Neither Here Nor There - Travels In Europe Part 4

I travelled to Hamburg, by way of Osnabruck and Bremen, and arrived in the early evening. I hadn't been to Hamburg before. Katz and I pa.s.sed through it by train on our way to Scandinavia, but it was late at night and all I recalled was a dark city and a dark station where we stopped for half an hour while more carriages were hooked on. The station was much as I remembered it, vaulted and echoing, but brighter and busier at six in the evening. People were everywhere, hurrying to catch trains.

I threaded my way through the crowds to the tourist information desk and, having had so much trouble finding a room in Amsterdam, gladly paid a handsome fee to have accommodation found for me, and then was chagrined to discover that the Hotel Popp, the establishment to which the pleasant and well-spoken young man directed me after relieving me of a handful of notes and a selection of coins, was directly opposite the station. I could have found it on my own in thirty seconds and applied the money to a night of abandon in the Reeperbahn. Still, it was convenient and had a bar and restaurant, so I couldn't complain. Actually I could. The room was tiny and depressingly basic, with a twenty-watt bulb in the reading light, no carpet, no television and a bed that could have pa.s.sed for an ironing board. But at least with a place called the Hotel Popp I wouldn't forget the name and end up, as I often do in strange cities, asking a cabbie to just drive around until I spotted it.

I went out for a stroll before dinner. Lounging at intervals along the side streets around the station were some of the most astonis.h.i.+ngly unattractive prost.i.tutes I had ever seen fifty-year-old women in mini-skirts and black fishnet stockings, with crooked lipstick and t.i.ts that grazed their kneecaps. Where on earth they get their trade from I couldn't begin to guess. One of them gave me a 'h.e.l.lo, dearie' look and I was nearly crushed by a bus as I faltered backwards into the street. But within a block or two things improved considerably. I had left my city map behind in the hotel so I had no idea where I was going, but it all looked inviting in every direction. It was a warm spring evening, with dusk settling cosily over the city, like a blanket around one's shoulders, and people were out walking aimlessly and browsing in shop windows. I was pleased to find myself among them.

I had expected Hamburg to be grimmer, a sort of German Liverpool, full of crumbling flyovers and vacant lots I already knew that it had the highest unemployment rate in Germany, over twelve per cent, half as high again as the national average, so I expected the worst but Hamburg proved to be anything but struggling, at least on the surface. The department stores along the Monckebergstra.s.se, the main shopping street, were bright and spotless and full of fancy goods much finer than anything on Oxford Street and the side streets glowed with restaurants and bistros through whose yellowy windows I could see people dining elegantly and well.

I walked through the big town hall square and around the darkened streets of the warehouse district, handsome and silent, then rounded a corner to find one of the more arresting city sights I have ever seen the Inner Alster, the smaller of the two lakes around which Hamburg is built. I knew from maps that Hamburg had these lakes, but nothing I had read or seen in pictures had prepared me for just how beautiful they were. The Inner Alster is much the smaller of the two, but it is still large enough to present a great rectangular pool of silence and darkness in the midst of the city. The lakeside is agreeably lined with trees and benches, overlooked by office buildings and a couple of hotels of the old school, the sort of places where the doormen are dressed like Albanian admirals and rich old ladies in furs constantly go in and out with little dogs under their arms.

I sat on a bench in the darkness for perhaps half an hour just watching the lights s.h.i.+mmering on the surface and listening to the lapping of water, then stirred myself enough to walk over to the Kennedybrucke, a bridge across the channel where the two lakes meet. The Outer Alster, seen from here, was more ma.s.sive and irregular and even more fetching, but I would leave that for tomorrow.

Instead, famished, I strolled back to the welcoming glow of the Popp, where I dined amply and surprisingly well for what was after all just a small station hotel, bloating my cheeks with bread rolls and salad and meat and potatoes till I could eat no more, and then filled all the remaining s.p.a.ce inside me with good German beer and read half a book, until at last, at about half-past midnight, I arose from my table, nodded genteelly to the six Turkish waiters who had been waiting hours for me to go and ascended in a tiny slow-motion lift to the fourth floor, where I spent no more than half an hour stabbing at the keyhole with my key before bursting unexpectedly into the room, pus.h.i.+ng the door shut with the back of my foot, shedding some clothes (one sock, half a s.h.i.+rt) and falling onto the bed, where I dropped more or less immediately into a deep, contented and, I dare say, grotesquely blubbery sleep.

I woke in a square of suns.h.i.+ne, too hot and bright to sleep through, and stumbled to the window to find a gorgeous morning blazing away outside, much too gorgeous to waste. The Hauptbahnhoff concourse and the street below, the Kirchenallee, were so brightly bathed in sunlight that I had to s.h.i.+eld my eyes. I had a hangover you could sell to science, but after two cups of strong coffee at a sunny table outside the Popp, a handful of aspirins, two cigarettes and a cough so robust that I tapped into two new seams of phlegm, I felt tolerably human and was able to undertake a gentle stroll to the waterfront through the dappled suns.h.i.+ne of St Pauli Park. There wasn't much to see upon arrival, just cranes and dockyards and the broad, sluggish estuary of the Elbe. I thought of what Konrad Adenauer used to say: 'You can smell Prussia when you get to the Elbe.' I could only smell dead fish, or at least I a.s.sumed it was dead fish. Maybe it was Prussians.

In the 1930s, the docks at Hamburg employed 100,000 people. Now the number is barely 1,200, though it is still the second busiest port in Europe (after Rotterdam), with a volume of trade equal to the whole of Austria's. Until just a couple of weeks before, I could have witnessed the interesting sight of freighters unloading grain from their aft holds and redepositing it in their forward holds as a way of extracting additional funds from the ever-beneficent EEC. With its flair for grandiose f.u.c.k-ups, the EEC for years paid special subsidies to s.h.i.+ppers for grain that was produced in one part of the Common Market and re-exported from another, so s.h.i.+ppers taking a consignment from, say, France to Russia discovered that they could make a fortune by stopping off at Hamburg en route and pointlessly unloading the cargo and then reloading it. This little ruse enriched the s.h.i.+ppers by a mere 42 million before the bureaucrats of the EEC realized that the money could be much better spent on something else themselves, say and put a stop to the practice.

