Building Somer

As regular readers will know, after being bullied in my job and then kicked out of it, so facing having my house repossessed and now battling with lying buyers, I have been under a lot of mental stress.  Each week I have to keep up a front so that I can apply for the required three jobs for week that the job centre asks for and then attend the interviews I am called to.  I have had 9 interviews in the last 8 weeks, but seem incapable of saying what they want me to say.  Of course, the approaches in each interview are different and there are a range of candidates, but clearly I am doing something wrong as these are all jobs I could walk into and start doing tomorrow.  I imagine there has been some shift in the fashion of what is required for interviews that I have not caught on to.  I have noticed that no-one wants PowerPoint presentations any more whereas just two years ago they were de rigeur for interviews.  I was rejected from a job in 2003 simply because I did not use PowerPoint and at one in 2010 I was not allowed to proceed to the interview as it was felt my 15-minute PowerPoint presentation was 'not blue sky enough', so I am glad that fashion has passed, finally.

In such circumstances, I now start the day with a panic attack.  Sometimes this is caused by having had a nightmare, something which is pretty common for me, sometimes with two nightmares in a single night.  The variety is diverse with me finding myself in the First World War, being chased by zombies or mutants or slowly torturing my brother over a fire in my grandparents' living room of the 1970s.  There is no point lying in bed once I have awoken as instead of these vividly realised fears I get nameless, shapeless ones.  Sometimes this is difficult as I need to sleep longer.  Tiredness simply feeds the concerns.  I volunteered to work on a sustainable farm for a week, but turning hay exposed me to Farmer's Lung and swept me with a range of mental symptoms which are apparently among what the illness, caused by spores in the hay can provoke.  My mind was literally numbed and I found myself staring into space with my mouth hanging open, then I was swept with complete paranoia which was topped off by me hallucinating that the trees around the field were unwinding like snakes and then walking towards me.  So much for 'trying to get away from it all'.

Trying to keep myself in bed a little longer led to Somer.  It is pronounced 'summer', rather than 'sommer'.  The name came from somewhere in my mind and it certainly would not be the one I would have used if I was writing a story.  I wondered if it simply derived from 'somewhere', something like Ecalpemos, i.e. 'Someplace' reversed, as used in 'A Fatal Inversion' by Barbara Vine [Ruth Rendell] (1987) or even Somerton which I have recently read is a place in Jamaica.  I had tried to meditate and to focus on a single point or a rosebud, the kinds of things they advise in meditation classes.  However, my mind likes greater complexity and once I slip off the single point it goes down the path of worry once more.  I used to envisage the wargames I was playing and plot what I would do next.  I think one difficulty is that with all the problems I have had with the Steam system, finding that old games cannot run on my new computer and not being able to afford subscription to 'World of Warcraft' any longer, it is very difficult to find something that I can lose myself in.  I tried 'Crusader Kings' but one decision can lead to your kingdom being obliterated without you being able to fight back in a way you could with something from the 'Total War' range.  I have written to Sega about the bug in 'Napoleon Total War' which means it crashes whenever an attack starts, but never received a response.

Back to Somer, and in my mind it is a place.  It is an imaginary town.  When I need to escape from stresses I go into it and think of a new building as if I was building something in 'Sim City' but seeing it from street level and for real.  At the moment, there do not seem to be any people in it when I envisage it, but simply working on the architecture does wonders for calming me down.  I had anticipated that it would be French in feel given all the days I have enjoyed on holidays in French towns, but for now it appears to be very English.  The first structure that appeared, and it is not always me deciding what comes next, it often simply appears from my mind like the name, was the lighthouse in the South centre of the town; I have a feeling that the sea is South of that.  This was clearly shaped by Southwold in Suffolk which I visited once for a wedding.  Then appeared a book shop to the South-West of the town, based it seems on the music shop that used to be in Holywell Street in Oxford, though I do not know it is still there.  Another refugee from Oxford appears to be a cinema, its setting is from Great Clarendon Street but the building itself seems to be more like the cinema, the Curzon Mayfair, compressed a bit.  There is a park in the North-East part of Somer, which is quite small and has a sandstone rock sprouting out of it with a spiral path up the side to a viewing platform, though I have never climbed it.  It reminds me of the outskirts of Freiburg-am-Breisgau and something I saw in the drama set in Edinburgh, 'Reichenbach Falls' (2007) in a park where a spring comes out.  To the East of this was another bookshop which appears to have come from Westbourne in Dorset.

