Student inter-railing and a catalogue of cock ups

This is a true story.

In 1990, four of us students - myself, Phil, Geoff and Ziggy - set out to spend a month travelling from one European city to another, back-packing with an inter-rail train ticket and an appetite for culture and adventure.  The route was planned out in advance and we expected to visit about 12 cities and travel through 9 countries in 30 days.  What we didn't plan for was a 5th traveller, a stealthy stowaway who ripped the arse out of our naïve optimism and orchestrated a series of mishaps that meant that by the 11th day - following ten consecutive days of maintaining a perfect 100% score on the 'Crap-scale' - we admitted defeat and headed home.

That gate-crasher was Mr Cock-Up and (summarising from a diary I kept at the time) this is what the little bastard did to us...

Sunday 2nd September - Departure
We met at Liverpool St station with a couple of hours to kill before our train departed for the port of Harwich and as you'd expect from 4 young lads about to go on holiday, we fancied a beer.  Pubs didn't open in the City on Sunday afternoons, so after an aimless walkabout, the drinking was postponed until we boarded the overnight ferry to Holland.

Monday 3rd September - Amsterdam
At about 3am, after far too many lagers and a liqueur called Underberg, we slept on the floor (all seats having been nabbed by that point).  I threw up before disembarking, then threw up again on the train from the port to Amsterdam.  Geoff left his shoes on the train, having changed into his moccasins (or kebab shoes) for comfort, and had to run along the platform to get back on and find them.  We didn't feel up to walking much after that heavy night, so we had a boat tour around the canals, which proved very long and very dull.  Following this we had McDonald's for lunch and spent the afternoon in the Irish Pub (Cokes for me, due to the unsettling effects of the 'Chunderberg'), made another McDonald's trip for dinner and then boarded an overnight train to Berlin, securing a compartment to ourselves with fold down seats that created a big bed with lots of space in which to sleep...

Tuesday 4th September - Berlin
But at 2am, the train broke down and we had to get off and board another, which seemed to have no empty compartments, so we squeezed into the narrow bit of corridor by the bogs and tried to sleep here.  A couple of hours later, Geoff found us 4 empty seats in a compartment, so we settled here to sleep, but were woken by the ticket inspector at the border between West and East Germany, who informed us that our Inter-Rail tickets were not valid in the East.  We had to pay, but didn't have enough in Marks.  The inspector spoke no English and confusion ensued.  In the end, he let us stay on board having paid what we could.
Disembarking in Berlin, a beggar approached us with his hands behind his back.  He must have been concealing a CS gas cylinder, because once he'd walked off we started to suffer from stinging eyes and fits of coughing.
We booked into a cheap hotel, the Pension Krone, and as I planned out what sights to see that afternoon, each of the others fell asleep, before I too followed, thanks to the disturbed nature of the previous night.
When we awoke at 5pm, we decided to postpone sight-seeing until the next day and instead found the Irish Pub, where we spent the evening.

Wednesday 5th September - Berlin (2)
At breakfast, we asked Geoff if he would order for us, as he was the only one with O-level German.
'Ask for 4 coffees, Geoff' one of us said.
'4 coffees please,' Geoff asked the woman serving us.
'IN GERMAN, GEOFF!' we reminded him.
Our walking tour of the city was done beneath a curtain of rain.  The Brandenburg Gate was concealed by scaffolding and was minus its Victory statue.  At least the Wall and the Reichstag were interesting.
We finished the day in McDonald's and the Irish Pub.

Thursday 6th September - Munich
The overnight train to Munich was hot and cramped, as we shared a couchette with 2 other people and I got very little sleep, almost cracking up at times.  In Munich, it took ages to find the Youth Hostel we'd planned to stay in, mainly because we got off at the wrong U-bahn station and we were misdirected by any locals that we asked.  When we found it, we had to queue for 2 hours 45 mins to check in.
We did some sight-seeing that afternoon and in the evening, as we sat on the pavement outside the hostel, I got some obvious eye-contact from a nice German girl, who I attempted to chat-up using Geoff as an interpreter.  (All he could really ask her, though, was how many brothers, sisters and pets she had... I don't think he got a grade A in his O' Level).  It seemed to be going well, until Phil let go an enormous fart, which caused her to walk off.