I walked a few hundred yards inland and uphill to the Reeperbahn, that famed mile-long avenue of sin. It looked disappointingly unl.u.s.ty. Of course, sinful places never look their best in daylight. I remember thinking even in Las Vegas that it all looked rather endearingly pathetic when viewed over a cup of coffee and a doughnut. All that noise and electric energy that is loosed at dusk vanishes with the desert sun and it all suddenly seems as thin and one-dimensional as a film set. But even allowing for this, the Reeperbahn looked tame stuff, especially after Amsterdam. I had envisioned it as a narrow, pedestrianized street packed on both sides with bars, s.e.x shops, peep shows, strip clubs and all the other things a sailor needs to revive a salty d.i.c.k, but this was almost a normal city street, busy with traffic flowing between the western suburbs and the downtown. There was a fair sprinkling of seamy joints, but also a lot of more or less normal establishments restaurants, coffee shops, souvenir stores, jeans shops, even a furniture store and a theatre showing the inescapable Cats. Cats. Almost the only thing that told you this was a neighbourhood of dim repute was the hard look on the people's faces. They all had that gaunt, washed-out look of people who run funfair stalls. Almost the only thing that told you this was a neighbourhood of dim repute was the hard look on the people's faces. They all had that gaunt, washed-out look of people who run funfair stalls.

The really seedy attractions were on the side streets, like Grosse Freiheit, which I turned up now. I walked as far as the Kaiserkeller at No. 36, where the Beatles used to play. Most of the other businesses along the street were given over to live s.e.x shows, and I was interested to note that the photos of the artistes on display outside were unusually I am tempted to say unwisely candid. In my experience, places such as these always show pictures of famously beautiful women like Christie Brinkley and Raquel Welsh, which I dare say even the most inexperienced sailor from Tristan da Cunha must realize is not what he's likely to encounter inside, but at least they leave you wondering what you are are going to find. These pictures, however, showed gyrating women of frightfully advanced years women with maroon hair and thighs that put me in mind of flowing lava. These ladies must have been past their best when the Beatles were playing. They weren't just over the hill; they were pinp.r.i.c.ks on the horizon. going to find. These pictures, however, showed gyrating women of frightfully advanced years women with maroon hair and thighs that put me in mind of flowing lava. These ladies must have been past their best when the Beatles were playing. They weren't just over the hill; they were pinp.r.i.c.ks on the horizon.

The s.e.x shops, too, were as nothing compared to those of Amsterdam, though they did do a nice line in inflatable dolls, which I studied closely, never having seen one outside a Benny Hill sketch. I was particularly taken with an inflatable companion called the Aphrodite, which sold for 129 marks. The photograph on the front was of a delectably attractive brunette in a transparent negligee. Either this was cruelly misleading or they have made more progress with vinyl in recent years than I had realized.

In large, lurid letters the box listed Aphrodite's many features: LIFE SIZED!, SOFT FLESH-LIKE SKIN!, INVITING a.n.u.s! LIFE SIZED!, SOFT FLESH-LIKE SKIN!, INVITING a.n.u.s! (Beg pardon?), (Beg pardon?), MOVABLE EYES! MOVABLE EYES! (Ugh) and (Ugh) and LUSCIOUS v.a.g.i.n.a THAT VIBRATES AT YOUR COMMAND! LUSCIOUS v.a.g.i.n.a THAT VIBRATES AT YOUR COMMAND!

Yeah, but can she cook? I thought.

There was another one called a Chinese Love Doll 980. 'For a Long-Lasting Relations.h.i.+p,' it promised sincerely, and then in bolder letters added: EXTRA THICK VINYL RUBBER. EXTRA THICK VINYL RUBBER. Kind of takes the romance out of it, don't you think? This was clearly a model for the more practical types. On the other hand it also had a Kind of takes the romance out of it, don't you think? This was clearly a model for the more practical types. On the other hand it also had a VIBRATING v.a.g.i.n.a AND a.n.u.s VIBRATING v.a.g.i.n.a AND a.n.u.s and and t.i.tS THAT GET HOT! t.i.tS THAT GET HOT! ! Below this it promised: ! Below this it promised: SMELL LIKE A REAL WOMAN. SMELL LIKE A REAL WOMAN.

All these claims were given in a variety of languages. It was interesting to see that the German versions all sounded coa.r.s.e and b.e.s.t.i.a.l: LEBENGROSSE, VOLLE JUNGE BRUSTE, LIEBENDER MUND. LEBENGROSSE, VOLLE JUNGE BRUSTE, LIEBENDER MUND. The same words in Spanish sounded delicate and romantic: The same words in Spanish sounded delicate and romantic: ANO TENTADOR, DELICIOSA v.a.g.i.n.a QUE VIBRA A TU ORDEN, LABIOS AMOROSOS ANO TENTADOR, DELICIOSA v.a.g.i.n.a QUE VIBRA A TU ORDEN, LABIOS AMOROSOS. You could almost imagine ordering these in a restaurant ('I'll have the Ano Tentador lightly grilled and a bottle of Labios Amorosos '88'). The same things in German sounded like a wake-up call at a prison camp.

