Lockdown Day 37: Tuesday 28th April, 2020

This bar was magic. I loved this fucking bar. I thought about moving in.

We were on a rare tear, well off the reservation, deep in the red-light district and lost in that scarlet night. Living it, loving it and lapping it up. Since midnight it had been my sixteenth birthday, though I had no idea at what time I was born so I might still really be fifteen, and we were hell-bent on enjoying this succulent solstice. The witching hour had long gone, now only renegades and revenants roamed dark alleys and cobbled streets as we drank deep before dawn’s seething cauldron boiled over and washed away the ashes of mother night’s joyous fires. 

  Everybody spoke Englisch. Perfekt!
Perhaps with guttural accents and alerting grammaticalisations, but way better than either one of us would ever speak German, despite the avid attentions of Miss Mac and her lickable teaching assistant Miss GrossBusten. Thank God for English. It certainly made life easier when you were pissed abroad. Lost in the back streets of Katmandu you could still hold firm to the belief that if you yelled ‘Fuck off!!’ to someone tampering with your rucksack they’d understand you. You could be legless in Lhasa yet know that if you called for whisky, you would be understood by the nearest barkeep.

  Why we were shocked at their aptitude with English I had no idea. Every bar we’d been in since we started our drunken blitzkrieg ten hours before – and we’d been in a good few – had been the same. We were good kids. We were polite. We were foreign. We weren’t mental. They were German, even more polite though formal, friendly and hospitable. They went out their way to talk to us, to make us welcome. We were a refreshing distraction from the zeitgeist, eine schottische neuheit, our accents even more guttural than theirs, our unbounded ambition to conquer everything in the world fresher than theirs and grounded in our naïve one-world hippy dreams rather than hate. We’d learnt more about Germany in these last few days than we had in four years of school and a lifetime of war movies.  

  Our Nurnberg trial had begun very much earlier the previous day, a blue Monday evening in a red rag week that sounded to me like the bouquet of a white Burgundy. We’d started slow with a couple of beers and a couple more, then picked up a fair head of steam with some bier, a couple of biers, then some more bier – Weiss, Dunkel, Blond, Pilsner – as long as it was cold and wet it went down. We were speeding now, two dark thirty on a Tuesday morning, steaming down the tracks on the rock’n’roll express. I was again finding that the amphetamines were slowing me down, holding me back. I didn’t like it. What was that all about? I decided I didn’t like speed. It didn’t agree with me. It would have to go.

Out demons out!

  We drank. Slowly now. Surely. More measured than in the lost evening. Our guts were full and we could no longer throw the icy bitterness down our throats with abandon. Each glass was longer, each nektared sip, each amber minute slowing inexorably as the night shuddered to an unwilling close.
Dan and I had been thrown together on our first day at beleaguered secondary school, eigentlich in unsere erste Deutsche Klasse, with Miss Mac, our German teacher. (I felt a bit sorry for her as she was our form teacher as well and had taken our home class for four years. Some of that class were not well-behaved but I won’t be casting the first stone.) He  had put up with me for that initial hour then we’d been mates ever since. He had a wicked sense of humour, dry Glasgow wit infused with something else I didn’t quite get. The subsumed legacy of persecution, maybe? Or possibly just his own dark personality. Who knew? Whatever. His mimicry and slapstick often had me wetting myself laughing. My sarcastic joking sometimes had him buckled in hysterics. Tonight, we were both happy drunks. I was totally spangled.

  We weren’t saying much by then. Not to each other, not to the surroundings or even in soused internal monologue. We were both chilling in a deep beer buzz.

Drinks drunk and more slowly ordered.