashtrays, Mozart liqueurs.
Building and roadworks seemed to be in progress everywhere, filling the town with dust and noise. I
seemed to be forever walking on planks over temporary ditches.
The streets of the old town, crammed into a compact space between the River Salzach and the
perpendicular walls of the Mnchsberg mountain, are undeniably quaint and attractive, but so overbearingly
twee as to bring on frequent bouts of dry heaving. Along Getreidegasse, the site of Mozart's birthplace,
every shop had one of those hanging pretzel signs above the door, including, God help us, the local
McDonald's (the sign had a golden-arches M worked into its filigree), as if we were supposed to think that
they have been dispensing hamburgers there since the Middle Ages. I sank to my knees and beat my poor
head on the cobbled pavement.
I'm all for McDonald's in European cities, I truly am, but we should never forget that any company that
chooses a half-witted clown named Ronald McDonald as its official public face cannot be relied on to
exercise the best judgement in matters of corporate presentation.
The people of McDonald's need guidance. They need to be told that Europe is not Disneyland. They
need to be instructed to take suitable premises on a side street and given, without option, a shop design
that is recognizable, appropriate to its function and yet reasonably subdued. It should look like a normal
European bistro, with perhaps little red curtains and a decorative aquarium and nothing to tell you from the
outside that this is a McDonald's except for a discreet golden-arches transfer on each window and a steady
stream of people with enormous asses going in and out of the door. While we're at it, they should be told
that they will no longer be allowed to provide each customer with his own weight in styrofoam boxes and
