In the Red
Donald MacInnes: still bewitched by that first glimpse of European otherness
I’m desperately sorry that you had to negotiate last Saturday’s ups and downs without my guidance. And while I probably could have sucked it up and just turned in a sickbed column, there was in truth nothing about my bout of gastroenteritis that had anything to do with personal finance (other than the fact that I would have happily sold my soul to the devil for 10 minutes respite from all the shivering, aching and vomiting).
When last our ships passed in the night, I was arriving in Rotterdam with the rest of my school trip and marvelling at the dizzying feeling of being in Holland, having never been out of the UK. This sense of wonder at being in a foreign country continued as we boarded the coach again for our journey to Heidelberg, a beautiful university town in the south-west of Germany. The whole way there, every street sign, every shopfront, every van reminded me that I was abroad!
We didn’t arrive until night-time, so were ordered straight to bed. The following morning, I again experienced that vivid, drunken feeling of otherness, when I opened the shutters to my hotel room and looked out into the road. The view almost reminded me of the scene in Oliver!, when the boy Twist wakes up in his rich benefactor’s home in an opulent London square, leans out of the window and sings “Who will buy … this wonderful morning?”
Chin cupped in my hands on the window sill, I watched people striding here and there, going about their German business; entering shops which sold I did know what and driving vans full of goodness knows. Now, if we want to see what people in other countries are doing, we can look at a live webcam, but back then this glimpse at the lives of foreign others – its very mundanity even – was profoundly bewitching and memorable (witness the fact that I am writing about it 30-odd years later).
I can even remember the smell of the little continental roll you got with your breakfast. It was an early surprise, what Europeans (and those further afield) ate in the morning. Downstairs in the restaurant, the buffet offered a million slices of cold meat, as well as fruit salad and big tubs of plain yoghurt. I’ve never grown used to it.
Indeed, perhaps it was the unrecognisable breakfasts throughout the trip which triggered my silliest purchase of all. Maybe it was the feeling of being so very abroad and far from home which tempted me to buy a pair of electric blue and yellow roller boots two days later from a sports store in Munich. To this day I have no idea why I bought them. Sure, roller disco was quite big at the time, but I was not then and have never since been an advocate of nor adherent to perambulatory disco.
I can only put it down to a desire to bring something home with me to remind me of that foreign land. I guess roller boots are as good as a toby jug.
Twitter: @DonaldAMacInnes