I have tried to envisage some restaurants and so far have produced only one, on a curved street close to this bookshop, it is Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's restaurant the Axminster Canteen in Axminster, West Dorset, but thrust into a street from Swanage in East Dorset.  South of this is a small square with a cafe to the East side and a memorial in the middle; it is cobbled but I cannot place it. I think it is from France, perhaps using elements of the square in St. Omer but being more cramped than that one is.  I guess Somer is developing from places I have been happy in or think I might be, as I have never visited Axminster and whilst I have been to Edinburgh, never went to the park shown.

Much of the town remains unfilled in and as yet has no residences that I might go to 'live' in.  I have insisted that my mind puts in specific buildings and locations, such as the square in Bath where they play petanque, but it seems I cannot force things into the structure, they do not remain there when I revisit Somer.  I guess I have to walk around and 'explore', though at present I simply tend to 'appear' outside one building; only able to face in one direction and see it becoming more detailed.  I have read at least one science fiction story in which men's minds slip into an imagined city.  I do wonder if this is doing me harm or exposing that I am suffering from some serious mental condition.  However, for the moment it seems to be working and at least allows me to lie in bed that little bit longer without feeling drowned by all the worries pressing on me.

P.P. 05/08/2012
After finding for some nights that I could not call up any images into my mind's eye and even when I tried to think of Somer there were large gates blocking my 'entrance' back into the town, I found that finally I could begin to 'construct' more of it.  My mind ran me through a host of new buildings and locations that it felt should be present.  To the West, beyond the bookshop, appeared a large chunk of University Parks from Oxford.  I imagine a lot of people quite like these.  They have an interesting mix of sports fields and pleasant walks going down to the small River Cherwell.  Interestingly, I did not envisage cricket being played here, there is another location for that right over on the East side, it is modelled on the ground at a small village near Thame in Oxfordshire.  There used to be a railway running passed the village and you enter it through the remains of the railway bridge; the top piece has been removed so it is like passing through a gateway.  The railway embankment cuts the village off from the busy road.  I remember cycling through there and seeing a cricket match taking place as if it had come from some 1930s novel.

I have brought a chunk of the Cherwell into Somer, but North of the park it turns into the River Itchen which runs through Winchester in Hampshire and sitting on it, far closer than they do in real life are 'The Tun' and 'The Willow Tree' pubs; the former is now a Spanish restaurant but in Somer it retains the pub it was back in the mid-2000s.  The small square to the East of the town has acquired a favourite restaurant of mine,  'Oscar's' from Leamington Spa, a French restaurant which is the closest I have found any restaurant in Britain to be to numerous small town restaurants in France that I encountered while cycling.  If it still exists I recommend going there.

Just to the North-West of the square is the odd park which brought in elements of Freiburg-am-Breisgau and then suddenly acquired a tall, slender round tower, a bit like a Europeanised version of a minaret and I have no idea where that came from.  The square which has opened out to the East of this park, however is more familiar it has been lifted with the market place clock tower, the Beffroi from Amiens.  Between this and the park has appeared a place from a dream that I remember years after I had it.  It is a branch of Woolworths, the lamented store that used to be in every British high street.  This one has an added element, two cylindrical funicular railways, going up from the shop floor to the top of the park's rocky outcrop.  The branch of Woolworths seemed to be a mix of the one in Guildford, Surrey, and I think the one in Hayes in Middlesex, that I visited as a boy.