I was fascinated. Who buys these things? Presumably the manufacturers wouldn't include a vibrating a.n.u.s or t.i.ts that get hot if the demand wasn't there. So who's clamouring for them? And how does anyone bring himself to make the purchase? Do you tell the person behind the counter it's for a friend? Can you imagine taking it home on the tram and worrying all the time that the bag will split and it will flop out or self-inflate or, worse still, that you'll be killed in a crash and all the next week the papers will be full of headlines like 'POLICE IDENTIFY RUBBER-DOLL MAN' above a smiling picture of you from your high-school year book? I couldn't handle the tension. Imagine having friends drop in unexpectedly when you were just about to pop the champagne cork and settle down for a romantic evening with your vinyl companion and having to shove her up the chimney and then worry for the rest of the evening that you've left the box on the bed or some other give-away lying around. ('By the way, who's the other place setting for, Bill?') Perhaps it's just me. Perhaps these people aren't the least embarra.s.sed about their abnormal infatuations. Perhaps they talk about it freely with their friends, sit around bars saying, 'Did I tell you I just traded up to an Arabian Nights Model 280? The eyes don't move, but the a.n.u.s gives good action.' Maybe they even bring them along. 'Helmut, I'd like you to meet my new 440. Mind her t.i.ts. They get hot.'

With this intriguing thought to chew on, I strolled back to the city centre past the ma.s.sive law courts and concert hall and along an avenue interestingly named Gorch-Fock-Wall, which sounded to me like the answer to a riddle ('What does Gorch do when he can't find his inflatable doll?'), and had a look around the shopping streets and cla.s.sy arcades packed into the area between the huge town hall and Inner Alster.

It was getting on for midday and people were sitting out in the sunny plazas having lunch or eating ice-creams. Almost without exception they looked healthy and prosperous and often were strikingly good-looking. I remembered German cities from twenty years before being full of businessmen who looked just as Germans were supposed to look fat and arrogant. You would see them gorging themselves on piles of sausages and potatoes and gulping with full mouths from litre tankards of golden beer at all hours of the day, but now they seemed to be picking delicately at salads and fish, and looking fit and tanned and, more than that, friendly and happy. Maybe this was just a Hamburg trait. Hamburg is after all closer to Denmark and Sweden and even England than it is to Munich, so perhaps it is atypical of Germany.

At all events, this relaxed and genial air was something that I hadn't a.s.sociated with Germans before, at least not those aged over twenty-five. There was no whiff of arrogance here, just a quiet confidence, which was clearly justified by the material wealth around them. All those little doubts we've all had about the wisdom of letting the Germans become the masters of Europe evaporated in the Hamburg suns.h.i.+ne. Forty-five years ago Hamburg was rubble. Virtually everything around me was new, even when it didn't look it. The people had made their city, and even themselves, rich and elegant and handsome through their cleverness and hard work, and they had every right to be arrogant about it, but they were not, and I admired them for that.

I don't think I can ever altogether forgive the Germans their past, not as long as I can wonder if that friendly old waiter who brings me my coffee might have spent his youth bayonetting babies or herding Jews into gas ovens. Some things are so monstrous as to be unpardonable. But I don't see how anyone could go to Germany now and believe for a moment that that could ever happen again. Germans, it struck me, are becoming the new Americans rich, ambitious, hard-working, health-conscious, sure of their place in the world. Seeing Hamburg now, I was happy to hand them my destiny happier, at any rate, than leaving it to those who have spent the last forty years turning Britain into a kind of nation-state equivalent of Woolworth's.

One thing hadn't changed: the women still don't shave their armpits. This has always puzzled me in a vague sort of way. They all look so beautiful and stylish, and then they lift up their arms and there's a Brillo pad hanging there. I know some people think it's earthy, but so are turnips and I don't see anyone hanging those in their armpits. Still, if failure to deal with secondary pubic hairs is the worst trait the Germans take with them into the closing years of the century, then I for my part shall be content to let them lead us into the new millennium. Not that we will have the slightest f.u.c.king choice, mind you.

All these lithe and attractive bodies began to depress me, especially after I caught sight of myself reflected in a store window and realized that I was the fat one now. After spending the first twenty-five years of my life looking as if my mother had mated with a stick insect, these sudden reflected glimpses of rolling blubber still come as a shock. Even now I have to stop myself from giving a good-morning smile to the fat guy every time I get into a mirrored lift. I tried a diet once, but the trouble is they so easily get out of control. I lost four pounds in the first week and was delighted until it occurred to me that at this rate in only a little over a year I would vanish altogether. So it came as something of a relief to discover that in the second week I put all the weight back on (I was on a special diet of my own devising called the Pizza and Ice-Cream Diet) and I still draw comfort from the thought that if there is ever a global famine I will still be bounding around, possibly even playing a little tennis, while the rest of you are lying there twitching your last.

I devoted the afternoon to a walk around the immense Outer Alster. I hadn't intended to spend the whole afternoon there, but it was so beautiful that I couldn't pull myself away. Sailing boats dotted the water, and little red and white ferries plied endlessly beneath a sky of benign clouds, taking pa.s.sengers between the rich northern quarters of the city and the distant downtown. A narrow park, full of joggers and lovers and occasional benchloads of winos (who looked remarkably fit and prosperous considering their vocation), encircled the lake and offered one enchantment after another. Every view across the water was framed by st.u.r.dy oaks and trembling willows, and offered distant prospects of the city: the s.p.a.ce-needle eminence of a TV tower, a few scattered skysc.r.a.pers, and for the rest copper roofs and church spires that looked as if they had been there for ever.

On the streets around the perimeter of the lake, and as far back into the surrounding streets as you cared to wander, stood huge houses of every architectural style, with nothing in common but their grandness. Where the lake occasionally wandered off into placid backwaters, the houses had immense shady lawns running down to the water's edge, with gazebos and summer houses and their own jetties. It must be very agreeable to live on a lake in a grand house and go to work by foot or bike around the lake or by ferry across it or even aboard your own boat and to emerge at the other end at such a rich and handsome city centre. What a perfect life you could lead in Hamburg.

10. Copenhagen

I took a train to Copenhagen. I like travelling by train in Denmark because you are forever getting on and off ferries. It takes longer, but it's more fun. I don't know how anyone could fail to experience that frisson of excitement that comes with pulling up alongside a vast white s.h.i.+p that is about to sail away with you aboard it. I grew up a thousand miles from the nearest ocean, so for me any sea voyage, however brief, remains a novelty. But I noticed that even the Danes and Germans, for whom this must be routine, were peering out of the windows with an air of expectancy as we reached the docks at Puttgarden and our train was shunted onto the ferry, the Karl Carstens. Karl Carstens.

