Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
So every time you saw him he was being given a Chinese burn or having his wobbly pink butt
mercilessly zinged with damp towels in the locker-room or standing in his underpants beneath a school-yard
oak endeavouring with a long stick to get his trousers down from one of the branches, where they had
recently been deposited by a crowd of up to four hundred people, which sometimes included passing
motorists and the residents of nearby houses. There was just something about him that brought out the
worst in everyone. You used to see pre-school kids chasing him down the street. I bet even now strangers
come up to him on the street and for no reason smash his hot dog in his face. I would.
In the morning I went to the station to catch a train to Cologne. I had half an hour to kill, so I wandered
into the station caf←. It was a little one-woman operation. The woman running it saw me take a seat, but
ignored me and instead busied herself tidying the shelves behind the counter. She was only a foot or so
from me. I could have leaned over and used her buttocks as bongos, but it gradually dawned on me that if I
wanted service I would have to present myself at the counter and make a formal request. It would never
occur to her to conclude that I was a foreign visitor who didn't know the drill and say to me in a pleasant
voice, 'Coffee, mein Liebschen?' or even just signal to me that I should step to the counter. No, I was
breaking a rule and for this I had to be ignored. This is the worst characteristic of the Germans. Well,
actually a predilection for starting land wars in Europe is their worst characteristic, but this is up there with it.
I know an English journalist living in Bonn who was phoned at work by his landlady and instructed to
come home and take his washing down from the line and rehang it in a more systematic manner. He told
her, in so many words, to go fuck herself, but every time he put washing out after that he would return home
to find it had all been taken down and rehung. The same man came in one weekend from cutting the grass
to find an anonymous note on the doormat informing him that it was illegal to mow one's lawn in North
Rhine-Westphalia between noon on Saturday and 9 a.m. on Monday, and that any further infractions would
be reported to the lawnmower police or whatever. Eventually he was transferred to Bogot£ and he said it
was the happiest day of his life.
Cologne is a dismal place, which rather pleased me. It was comforting to see that the Germans could
make a hash of a city as well as anyone else, and they certainly have done so with Cologne. You come out
of the station and there, at the top of an outdoor escalator, is the cathedral, the largest Gothic structure in the
world. It is awesome and imposing, no question, but it stands in the midst of a vast, windswept, elevated
concrete plaza that is just heart-numbingly barren and forlorn. If you can imagine Salisbury Cathedral
dropped into the car park of the Metro Centre you may get the picture. I don't know what they were thinking
of when they built it. Certainly it wasn't people.
I had been to Cologne briefly once before, the summer I travelled alone, but I could remember little of it,
except for the massive presence of the cathedral, and staying in a guesthouse somewhere on a back street
in the permanent shadow of an iron bridge across the Rhine. I remembered the guesthouse much better
than the city. In the hallway outside my room stood a table stacked high with German weekly magazines, all
of which seemed to be concerned exclusively with sex and television, and since television in Germany
seemed also to be concerned almost exclusively with sex, sex was something of a feature in these
publications. There was nothing pornographic about them, you understand. They just covered sex the way
British magazines cover gardening. I spent much of an afternoon and a whole evening travelling between my
room and the table with armloads of these diverting periodicals for purposes of cultural study.
I was particularly fascinated by a regular feature in, I think, Neue Review, which focused on a young
couple each week - a truck mechanic from Duisburg named Rudi and his dishy librarian wife Greta, that
sort of thing. Each week it was a different couple, but they all looked as if they had been squeezed from the
same tube of toothpaste. They were all young and good-looking and had superb bodies and dazzling
smiles. Two or three of the photographs would show the couple going about their daily business - Rudi lying
under a DAF truck with a spanner and a big smile, Greta at the local supermarket beaming at the frozen
chickens. But the rest of the pictures treated us to the sight of Rudi and Greta without any clothes on doing
things around the house: standing together at the sink washing the dishes, sharing a spoonful of soup from
the stove, playing Scrabble buttocks-up on a furry rug.
There was never anything overtly sexual about the pictures. Rudi never got a hard on - he was having
much too good a time drying those dishes and tasting that soup! He and Greta looked as if every moment
 
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