So Somer continues to grow and I wish I was an artist so that I could capture its wonderful eclectic growth.  It seems to be doing its job.  However, my mind got so busy with this latest round of construction that I found I could not get to sleep.  It now has two residents, though so far both of them were facets of me.  The first was me as the puppeteer from 'Masquerade' by Kit Williams (1979) which seemed rather appropriate, but then I stepped out of him to become more myself, dressed in my 18th century brocade suit over a loose white shirt and wearing my favourite ski-hook knee-high laced boots.  I suppose I have always had fun when dressed like that.  I do hope other people start appearing in the rather empty streets of Somer soon.

P.P. 07/10/2012
By chance I came across an article that mentioned the Japanese book about a man whose consciousness ultimately becomes drawn into a constructed city.  It is 'Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World' by Haruki Murakami (1985); the English translation came out in 1991.  I read it in hard back version that I bought from a remaindered bookshop so it must have been pretty new to the UK when I read it, though I was not aware of that because I picked up on the 1980s feel to the story.  The book has a whole Wikipedia webpage about it.  Whilst I would not recommend it as an enjoyable read, it is certainly a book which can trigger off some thoughts.  Perhaps my unease with it comes from it taking a Japanese rather than Western perspective so making it harder for me to engage with.  Maybe I read it when I was too young, though saying that I think I am a lot less experimental in what I read than I was at the time, twenty years ago.

20 Years On: Part 3 of Account of Hitch-hiking through southern West Germany

On this day I finally got to Augsburg, a town I had missed the previous September and I was pleased I did. I remember my underwear being strapped to the back of my rucksack smelling so much that I had to shove it inside as the woman offering us the 'Mitfahr' had read the slip wrong and had expected three women and was unimpressed by having to take one ugly-looking foreign man (she had expected Germans) who had to have everything translated for him by the others. She wanted to abandon me but Becky persuaded her and, of course, I paid up as agreed. I sat silently in the back of the car while Becky kept her entertained with her usual very jolly manner in good German.

I remember the youth hostel being very clean and surprisingly empty. I guess most people do not stop in Augsburg but go on to Munich. I remember the South African woman staying there had the principle when visiting towns of seeing one thing in each, but a different thing in consecutive towns, e.g. a cathedral in the first, a castle in the second, a museum in the third. Of course to fill my days I always saw as much as I could of everything in every town.


In contrast to the student halls in Augsburg, in Köln I was paying about DM247,- per month for just a room (no balcony) with two showers, two toilet cubicles and a kitchen shared between 12 students. This was the first time I had had Weizer beer with a tiny piece of lemon in it from which bubbles stream. In Köln they drank from 0.2 litre glasses or 0.5 litre only if you were drinking Guinness in a specialist pub.




I am reminded by the photo I have uploaded that I always used to be fascinated by taking photos of roads disappearing off into the distance and when cycling northern France was always trying to capture the perfect French tree-lined road. In part I blame the television series 'Secret Army' (1978-9) which started and ended with vistas across the Belgian countryside. It was only in the mid-1990s that someone pointed out to me how dreary this kind of shot was, it showed nothing, not an interesting building or a beautiful landscape. However, I include this photo for completeness and to show the kind of view that, for some reason, fascinated me at the time.


Saturday 13th May 1989
Today I woke promptly again. The youth hostel was filling up with Italians for a function. I went round to Sara's room then we caught the tram into town and met up with the woman who was giving us a lift to Augsburg. We stopped once. It cost DM24,- to register originally and then DM60,- for the petrol.