Here's a tip for you if you ever travel on a Scandinavian ferry. Don't be the first off the train, because everyone will follow you, trusting you to find the way into the main part of the s.h.i.+p. I was in a group of about 300 people following a fl.u.s.tered man in a grey trilby who led us on a two-mile hike around the cargo deck, taking us up and down long avenues of railway carriages and huge canvas-sided trucks, casting irritated glances back at us as if he wished we would just go away, but we knew that our only hope was to stick to him like glue and, sure enough, he eventually found a red b.u.t.ton on the wall, which when pressed opened a secret hatch to the stairwell.

Overcome with new frissons of excitement, everyone clambered hurriedly up the metal stairs and made straight for the buffet. You could tell the nationality of the people by what they went for. The Germans all had plates piled high with meat and potatoes, the Danes had Carlsbergs and cream cakes, the Swedes one piece of Ryvita with a little dead fish on it. The queues were too much for me, so I went up on the top deck and stood out in the suns.h.i.+ne and gusty breeze as the boat cast off and, with a sound oddly like a was.h.i.+ng machine on its first cycle, headed across the twelve miles of white-capped water between northern Germany and the Danish island of Lolland. There were about eight of us, all men, standing in the stiff breeze, pretending we weren't peris.h.i.+ng. Slowly Puttgarden receded behind us in a wake of foam and before long Lolland appeared over the horizon and began to glide towards us, like a huge low-lying sea monster.

You cannot beat sea travel, if you ask me, but there's not much of it left these days. Even now grand plans are under way to run bridges or tunnels between all the main islands of Denmark and between Copenhagen and Sweden, and even across this stretch of water between Puttgarden and Rodbyhavn, so that people will be able to zip across it in ten minutes and scarcely notice that they have moved from one country to another. This new European impulse to blur the boundaries between countries seems a mite misguided to me.

At Rodbyhavn, our frissons spent, we all reboarded the train and rode listlessly through the rest of the afternoon to Copenhagen. Denmark was much neater and emptier than northern Germany had been. There were no factories as there had been in Germany and none of that farmyard clutter of abandoned tractors and rusting implements that you see in Belgium and Holland. Big electricity-generating wind turbines, their three-bladed fans spinning sluggishly, were dotted around the low hillsides and stood in ranks in the shallow coastal bays. It was a pity, I thought with that kind of distant casualness that comes with looking at things that are already sliding from view, that they hadn't made them more attractive like scaled-up Dutch windmills perhaps.

It seemed odd and sad that mankind could for centuries have so effortlessly graced the landscape with structures that seemed made for it little arched bridges and stone farmhouses, churches, windmills, windingroads, hedgerows and now appeared quite unable to do anything to the countryside that wasn't like a slap across the face. These days everything has at best a sleek utility, like the dully practical windmills slipping past with the scenery outside my train window, or else it looks cheap and temporary, like the tin sheds and concrete hangars that pa.s.s for superstores on the edge of every medium-sized town. We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.

We reached Copenhagen's central station at a little after five, but the station tourist office was already closed. Beside it stood a board with the names of thirty or so hotels and alongside each hotel was a small red light to indicate whether it was full or not. About two-thirds of the lights were lit, but there was no map to show where the hotels stood in relation to the station. I considered for a moment jotting down some of the names and addresses, but I didn't altogether trust the board and in any case the addresses were meaningless unless I could find a map of the city.

Perplexed, I turned to find a Danish bag lady clasping my forearm and addressing me in a cheerful babble. These people have an uncanny way of knowing when I hit town. They must have a newsletter or something. We wandered together through the station, I looking distractedly for a map of the city on a wall, she holding onto my arm and sharing demented confidences with me. I suppose we must have looked an odd sight. A businessman stared at us over the top of a newspaper as we wandered past. 'Blind date,' I explained confidentially, but he just kept staring.

I could find no map of the city, so I allowed the lady to accompany me to the front entrance, where I disengaged her grip and gave her some small coins of various nations. She took them and wandered off without a backward glance. I watched her go and wondered why crazy people like train and bus stations so much. It is as if it's their office ('Honey, I'm off to the station to pick through the litter bins and mumble at strangers. See you at five!'). I can never understand why they don't go to the beach or the Alps or someplace more agreeable.

I went to half a dozen hotels in the immediate neighbourhood of the station and they were all full. 'Is there some reason for this?' I asked at one. 'Some convention or national holiday or something?'

'No, it's always like this,' I was a.s.sured.

Am I wrong to find this exasperating? Surely it shouldn't be too much, on a continent that thrives on trade and tourism, to arrange things so that a traveller can arrive in a city in late afternoon and find a room without having to traipse around for hours like a boat person. I mean here I was, ready to spend freely in their hotels and restaurants, subsidize their museums and trams, shower them with foreign exchange and pay their extortionate VAT of twenty- two per cent, all without a quibble, and all I asked in return was a place to lay my head.

Like most things when you are looking for them, hotels were suddenly thin on the ground in Copenhagen. I walked the length of the old part of the city without luck and was about to trudge back to the station to begin again when I came across a hotel by the waterfront called the Sophie Amalienborg. It was large, clean, modern and frightfully expensive, but they could give me a single room for two nights and I took it without hesitation. I had a steamy shower and a change of clothes and hit the streets a new man.

Is there anything, apart from a really good chocolate cream pie and receiving a large, unexpected cheque in the post, to beat finding yourself at large in a foreign city on a fair spring evening, loafing along unfamiliar streets in the long shadows of a lazy sunset, pausing to gaze in shop windows or at some church or lovely square or tranquil stretch of quayside, hesitating at street corners to decide whether that cheerful and homy restaurant you will remember fondly for years is likely to lie down this street or that one? I just love it. I could spend my life arriving each evening in a new city.

