Dear Varsity,

People used to arrive in Berlin at Anhalter Bahnhof and be met on the platform by classically glamorous stars like, oh, Marlene Dietrich.  Unfortunately Anhalter Bahnhof is now a heap of ruins and Marlene's not much better off.  I didn't come to Berlin by train; I came by accident.

It all began in Paris.  Cheap travel, fifteen pound bus ticket; my only fifteen pounds.  Lived off other people's kebabs mostly.  Well, Xavier Buxton and I (labelled 'box office poison' in Cambridge for our Troilus and Cressida') acted in a friend's production of Beckett's Play, raising the all-essential four Euros that can take the strain off any household economy.  And we lived in a delightful skip with a tree, three beds, and a fine view of Notre-Dame.

But the smug feeling of sleeping rough wears off around 3 in the morning, when it is bitterly cold.  Joe Passmore and I decided to go and suprise-visit this girl we know from Hamburg.  So we packed up our trusty cigarette-lighter and a knife, and hitchhiked out.  From Paris to Metz with a businessman yelling "Margaret Thatcher kaputt!" From Metz, sixty kilometres' walk with a packet of hobnobs over the border into the Saarland.  Friendly hash-dealers put us to bed in their primary school.  We took trains, Saarbrüchen-Trier-Koblenz, hallucinated, Cologne Münster, hated each other, Osnabrück-Bremen, HAMBURG.  Then we called the girl.

"You're in Hamburg," she said.  "How nice for you. I live in Frankfurt-am-Main."

There wasn't much left to say.  We got the first car out: a 200mph Turk in flip-flops, who fed us carrots all the way to Berlin.  Once here we lived in a little hut we build in the forest.  And when it rained, and we lost our lighter and the knife, I had had enough, and went home.

So when I actually came here to start my year abroad, I flew comfortably, glamorously, Easyjet.

Last night, however, I went to 'Mandereley' (as the pile of sticks we lived under was known) again, and dug up the beloved, lost lighter and knife.  They both still work.

Ending with a suitable metaphor for something or other,

 

Ali

 

Read the second installment here