Dear Varsity,

I wrote you a really long and well-formed narrative a couple of days ago, but the woman at the telegraph office accidentally sent it to “Farsi Tea, Tehran”. And now I can’t really remember what happened last week, and there’s a man from Mossad hanging around on the other side of the canal. The goose flies at night.

So I am lying here surrounded by the detritus of the week, a dead lobster, a broken pair of handcuffs and a Viagra Calendar 2005. I have a scar on my elbow, a needle-mark on my arm and an odd disease eating away the skin on my index finger, the results of a concatenation of events so complicated that even Raymond Chandler doesn’t know what’s going on. So instead of stories, I’m going to tell you about the Great Game.

When we were young we used to go to Southampton on the train to do battle with the night. Lacking anybody real to fight, in our vacuous existence, we had to set up imaginary adversaries. The club closed at three, you missed the last bus home, so you had to skirmish through the crowds employing all your luck and loveliness to get a bed for the night. You could just camp on the street until six-thirty, but sleeping with someone’s much more fun, and retreating to the station is an admission of defeat.

But here, because of the vehemently methodical way the Germans railway-timetable their fun, the game’s a bit too easy. You can find anyone you like on the internet, even if you’re a hungry cannibal looking for a bite to eat on a Thursday afternoon. Berghain is always open. The whole of Berlin is an erogenous zone. So you play for higher stakes, you never sleep at all, you run around for days on end and wind up somehow in the upstairs of a bakery with two Swedish prostitutes, a jar of gherkins and a gallon of frothy mochaccino.

And I have to tell you what I’ve been doing in 350 words?

The 349th word is,

Ali