You could certainly do worse than Copenhagen. It is not an especially beautiful city, but it's an endlessly appealing one. It is home to one and a half million people a quarter of the Danish population but it has the pace and ambience of a university town. Unlike most great cities, it is refres.h.i.+ngly free of any delusions of self-importance. It has no monuments to an imperial past and little to suggest that it is the capital of a country that once ruled Scandinavia. Other cities put up statues of generals and potentates. In Copenhagen they give you a little mermaid. I think that's swell.

I walked along Nyhavn, a three-block-long street with a ca.n.a.l in the middle filled with tall-masted s.h.i.+ps and lined with narrow, step-gabled seventeenth- and eighteenth-century houses, looking for all the world like a piece of Amsterdam gone astray. The neighbourhood was in fact originally settled by Dutch sailors and remained the haunt of jolly tars until recent times. Even now it has a vaguely raffish air in parts a tattoo parlour and one or two of the sort of dive bars through whose windows you expect to see Popeye and Bluto trading blows but these are fading relics. For years, restaurateurs have been dragging Nyhavn almost forcibly upmarket and most of the places now are yuppie bars and designer restaurants, but very agreeable places for all that, since the Danes don't seem to be the least bit embarra.s.sed about living well, which is after all how it should be.

The whole length of Nyhavn was lined with outdoor tables, with young, blond, gorgeous people drinking, eating and enjoying the unseasonably warm weather. I always wonder in Copenhagen what they do with their old people they must put them in cellars or send them to Arizona because everyone, without exception, is youthful, fresh-scrubbed, healthy, blond and immensely good-looking. You could cast a Pepsi commercial in Copenhagen in fifteen seconds. And they all look so happy.

The Danes are so full of joie de vivre that they practically sweat it. In a corner of Europe where the inhabitants have the most blunted concept of pleasure (in Norway, three people and a bottle of beer is a party; in Sweden the national sport is suicide), the Danes' relaxed att.i.tude to life is not so much refres.h.i.+ng as astonis.h.i.+ng. Do you know how long World War II lasted for Denmark? It was over in a day actually less than a day. Hitler's tanks crossed the border under cover of darkness and had taken control of the country by dawn. As a politician of the time remarked, 'We were captured by telegram.' By evening they were all back in the bars and restaurants.

Copenhagen is also the only city I've ever been in where office girls come out at lunchtime to sunbathe topless in the city parks. This alone earns it my vote for European City of Culture for any year you care to mention.

I dined in a crowded, stylish bas.e.m.e.nt restaurant halfway along Nyhavn. I was the only person who didn't look as if he had just come from the set of Miami Vice. Miami Vice. All the men wore s.h.i.+rts b.u.t.toned to the throat and the women had big earrings and intentionally distressed hair, which they had to shove out of the way each time they went to their plate. Every one of them was beautiful. I felt like Barney Rubble. I kept expecting the manager to come to the table and say, 'Excuse me, sir, but would you mind putting some of this mousse on your hair?' In the event, the staff treated me like an old friend and the food was so superb that I didn't mind parting with the six-inch wad of banknotes that any meal in Copenhagen occasions. All the men wore s.h.i.+rts b.u.t.toned to the throat and the women had big earrings and intentionally distressed hair, which they had to shove out of the way each time they went to their plate. Every one of them was beautiful. I felt like Barney Rubble. I kept expecting the manager to come to the table and say, 'Excuse me, sir, but would you mind putting some of this mousse on your hair?' In the event, the staff treated me like an old friend and the food was so superb that I didn't mind parting with the six-inch wad of banknotes that any meal in Copenhagen occasions.

When I climbed the steps to the street, darkness had fallen and the air had chilled, but people still sat outside at tables, drinking and talking enthusiastically, jackets draped over their shoulders. I crossed Kongens Nytorv, one of the city's princ.i.p.al squares, sleepy and green, pa.s.sed beneath the soft lights of the Hotel D'Angleterre, full of yet more happy diners, and headed up Strget, Copenhagen's main shopping street. Strget is the world's longest pedestrian street. Actually it's five streets that run together for a little over a mile between Kongens Nytorv and the city's other main square, Raadhuspladsen, at the Tivoli end. Every travel article you read about Copenhagen talks rapturously about Strget, but I always feel vaguely disappointed by it. Every time I see it, it seems to have grown a tiny bit seedier. There are still many swish and diverting stores down at the Kongens Nytorv end Georg Jensen for silver, Brdrene Andersen for clothes, Holmegaard for china and gla.s.s but as you pa.s.s the half-way point Strget swiftly deteriorates into tatty gift shops and McDonald's, Burger Kings and other brightly lit temples of grease. The whole thing could do with a lot more in the way of benches and flagstones (it's all patched asphalt now) and even dare I say it? the odd tub of geraniums. It's a shame that in a country as wealthy and design-conscious as Denmark they can't make the whole street the words tumble involuntarily from my lips more picturesque.

Still, it is pleasant to walk from one end of the downtown to the other without encountering cars, and just as you reach the western end, when you think that this is too, too dreary and you really should turn back, you step into the large and colourful Raadhuspladsen, or town hall square. One of the things they do in Europe that has always impressed me is let advertisers put colourful neon signs all over the roofs and top floors of the buildings around their main squares. You don't notice the signs in the daytime because they are so high up, so the buildings preserve that air of stern magnificence appropriate to their function, but when darkness falls and you could do with a little gaiety, the same buildings suddenly light up with bright advertis.e.m.e.nts that illuminate the square and colour the faces of the people below.

I walked across to Tivoli, even though I could see from a distance that it was shut and darkened, as if under dust sheets. A sign on the gate said it wouldn't open for a couple of weeks. As I walked back across the square towards Strget I encountered a small crowd by the town hall and stopped to have a look.