In Augsburg I walked to the youth hostel which is almost empty and in a pleasant part of town. I had to wait until 17.00 to occupy my room so chatted with a South African woman and a German woman. Then I walked through the centre of the town and got the tram and a bus to the South of the city and went to the hall where Becky's friends are living. Each room has a shower, toilet, cooker, sink and balcony for DM128,- per month. We had a good Mexican meal in the function room. There was an American, a Dane, a German and seven British. After that we went to town, to a quiet pub and drunk half litres of beer and played table football. It was near the youth hostel so I was able to get back in time to have a shower and re-pack my rucksack. Becky seemed much happier this evening, she must be desperate to see Ashley [her boyfriend] but is having a pleasant time now.

Weather: Dull and mild.

Road leading to Youth Hostel in Augsburg, West Germany in May 1989

20 Years On: Part 2 of Account of Hitch-hiking through southern West Germany

From this day in Freiburg-am-Breisgau, I remember Becky being unsettled by how long the eyelashes of Peter, another Briton and boyfriend to Sara, were. I also remember how elegant the trams in the town looked, very 1950s style. Unlike the trams in Köln they only had doors on one side and with the small lamps and tables, they looked like a series of dining cars moving through the evening streets. One part of the route ran across a lawn with grass grown intentionally between the tracks and it looked like the trams were moving over the grass. I had not experienced the delights of tram travel on my previous visit when I had walked everywhere.

'Mitfahr' literally 'with travel' was a sensible scheme to make hitch-hiking safer. There were offices in West German towns and you would go there in the morning saying you wanted to travel to another town and for a fee they would put up your details and people offering lifts would come in and put up their offers too. The office would match you up. The person giving the lift would get a small fee from you for the petrol. You could pick the sort of lift you wanted, in case, say you only wanted to travel with a woman. You were safer as the office kept the details of the driver. In West Germany you have to re-register your car to wherever you live even if you just move a few streets and cross and administrative border, so it is always easy to tell (if you know the town designations on the numberplates and they are easy to guess, B is Berlin, D is Düsseldorf and so on, even the size of the town is shown as cities have a single letter, large towns and some cities, two letters and small places three letters) where the car and owner are from.

This was the first time I had ever met a French Canadian (at the youth hostel) and was surprised to find that he spoke no English. He was motorbiking around Europe. With the warmer weather I experienced the problem of the Freiburg-am-Breisgau youth hostel: the noisy stream outside that keeps you awake.

It was seeing all the wonderful wooden toys and being told that if your foot slipped into the stream channels that run alongside the roads throughout the town that you were destined to marry a woman from the town, I think that prompted my thoughts. Also I think Becky, in the third year of her degree was thinking ahead to her future with the boyfriend she was going to visit and the possibility of them raising a family in West Germany, that got me all wrapped up in my own fantasies. This was the first time (of very few) that I ate in a food court and was very impressed by it. Cars and lorries are banned from the centre of Freiburg-am-Breisgau and it looks wonderfully historic, just how you would imagine a German town to appear. The notebook I bought there I used for about the next ten years before it disintegrated. I still have the poster.

It is interesting to note, that even though I had been in West Germany six weeks by this time, the money situation had still not been sorted out and I was desperate for my LEA (Local Education Authority) grant. It shows how poorly everything had been organised. My parents had to send me £50 notes concealed in cards to keep me going. In the end I never opened a bank account as it was so difficult. In those days you needed to be earning DM60,000 (about £25,000 in those days) to get a credit card whereas in the UK they gave them out to every student who opened an account. Of course, having stayed away from suicide only on the promise of partying and sworn not to return to West Germany I had little interest in continuing to attend class and saw no point in learning German. In fact I have never had a use for it since.

Uploading the photos I have been beginning to wonder if it rained almost all the time when I was in West Germany both in 1988 and 1989. I certainly remember my first month in Köln almost having incessant rain which made it even more gloomy.

