Travel Reference
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friendly old waiter who brings me my coffee might have spent his youth bayonetting babies or herding Jews
into gas ovens. Some things are so monstrous as to be unpardonable. But I don't see how anyone could go
to Germany now and believe for a moment that that could ever happen again. Germans, it struck me, are
becoming the new Americans - rich, ambitious, hard-working, health-conscious, sure of their place in the
world. Seeing Hamburg now, I was happy to hand them my destiny - happier, at any rate, than leaving it to
those who have spent the last forty years turning Britain into a kind of nation-state equivalent of Woolworth's.
One thing hadn't changed: the women still don't shave their armpits. This has always puzzled me in a
vague sort of way. They all look so beautiful and stylish, and then they lift up their arms and there's a Brillo
pad hanging there. I know some people think it's earthy, but so are turnips and I don't see anyone hanging
those in their armpits. Still, if failure to deal with secondary pubic hairs is the worst trait the Germans take
with them into the closing years of the century, then I for my part shall be content to let them lead us into the
new millennium. Not that we will have the slightest fucking choice, mind you.
All these lithe and attractive bodies began to depress me, especially after I caught sight of myself
reflected in a store window and realized that I was the fat one now. After spending the first twenty-five years
of my life looking as if my mother had mated with a stick insect, these sudden reflected glimpses of rolling
blubber still come as a shock. Even now I have to stop myself from giving a good-morning smile to the fat
guy every time I get into a mirrored lift. I tried a diet once, but the trouble is they so easily get out of control. I
lost four pounds in the first week and was delighted until it occurred to me that at this rate in only a little over
a year I would vanish altogether. So it came as something of a relief to discover that in the second week I
put all the weight back on (I was on a special diet of my own devising called the Pizza and Ice-Cream Diet)
and I still draw comfort from the thought that if there is ever a global famine I will still be bounding around,
possibly even playing a little tennis, while the rest of you are lying there twitching your last.
I devoted the afternoon to a walk around the immense Outer Alster. I hadn't intended to spend the
whole afternoon there, but it was so beautiful that I couldn't pull myself away. Sailing boats dotted the water,
and little red and white ferries plied endlessly beneath a sky of benign clouds, taking passengers between
the rich northern quarters of the city and the distant downtown. A narrow park, full of joggers and lovers and
occasional benchloads of winos (who looked remarkably fit and prosperous considering their vocation),
encircled the lake and offered one enchantment after another. Every view across the water was framed by
sturdy oaks and trembling willows, and offered distant prospects of the city: the space-needle eminence of
a TV tower, a few scattered skyscrapers, and for the rest copper roofs and church spires that looked as if
they had been there for ever.
On the streets around the perimeter of the lake, and as far back into the surrounding streets as you
cared to wander, stood huge houses of every architectural style, with nothing in common but their
grandness. Where the lake occasionally wandered off into placid backwaters, the houses had immense
shady lawns running down to the water's edge, with gazebos and summer houses and their own jetties. It
must be very agreeable to live on a lake in a grand house and go to work by foot or bike around the lake or
by ferry across it or even aboard your own boat and to emerge at the other end at such a rich and
handsome city centre. What a perfect life you could lead in Hamburg.