Two police officers, a man and a woman, both young and blond and as gorgeous as everyone else in the city, were talking softly and with sympathy to a boy of about seventeen who had clearly ingested the sort of drugs that turn one's brain into an express elevator to Pluto. Disorientated by this sudden zip through the cosmos, he had apparently stumbled and cracked his head; a trickle of blood ran from above his hairline to his downy cheek. The police officers were wearing the smartest commando-style uniforms I have ever seen navy blue jump suits with lots of zips and velcro pockets and loops holding torches and notebooks and portable telephones and, for all I know, grappling hooks and rocket launchers. They looked as if between them they could handle any contingency, from outbreaks of La.s.sa fever to disarming a nuclear submarine.

And the thing is, this was probably the biggest thing they would have to deal with all evening. The Danes are almost absurdly law-abiding. The most virulent crime in the country is bike theft. In 1982, a year for which I just happen to have the facts at my fingertips, there were six murders in Copenhagen, compared with 205 in Amsterdam, a city of similar size, and 1,688 in New York. The city is so safe that Queen Margarethe used to walk from Amalienborg Palace to the shops every morning to buy flowers and vegetables just like a normal citizen. I once asked a Dane who guarded her in such circ.u.mstances, and he looked at me with surprise and replied, 'Why, we all do,' which I thought was rather sweet.

The police officers helped the boy to his feet and led him to the patrol car. The small crowd dispersed, but I found myself following them, almost involuntarily. I don't know why I was so fascinated, except that I had never seen such gentle police. At the patrol car, I said in English to the female officer, 'Excuse me, what will you do with the boy?'

'We'll take him home,' she said simply, then raised her eyebrows a fraction and added: 'I think he needs his bed.'

I was impressed. I couldn't help thinking of the time I was stopped by police in America, made to stand with my arms and legs spread against a wall and frisked, then taken to a police station and booked because of an unpaid parking ticket. I was about seventeen myself at the time. G.o.d knows what they would have done to me if they had found me in a drugged stupor on a city bench. I suppose I'd be getting out of jail about now. 'Will he be in trouble for this?' I asked.

'With his father, I think so, yes. But not with us. We are all young and crazy sometimes, you know? Good-night. Enjoy your stay in Copenhagen.'

'Good-night,' I said, and with the deepest admiration watched them go.

In the morning I felt like going to some museums. Copenhagen has splendid museums, which are strangely neglected, even by the Danes. I went first to the immense National Museum, opposite Christiansborg Palace, and had it more or less to myself. National museums, especially in small countries, are often feeble affairs department-store mannequins dressed in sixteenth-century peasant costumes and a display case containing six Roman coins found in somebody's back garden. But the Danish National Museum is both vast and richly endowed, and I spent a morning happily wandering through its miles of echoing rooms.

Afterwards I went to the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. Some museums have great treasures but are dull buildings and some have dull treasures but are great buildings, but the Glyptotek succeeds on both counts. It has an outstanding collection of Roman statuary and some of the finest Impressionist paintings to be seen anywhere, but the building itself is a joy light, airy, impeccably decorated, with a warm and tranquil palm court full of gently dozing old people. (So that's where they put them!) But the best museum of all I saved for last the Hirschsprung Collection in stre Anlaeg Park. Everything about it is wonderful. It's a pleasant and gentle stroll from the city centre and stre Anlaeg is the best park in the city, in my experience (which is short but in this case attentive), for seeing secretaries sunning their b.r.e.a.s.t.s, but even without these huge and novel inducements it is worth seeking out because it is such a terrific and little-visited museum. It contains 884 paintings, a.s.sembled over forty years by one man, almost all of them from the nineteenth-century Skagen school of Danish painting, and all packed densely into twenty or so mostly small rooms. The paintings are all concerned with simple themes summer landscapes, friends enjoying a casual dinner, a view of the sea from an open window, a woman at a sink but the effect is simply enchanting, and you come away feeling as if you have spent the afternoon in some kind of marvellous and refres.h.i.+ng ionizer.

Afterwards, my spirits lifted, I had a long, happy walk through the surrounding park, moving methodically from one sunbathing blonde to another, enquiring if they needed any a.s.sistance with their suntan lotion. Actually, that's not true. It wasn't warm enough for sunbathing and in any case it was four in the afternoon and all the secretaries in Copenhagen were tucked away in their dark offices, their lovely b.r.e.a.s.t.s bagged away for at least another day, so I just walked around the park and imagined.

Early in the evening I went for a stroll along the city's curiously uninspiring waterfront: a dull vista of fish-processing factories and industrial cranes. Far away across the still water a s.h.i.+p-repair yard was working late doing something shrill and drastic to a rusted freighter, which defended itself with hideous shrieks and a shower of sparks. I walked as far as the statue of the Little Mermaid perched forlornly but rather prettily on her rock at the harbour's edge, and then strolled around a neighbouring park called Castellet, named for its star-shaped fortress guarding the harbour mouth, before finally stopping for a light and cheapish dinner at a cafe/bistro on Stockholmsgade.

The food was not remarkable, but the beer was good and the service was excellent since I was the only customer in the place. I had only to look up and smile hopefully and a fresh beer would be hustled to me. After a bit I didn't even have to look up. A new bottle would magically appear as the last drop fell from the old one. This was my kind of bistro.

So I sat contentedly for two hours looking at some Danish newspapers that had been left on the table, trying to discern from the ma.s.s of unfamiliar words whether Margaret Thatcher had perchance fallen out of a moving car or World War III had started yet. But planet Earth seemed to be much as I had left it three weeks before, so instead I gazed out of the window at the pa.s.sing traffic and lost myself in those aimless reveries that are the lone traveller's equivalent of a night on the town.