Friday 12th May 1989

This morning I woke early and after breakfast, dozed then went to Sara's room. After some more breakfast we went into town and looked around the shops, then market and craft stalls. I bought a poster of Freiburg and a small jug as a present, also a replacement notebook. Then we ate in the Markthalle which has a variety of food stalls - Chinese, French, pasta, pizza, potato, Turkish, Asian, champagne, coffee, salad, sweet and so on. I had Chinese stir-fried vegetables and pork. Then we came back and sat talking. A lot of it was irrelevant to me, but it is interesting to see how other students live. After that at around 16.00 Iwent back to the youth hostel which was far less crowded and I got in a larger room with its own shower and toilet and for DM3,- less.

I returned to Sara's room, she and Becky had been shopping and we had the usual tomato-sweetcorn-pasta mix and some tasty yoghurts. We talked some more. It seems that people on a year abroad have terrible problems with their relationships and spend a lot of time contacting their fellow students and travelling to see them. After dinner we caught the tram into town and went around a trendy pub, then a studenty one, before meeting Peter in the cellar of a traditional pub. We came back by tram.

I had telephoned Dad before going into the last pub and he said my grant had arrived alright and he is sending mr £200 in cash next week with which I will open an account and it will make other transfers easier. He asked how much work I was doing which combined with Mum saying I should do some German lessons has put me to worrying again. Tomrorrow us three [me, Becky and Sara] are going to the 'Mitfahr' an agency which puts hitchers and drivers together. It costs us DM8.50 each.

Weather: Rainy at first, sunny and warm later.

Pedestrianised Street in Freiburg-am-Breisgau, West Germany in May 1989

Stalls in Freiburg-am-Breisgau Market, May 1989

Becky and Sara Looking at Stall Selling Wooden Toys in Freiburg-am-Breisgau, May 1989

Notice the very Eighties style padded jackets with geometric patterns.

20 Years On: Part 1 of Account of Hitch-hiking through southern West Germany

I have said before that I often envy those people in a position to put up accounts and photos of their trips to various parts of the World and last August/September I posted entries from my diary and photos from my trip by train through West Germany and Austria twenty years to the day in 1988. I then thought of another trip that I made it what was then West Germany in May 1989, the only time I ever went on a hitch-hiking trip anywhere. I had been living in Köln since the start of April and was to remain there until late July. This was part of an exchange organised by my university and funded by the European Community's (predecessor of the EU) ERASMUS scheme which apparently still runs today. This meant I took out a term (we had three terms in those days in a university year rather than the semesters of now) and went to study at a German university. My department was very poorly set up for the trip because they expected me still to submit all my course essays from West Germany even though I would be attending lectures there on different subjects rather than my subject lectures back in Britain. They also did not take into consideration that I would miss the examination period, so I had to do the examinations with the people doing resits in September.

I was the only person who applied to go on the trip to West Germany, everyone else knew that it would damage their grades for their degree. I was keen to get away from the house I was sharing where the landlord's step-daughter, a Music student-teacher at our university, who lived there, was making my life a misery. My parents were always nagging me to go abroad, they were constantly trying to get me to emigrate. These reasons are why I broke my promise of the previous September never to set foot in West Germany again. My department had to send me otherwise it would have had to go back to the university to say, no it could not use the grant ERASMUS was giving and it should go to another department. So off I went with very poor German skills. West German universities are in sharp contrast to British ones, there were no personal tutors for pastoral care and students were very much left to themselves. My university was seen as a large one in the UK, with 6,500 students, Köln University had 53,000 students, the English department alone had half as many students as my entire home university.

I was lucky to be allocated a room in the 'foreigners' block' outside the city limits, because the accommodation office, behind a thick, black steel door was only open one hour per day. Being in a suburban area, West of the city, we encountered great prejudice and dealing with the local government bureaucracy took almost the whole of my first month in Köln. The local council took my passport and only returned it when me and other British students got the British consulate in Düsseldorf involved. Government offices in West Germany were only open three hours per day, longer on Thursdays and the staff were openly racist and xenophobic; even the university administration was hostile to foreign students and one woman staffing the desk in the university registry told me, English, 'get back on the ferry!', I said 'Das ist nicht möglich!' (that is not possible) which I think was a twist of a quote. Ironically I had almost ended up in the West German Army (the Bundeswehr) because I was at Köln station the day young men were being sent off to their military camps and I was there aged 21 with a suitcase and they assumed I was only pretending to be British to escape national service. I fled on the first local train I could get on having been pursued by the Feldjäger (Military Police).

