Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
of their existence was bliss. They smiled straight at the camera, as happy as anything to have their
neighbours and workmates and everyone else in the Federal Republic of Germany see them chopping
vegetables and loading the washing machine in their birthday suits. And I thought then what curious people
the Germans are.
That was about all I could remember of Cologne, and I began to fear, as I lingered on the precipice of
the cathedral plaza looking down on the grim shopping streets below, that that was about all that was worth
remembering. I went and stood at the base of the cathedral and gazed up at it for a long time, impressed by
its sheer mass. It is absolutely immense, over 500 feet long and more than 200 feet wide, with towers that
soar almost as high as the Washington Monument. It can hold 40,000 people. You can understand why it
took 700 years to build - and that was with German workers. In Britain they would still be digging the
foundations.
I went inside and spent a half-hour looking dutifully at the contents, but without feeling any of that sense
of exhilaration that the vastly smaller cathedral at Aachen had stirred in me the day before, then wandered
back outside and went to the edge of the terrace overlooking the Rhine, broad and brown and full of long
fleets of barges. This done, I wandered over to the main shopping street, Hohe Strasse, a long, straight
pedestrian artery which is one of the two most expensive streets in Europe on which to rent retail space (the
other is Kaufingerstrasse in Munich). It's more expensive even than Bond Street in London or the Rue du
Faubourg-St-Honor￩ in Paris. Bernard Levin wrote glowingly of Hohe Strasse in
To the End of the Rhine,
but to me it just looked like any shopping street anywhere - a succession of C&A-type department stores,
shoe stores, record stores, places selling cameras and video recorders. It was aswarm with Saturday
shoppers, but they didn't look particularly discerning and nothing like as well-dressed as the citizens of
Aachen. I could have been in Milton Keynes or Doncaster.
I stopped outside one of the many electronics shops and looked over the crowded window, idly
wondering if the goods on offer would be German-made, but no, they were the same Japanese videos and
cameras you see everywhere else, apart from the odd Grundig slide projector or some other relic of a
simpler age. Having grown up in a world dominated by American goods I used to get patriotically chagrined
seeing Japanese products appearing everywhere and I would read with sympathy articles in magazines
about how these wily little orientals were taking over the world.
Then one time, while I was flying on a Boeing 747, I plugged in a pair of earphones that offered the
audio quality of a paper cup at the end of a length of string and watched a film that looked as if it were being
projected onto a bath mat, and I had a shocking thought - namely, that this was as far as American
consumer electronics ever got. We got up to about 1972 and then just stopped. If we had left the field to
RCA and Westinghouse and the other American companies we would now all be wheeling around personal
stereos the size of suitcases and using video recorders that you would have to thread yourself. And since
that moment I have been grateful to the Japanese for filling my life with convenient items like a wristwatch
that can store telephone numbers, calculate my overdraft and time my morning egg.
Now my only complaint is that we have to live with all the embarrassing product names the Japanese
give us. No one ever seems to remark on this - on what a dumb and misguided name Walkman is, for
instance. I've never understood it. It doesn't walk, it's not a man. It sounds like something you'd give a blind
person to keep him from bumping into walls ('You want to turn up the bleeper on your Walkman, Harry'). If it
had been developed in America it would have been given a name like the SoundBlaster or MuzixMaster or
Dynam-O-Box or something with a little zip to it. But these things aren't developed in America any longer, so
we have to accept the sort of names that appeal to Japanese engineers - the Sony Handy-Cam, the
Panasonic Explorer, the Toyota Tercel. Personally, I would be embarrassed to buy a car that sounds like a
new kind of polyester, but I imagine that to the Japanese these names are as exciting and stellar as all-get-
out. I suppose that's what you have to expect from people who wear white shirts every day of their lives.
I returned to the station, where I had left my bag in a locker, and couldn't decide what to do with myself.
My intention had been to spend a couple of days in Cologne going to the museums - it has some excellent
ones - but now I couldn't muster much enthusiasm for the idea. And then I saw something that gave me an
instant urge to get out of there. It was a non-stop porno cinema, and quite a gross one at that to judge by the
candid glossy pictures on display by the ticket booth. The cinema was in the station, one of the services