Eventually I rose, paid the enormous bill and tottered a trifle wobbily out into the night. It was a fair hike back to my hotel, but I sustained myself en route by stopping at any place that looked bright and friendly and dispensed beer, of which Copenhagen possesses a gratifying plenitude, and thus pa.s.sed the evening sitting alone in a series of corners, drinking far too many beers, smiling inanely at strangers and dribbling ash down my s.h.i.+rt. Sometime around one in the morning, as I was weaving down Strget, suppressing the urge to break into song, I encountered an Irishman reeling down the street towards me, swearing crazily at anyone who pa.s.sed.

'You f.u.c.king c.u.n.ts!' he screamed at a genteel-looking couple whose pace immediately quickened. 'You s.h.i.+t-head! You great Danish t.u.r.d!' he shouted at a young man who lowered his head and hurried on.

The odd thing was that the Irishman was dressed in a dapper grey suit. He looked like a successful businessman. G.o.d knows what was going on inside his addled head. He caught sight of me, but seemed to recognize me as a fellow drunk and let me pa.s.s with a listless wave of the hand, but immediately perked up to rain abuse on a middle-aged man. 'You're a piece of c.r.a.p for sure, you stupid old t.w.a.t!' he said, to the man's considerable surprise, then added mysteriously: 'And I bet you're staying in a f.u.c.king posh hotel!' I stood with my arms crossed and watched as the Irishman reeled off down the street, shouting abuse at the buildings now, before he lurched abruptly to the left, as if yanked on a long rope, and disappeared down a side street, taking his expletives into the night.

I awoke in the morning feeling as if I had spent the night with my head attached to one of those machines they use to test shock absorbers. I looked at my watch. It was a quarter to ten. I had intended to catch a train to Sweden at half-past, and I had yet to pack and check out. I went to the bathroom to struggle through the morning hygiene and make low death noises, then wandered around the room dealing with personal effects as I chanced upon them a sock went onto my foot, a map was forced into the rucksack, a Big Mac box that I had no recollection of acquiring went into the wastebasket until at last I had a.s.sembled my possessions. I needed coffee the way Dan Quayle needs help with an IQ test.

I arrived at the front desk just in time to take up a position behind twenty-seven Italian visitors who, in that interesting way of the Italians, were all trying to check out at once. This didn't help my fragile mood any. At last the Italians departed, moving across the lobby as if surgically linked, and the last I saw of them they were all trying to go out of the revolving door together. I gave my key to the young woman and waited as the computer hummed for a minute, as if getting up steam, and then abruptly spewed out several feet of paper, which was shorn of its sprocket holes and separated into sixteen sheets, the faintest of which was presented to me for inspection.

I was surprised to see that the bill contained a charge for phone calls. The night before it all seemed so long ago now I had tried to phone home, but all I got was a recording in Danish which I presumed was telling me that the international lines were engaged or that I was dialling wrongly or possibly that I should just go and f.u.c.k myself. In any case, I couldn't get anywhere with it, and after three tries gave up. So I was taken aback to see myself billed for three phone calls. I explained this to the girl.

'Yes,' she said. 'You must pay for any phone calls you try to make, whether or not you are connected.'

'But that's insane.'

She shrugged, as if to say, Maybe it is, maybe it isn't.

'You're telling me,' I said slowly, my head feeling like the gong in a Rank movie, 'that I have to pay for phone calls I didn't make?'

'Yes, that is correct.'

'I didn't use the spare blanket in the cupboard. Do I have to pay you for that, too?' She looked steadily at me, clearly unaware that she was dealing with a person who could tip over the edge into violent insanity at any moment. 'I didn't use the shower cap,' I went on. 'Shall I give you a little something for that? I didn't use one of the bars of soap or the trouser press. This is going to cost me a fortune, isn't it?'

The girl continued to gaze levelly at me, though with a certain noticeable diminishment of goodwill. She had obviously weathered these storms before. 'I am sorry you find these small charges inconvenient, but it is the normal practice in Copenhagen.'

'Well, I think it stinks!' I barked, then caught a glimpse of a seriously demented person in the mirror wild hair, red face, Parkinson-like shakiness and recognized myself. I gave her my credit card, scratched a wild signature on the bill, and with a haughty turn exited, regretting only that I didn't have a cape to sling over my shoulder and an ebony stick with which to scatter the doormen.

I should have gone immediately to a cafe and had two cups of coffee and caught a later train. That would have been the sensible thing to do. Instead, still steaming, I proceeded towards the station at a pace that did my body no good at all, stopping en route at a bank on Strget to cash a traveller's cheque. It was for only $50 a snippet in Scandinavia, mere pocket money until I reached Sweden in the evening and would require some serious cash but for this I was charged the whopping sum of thirty-five kroner, well over ten per cent of the total. I suddenly realized why the Irishman from the night before was swearing at everyone. He had paid one Danish bill too many. 'That's an outrage,' I said, clutching the bank receipt like bad news from a doctor. 'I don't know why I don't just pin money to my jacket and let you people pick it off me!' I shrilled, leaving a row of clerks and customers looking at each other as if to say, What's his problem? Not enough coffee?

And it was in this dim and unfortunate frame of mind that I boarded the morning express to Gothenburg, abused a hapless young conductor for giving me the unwelcome news that it had no buffet car, and sat morosely in a corner, watching the garden-like suburbs of Copenhagen slip past, every nerve ending in my body tingling for caffeine.

11. Gothenburg

On the ferry across the oresund between Denmark and Sweden, I drank a cup of coffee and began to feel human again. I pa.s.sed the time staring out at the slate-grey sea and studying my k.u.mmerly and Frey 'Sudskandinavien' map. Denmark looks like a plate that has been dropped onto a hard floor: it is fractured into a thousand pieces, forming deep bays and scorpion-tail peninsulas and seas within seas. The villages and towns sounded inviting Aeroskobing, Skaerbaek, Holstenbro, the intriguingly specific Middlefart and from dozens of them dotted red lines led out to cosily forlorn islands like Anholt and Endelave and above all Bornholm, adrift in the Baltic; closer to Poland than to Denmark. It was my sudden earnest wish to visit them all. There would never be enough time. There never is in life. There wasn't even time for another cup of coffee.