While in Köln I attended a conference about the ERASMUS exchange system which asked why only 1 British student came to West Germany for every 8 West German students who went to British universities. I was able to give them a long list of reasons not only from personal experience. Since then I have read loads of articles about how difficult and depressing it is to go abroad during your degree, because university is handled so differently in various countries. For the British it is the toughest as our universities have the best pastoral care and we are the least travelled people of any country sending students abroad. The liaison women for me and other British students, Monika, described going to a West German university as like 'being parachuted into jungle warfare' and I could not describe it better myself.

I was so depressed by my reception that I tried to hang myself on the second day that I was at the university. The only reason why I stepped down from where I was standing on the foot of my bed with the noose around my neck, tied to a hook in the ceiling was that I had been given £670 by ERASMUS and received a grant of £280 per term all of which went on my rent of the room. I thought I might as well spend the ERASMUS money before killing myself. Being in the foreigners' block (well, in fact blocks, they were two 13-storey blocks of rooms) meant that there were a lot of British and Irish and foreigner-friendly Germans around and I made a good group of friends, I nicknamed 'The Raj'. Even though they were all doing German or French & German degrees they rarely spoke German and never attended many classes so we spent our time drinking beer, partying and picnicking. I embarrassed myself attending classes as I could not properly understand even what our liaison woman, Monika, was saying and in the Politics classes I taught, which were taught in English, the tutors could not understand my English accent.

Anyway with £670 of ERASMUS money, £280 of British local education authority money and £250 brought and sent from home, after the first month, I was able to have an enjoyable, drunken time and survived to return to the UK. My university had worried I would 'go native' and stay in West Germany and get a job (apparently one predecessor of mine had been found working on a pig farm). However, the opposite was the case. Without the bribe I would have come home after the first week. My treatment in West Germany built up such a resentment, that though I made friends I have kept in contact up until the 2000s, I swore not to return. I did not go abroad again for six years and I did not go back to Germany until 2004, by which time it was no longer West Germany and the scars of the trip had been able to heal a little. The trip did purge me of any desire to live abroad again and I ignored all the pressure from my parents to emigrate. When I foolishly took a TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) qualification, I realised I could only get a job teaching in Britain as the thought of being alone in some European city utterly terrified me, to the extent that completing the course I had nightmares about being back in Köln during that first month.

Anyway, this is a huge background to what is going to be an account of a very short trip. In May 1989, Becky one of the other British students there, wanted to go and visit her boyfriend who was on a similar trip in Innsbruck in Austria. She also wanted to visit friends from her home university who were at universities across southern West Germany. She did not have the money for a train ticket (and being in West Germany we could not get an Inter-Rail ticket which would cover West Germany, there was always that home country rule) but she was an incredibly experienced hitch-hiker having been all over Europe and experiencing lots of exploits which I may recount on another occasion, but she wanted someone (male or female) to travel with her for safety. I had intended to go to Hamburg (though in fact given there was only 5 months until the Berlin Wall came down I should have gone to West Berlin) but agreed to accompany her, so for the second time in 8 months I set off for Freiburg-am-Breisgau but this time hitch-hiking. I fell in love with the town again and foolishly, not yearning for Melissa this time, dreamt of meeting a nice German woman and having a family there. Given the hostility I experienced in West Germany even attempting something like that would have led to more abuse than even the level I have experienced in my town here in the UK.

Hitch-hiking was very common for students in those days, my university's students' union ran sponsored hitch-hikes across Europe for charity, but it was something that terrified me and Becky's stories did not help. Anyway, even though this trip was trouble-free I never did it again, probably sensible given my luck.

