A little way further down that longer trail that I mentioned (I was something like 26 years old) I got to visit a place called Damp 2000 on the Baltic Coast of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. It consisted of a number of 1960s style apartment blocks and a yachting marina stuck in some dreary flat farmland by a grey sea. It must be one of the least beautiful places I have ever visited. I remember looking around with incredulity and asking who could have been responsible for the hideous architecture. One of the people I was with muttered the name Hitler and there was a ripple of awkward laughter.
I was helping out with a holiday for disabled old ladies from the East End of London. One of the other volunteers was a middle-aged woman who told me that all her family were professional criminals. Her husband had once been a driver for the Kray Brothers. As it happens I was a driver on this trip, driving a sort of ambulance minibus. And I was asked by a dodgy friend in London to bring back a large amount of cannabis and make us both some money. Who would search an ambulance full of argumentative old ladies? he said. I decided against it.
I had gone along at the request of a friend, a young woman for whom I had, let’s say, warm feelings. She had a hard time running the trip and was rightly quite focused and not romantically inclined while we were away and was very cool towards me. Then, back in London, she and I were invited to supper by two of our fellow volunteers. Janet (there you are, I’ve said her name) and I found ourselves to be the only straight people present among what turned out to be a gathering of ardent lesbian feminists, eighties style and complete with dungarees, short hair and dangly ear-rings. I’m enough of an ineffectual wimp of a guy to be acceptable in such company and I had a good time. Hard drinks and soft drugs came our way in large amounts and we got wrecked. And so it was that there came a point in the evening when Janet and I fell backwards off our chairs onto the floor and into a passionate embrace. After a short while we made it to our feet, staggered through the door and headed off to her bed.
We spent some time together over the next few months; most of it sober and often with our clothes on. It was fun.