A reddish-brown train was waiting at Helsingborg to take us on to Gothenburg, 152 miles to the north along the west coast. We travelled through a landscape of low hills, red barns, small towns with mustard-coloured town halls, impenetrable pine forests, scattered lakes dotted with clapboard holiday cottages, jetties, upturned rowing boats. Occasionally the train would swing near the coast and give a glimpse through the trees of a cold sea. After a while rain began to streak the window.

I shared a compartment with a tanned young man, blond as only a Swede can be, in wire-rimmed gla.s.ses and a pony tail, who was returning to Gothenburg from Marrakech, where he had been visiting a girlfriend, as he put it. Actually she was a former girlfriend and he hadn't exactly visited her because upon arriving he discovered she was living with a Moroccan rug merchant she had somehow neglected to mention this in her postcards who had pulled out a scimitar and threatened to send the Swede home with his goolies in a sandwich bag if he didn't clear off instantly. Considering that he had just made a pointless journey of a couple of thousand miles, the young man seemed remarkably equable and spent almost the entire journey sitting cross-legged spooning purple yoghurt into his mouth from an enormous jar and reading a novel by Thomas Mann.

At angelholm we were joined by two more people, a grim-looking older woman all in black who looked as if she hadn't smiled since 1937 and who spent the entire journey watching me as if she had seen my face on a wanted poster, and by a fastidious older man who I guessed to be a recently retired schoolmaster and to whom I took an instant dislike.

The young Swede was sitting in the schoolmaster's reserved seat. Not only did the schoolmaster make him move, but instructed him to transfer all his personal effects from the luggage rack above the seat to the rack on the other side, which takes a particular kind of pettiness, don't you think? The schoolmaster then spent an endless period fussily sorting out his things extracting a folded newspaper and a small bag of plums from his case, arranging the case on the rack, examining the seat minutely for anything unpleasant and giving it a brush with the back of his hand, folding his jacket and his jumper with ritualistic care, adjusting the window in consultation with the lady but without reference to me or the young Swede, getting his case down again for some forgotten item, checking his hankie, readjusting the window. Every time he bent over, his a.s.s bobbed in my face. How I longed for a Smith & Wesson. And every time I looked round there would be that old crone watching me like the Daughter of Death.

And so the morning pa.s.sed.

I fell into one of those drooly, head-lolling dozes that seem to be more and more a feature of the advancing years. When I woke, I discovered that my companions were also snoozing. The schoolmaster was snoring raspingly, his mouth hugely agape. I noticed that my swaying foot had rubbed against him, leaving a dusty mark on his navy trousers. I further discovered, with cautious movements of my foot, that it was possible to extend the mark from just above his knee almost to his ankle, leaving an interesting streak on the trouser leg. In this means I amused myself for some minutes until I turned my head a fraction and discovered that the old lady was watching me. Immediately, I pretended to be asleep, knowing that if she uttered a sound I would have to smother her with my jacket. But she said nothing.

And so the afternoon pa.s.sed.

I hadn't eaten since my snackette supper of the night before and I was so hungry that I would have eaten almost anything, even a plate of my grandmother's famous creamed ham and diced carrots, the only dish in history to have been inspired by vomit. Late in the afternoon, a porter came along with a creaking trolley carrying a coffee urn and snackstuffs, and everyone stirred to a kind of frisky wakefulness and examined the fare keenly. I had twenty-four kroner of Swedish money, which I thought a handsome sum, but it proved sufficient to buy just one hopelessly modest open-faced sandwich, like the bottom half of a hamburger bun with a menopausal piece of lettuce and eight marble-sized meatb.a.l.l.s on top of it. Eating in Sweden is really just a series of heart-breaks.

I bought the sandwich and carefully peeled away the cellophane, but just as I lifted it to my mouth the train lurched violently over some points, making the bottles clatter in the drinks trolley and causing all the meatb.a.l.l.s to jump off the bun, like sailors abandoning a burning s.h.i.+p. I watched with dismay as they hit the floor and bounced to eight dusty oblivions.

I'd have scarcely thought it possible, but the lady in black found a look of even deeper contempt for me. The schoolmaster skittishly slid his feet out of the way, lest a meatball come to rest against his glossy brogues. Only the young Swede and the trolley attendant took a sympathetic interest and pointed helpfully as I gathered up the meatb.a.l.l.s and deposited them in the ashtray. This done, I nibbled bleakly on my piece of lettuce and dry bun and dreamed of being almost anywhere else in the universe. Only another two and a half hours to go, I told myself, and fixed the old lady with a hard stare that I hoped somehow conveyed to her what pleasure, what deep and lasting pleasure, it would give me to haul her off her seat and push her out of the window.

We reached Gothenburg just after six. Rain was belting down, drumming on the pavements and coursing in torrents through the gutters. I sprinted across the open square outside the station, jacket over head, dodging tramcars with split-second if largely inadvertent precision, skirted a large puddle, feinted between two parked cars, head-faked a lamppost and two startled elderly shoppers (once I start running, I can't stop myself from pretending I'm returning a kick-off for the Chicago Bears. It's a compulsion a sort of Tourette's syndrome of the feet), and darted breathless and sodden into the first hotel I came to.

I stood in the lobby, a vertical puddle, wiped the steam from my gla.s.ses with a corner of s.h.i.+rt tail and realized with a touch of horror, as I hooked my gla.s.ses back around my ears, that this was much too grand a place for me. It had potted palms and everything. For a moment I considered bolting, but I noticed that a reptilian young reception clerk was watching me narrowly, as if he thought I might roll up a carpet and try to carry it out under my arm, and I became instantly obstreperous. I was d.a.m.ned if some nineteen-year-old pipsqueak with zits and a clip-on tie was going to make me feel loathsome. I marched to the front desk and enquired the price of a single room for one night. He quoted me the sort of sum that would necessitate a trip to the bank with a wheelbarrow if paid in cash.