I remember Becky was annoyed because the first man, in his early thirties, who gave us a lift invited us to a wedding for when we got back to Köln, but I refused to go as I found such a random invitation embarrassing and had no desire to attend a wedding of strangers speaking a language, which, by now I knew for certain I would never grasp. The second man was surprised to find Becky spoke German and was British, he assumed we were Dutch. He said to us in flawless English that he had heard that in Britain 'only fools and spies speak foreign languages'.



Thursday 11th May 1989

Today I woke up at 07.00 but fell back to sleep and re-woke at 08.15. After breakfast I met up with Becky and we went to the main road to hitch to Freiburg. We were lucky as after only thirty minutes we got a lift to the motorway and then from the service station from a middle-aged ITT employee to just outside Karlsruhe and he was very friendly and bought us some tea and gave us an atlas. Then we had a lorry driver to just outside Freiburg and from there to the centre of town in a battered Mercedes and then by tram to Becky's friend's Sara's hall. Then after chatting we went to the youth hostel which was almost completely full up. Then we went to a studenty pub and had some pasta. We then walked around town looking in the shops and returned to the pub where we were joined by Sara and her boyfriend Peter, then went to another pub. Then I came back to the youth hostel by taxi; Becky is staying in Sara's room.

Weather: Rainy at first, dry later, mild.

River Valley outside Freiburg-am-Breisgau, West Germany in May 1989

This was the 'noisy' river which ran passed the youth hostel. You can see how shallow it is despite its breadth and make out some of the stones on the bottom that made it so noisy.

20 Years On - Part 9 of Account of Travelling by Train Around West Germany and Austria

Before re-reading this I had forgotten how much competition there was to get a youth hostel place in Munich. The rules in the Land (province) of Bavaria were stricter than in the other parts of West Germany. In most areas people of any age could stay in a youth hostel, in Bavaria you had to be under 26. In most areas you could bring your own bedding; in Munich you were compelled to hire it. The youth hostel was well used and the dormitories were huge compared to the rooms I had stayed in up until now, leading many visitors, unfairly to a prison camp. I think this was partly because most German youth hostels were luxurious compared to the bulk in the UK. I had no complaint.


I travelled from Freiburg-am-Breisgau to München on a train which was run by the East German Railway service (ironically still labelled 'Deutsches Reichsbahn' on the carriages, literally 'German Imperial Way', the pre-war name for the German railways) and all the instructions were in German, Russian, French and Italian, not English. The attendant who turned the beds (three on each side of a carriage up the wall) back to seats and wall panels, wore a very naval looking uniform, she appeared like a rating from the 19th century. Unsurprisingly for East German staff they were very surly and had no interest in speaking to a non-German. Another thing new to a young British man was sitting opposite women in sleeveless or short-sleeved tops who had not shaved under their armpits. When the German singer Nina had appeared on television in the UK with her Number 1 hit, '99 Red Balloons' (1983) her unshaved armpits had raised much discussion but to be exposed to it across a train carriage left me uncertain where to look. It is funny these social mores, I probably would have been less embarrassed if these women had been topless.


I remember being impressed by Steve the American who was from, I think, Kentucky, and had studying engineering had come to West Germany to practice his German as he felt it would assist him in his engineering career. I remember Mark the Australian walked around the streets of the city barefoot.


Tuesday 30th August 1988
Today I woke up early and walked to the station along the quicker footpath route this time. I caught the train to Karlsruhe where I changed for a train to München. I stopped off in Karlsruhe where I bought some food. I arrived in München by 15.00. Then I walked to the youth hostel, already quite full. Within two hours, that one and the others, one affiliated and two non-affiliated were also full.


I met an Australian, Mark and we walked into the centre of town where we looked around some bookshops and at street-performers. Then we came back and I dried my washing at an excellent 24 hour laundrette. Then I cam back to have a beer. The youth hostel is rather rough. I am in a dormitory rooom which is rather smelly - forty people. There is quite a lot of complaint, but the town is decent. I went out again with Mark and an American, Steve, for some more drinks.


Weather: Sunny and warm.

View of the Schwarzwald Close to the Freiburg-am-Breisgau Youth Hostel, August 1988

Mural on Block of Flats in München, close to the Youth Hostel, August 1988

20 Years On - Part 8 of Account of Travelling by Train Around West Germany and Austria

When in my first year at university I had met a fourth year German language student (a British woman studying German as a subject; language degrees are four years rather than three as the students spend their third year in abroad) called Melissa and we had an ambivalent relationship. She used me at a party as a kind of shield against a very smarmy man called Tony and as a result I had my first real passionate kiss. However, as discussed before, I had no confidence in my abilities with women and did not know how to handle the situation. Melissa and her group of friends lived on the corridor in halls next to the one I lived on so they would often socialise with my friends as a group. I had not gone to university until I was almost 20, whereas most of my friends in my year were closer to 18, so in age I was not much younger than Melissa. She was a confusing character anyway, very flirtatious but then when you talked with her you realised she was very naive too and did not really realise what men expected from her given her flirtatious manner. Anyway, she had spent her year abroad in Freiburg-am-Breisgau in the South-West of West Germany and had mentioned she might be there in the Summer of 1988 and so I wandered around the town hoping that I would run into her and have some romantic encounter. It was wasted pining as when I met her at a party at her house in Herfordshire on the Saturday after I returned to the UK, it turned out she had never got to West Germany that year and instead had been in California. Anyway, she must be in her mid-40s now but I have not seen her for just under twenty years.

On the way to Freiburg-am-Breisgau in the Schwarzwald (Black Forest) I also remember meeting a strange young German man on the train who was obsessed with cows. He had a book of photographs of different breeds and travelled the country to see them. He spoke about slaughterhouses as one might concentration camps and he constantly extolled how beautiful cows were. The photograph with the bicycle by the tree was my attempt to replicate a similar arty poster I had of Oxford, but the light levels were really too low with all the rain to allow it to be successful.

Fabrikstraße means 'factory street'. The term 'yuppie' was very much in fad at the time and stemmed from the phrase 'young upwardly-mobile professionals' who seemed to be at the forefront of Thatcherite society. In Britain, München is better known as Munich, Wien as Vienna and Nürnberg as Nuremberg. In the end I did not get to Augsburg until the following Summer. At that time I returned to Freiburg-am-Breisgau too and found out that the rain on this visit had spared me the key problem of the youth hostel there, which is that it sits right next to a broad, shallow, fast moving stream and throughout the night (if the windows are open) you are kept awake by its noisy bubbling.

Monday 29th August 1988

Today I work early and caught the bus to the station. Then I caught the train to Freiburg. I looked around the cathedral and the old town, then wandered around a park in the foothills of the Schwarzwald. I walked through the rain to the youth hostel, through real yuppie areas of new houses and fancy schools, ironically called Fabrikstraße. At the youth hostel they did have [clothes] washing facilities but the dryer was out of order. I did the washing which was smelling terribly and also read "Newsweek" and "Time" lent to me by an American. I ate in the youth hostel for DM6,- and with no lunch saved me some cash. Tomorrow I think I will got to München probably via Karlsruhe. If there is no room I will go to Augsburg, and onto Wien and then back to Nürnberg.

Weather: Heavy rain, sunny and warm later.

Market Hall in Freiburg-am-Breisgau, August 1988

Decorated Doors in Freiburg-am-Breisgau, August 1988

Cobbled Street in Freiburg-am-Breisgau, August 1988

Note channels along road side to allow stream to flow through the city

Bicycle Leaning on Tree in Freiburg-am-Breisgau, August 1988

View across Freiburg-am-Breisgau from the Schwarzwald, August 1988