Friday 7th September - Munich (2) and Salzburg
Geoff lost his locker key and had to pay a fine.  Then he found it.
We spent the morning at Dacau Concentration Camp and got on a train to Salzburg that afternoon.  Thinking we had secured our own compartment, we celebrated our luck, but then found out that only the first 3 carriages were crossing the border into Austria.  We were in the last carriage of about 20.  We had to run down the platform, heavy rucksacks threatening to send us toppling over.
We made it just in time and after a short journey, disembarked in a rain-sodden Salzburg and checked into the Youth Hostel.
As Phil took a shower, a message came over the Tannoy asking him to come to reception.  Someone had handed in his wallet, but not before whoever had taken it had stolen the money he had in it.
We walked around the city that evening, then had a proper night's sleep.

Saturday 8th September - Vienna
We took a train to Vienna in the morning, checked into a hotel and walked around a few sights.  In the rain, again.  We had McDonald's for dinner and bought some beer to drink in our room that evening.

Sunday 9th September - Budapest
Our luck seemed to be changing.  We had no problems getting the train to Budapest the next morning and secured accommodation in private residences without needing to queue much at all.  These were flats in tower blocks in the suburbs. The one in which Geoff and I stayed was home to a little old woman who spoke no English and merely pointed to our bedroom and gave us keys to the flat.
We took a cab back in to the city.  (The driver who had taken us out to the tower blocks had hit another car and driven off and was generally skidding and wobbling everywhere in his rickety Skoda.  This one was a bit kamikaze as well.) We had McDonald's for dinner (very cheap in Hungary in those days) and then wandered around looking for a bar.  Everywhere we tried ripped us off, charging stupidly high prices for warm, shit-tasting lager.  In the end, we just wandered around in a futile attempt to find a decent bar, before giving up and getting a cab back to the flats.
Geoff and I found that our door key wouldn't work.  As we tried to force it to turn, the door was opened by the occupant, a little old woman who spoke no English; but not 'our' little old woman.  We had the right number flat, but the wrong block.  God knows what she thought as we apologised and made a quick, embarrassed exit, hoping she wouldn't call the police.

Monday 10th September - Budapest (2)
After a McDonald's breakfast, we had a whole day of sight-seeing, untroubled for once by any rain. Buoyed by the prospect of a more sustained change in fortune, we planned a proper boys' night out.
We discovered Budapest's Moulin Rouge.  It cost a very steep £7 to get in and we weren't allowed beer and instead they demanded that we order what they called a 'Champagne cocktail' (also £6) as part of the deal.  It was actually rum and coke.  They sat us at the table furthest from the stage.  There was only one other customer and he had a table at the front. The bouncers stood near us and glared.  A woman came out on stage, took her top off and wiggled her boobs about to Rick Astley's 'Never Gonna Give You Up.'
We finished out cocktails and left, finding as an alternative, the John Bull (English) pub.  Here we reflected on how much money we had spent so far (far too much) and how much we had left for the next 20 days (far too little).  And we ruminated on how luck seemed to be going against us.

Tuesday 11th September - Budapest (3)
We met Ziggy and Phil in their flat in the tower block next to ours, only to discover that their key was stuck in the lock and their own little old woman had gone out.  So they couldn't leave the flat.  We managed to contact a warden for the flats, who came to fix the problem by removing the lock from the door and disappearing (presumably to buy a new lock).  In his absence, their little old woman returned, saw the door with no lock and started shouting at us all.  The warden returned and Ziggy and Phil were charged the cost of the new lock and labour.  We left for town at 12.45pm.
The day was again dominated by McDonald's (2 visits) and the John Bull pub and also wasting time waiting around for Ziggy who had managed to chat up a Danish girl.  (As we waited, a man tried to sell us prostitutes).
Our next intended destination was Athens, via a 31-hour train journey through Yugoslavia.  We decided not to risk it, given our constant misfortunes, so instead I got to work that night looking at train times to Italy, which would have been the next stop after Athens.

Wednesday 12th September - Budapest (4)
Geoff and I were woken by a window cleaner entering our room, throwing the window wide open (letting in the cold) and proceeding to do his job despite us lying in bed.
We had no motivation for sight-seeing and following brunch in McDonald's we sat in the John Bull pub to plan travelling to Italy.  Frustratingly, there was no easy route or timings that would suit us.  It looked like we'd have to go back to Vienna first.
I said to the other three, 'There are two trains leaving Budapest at 4.40pm this afternoon.  One goes to Vienna.  The other takes us back to London.'

Thursday 13th September - A train
It was a typically uncomfortable night again.  A couchette with 6 seats collapsing into one bed and the four of us sharing with two others, cramped, hot and disturbed by snoring and someone else's feet in our faces.  We hadn't planned for food and from 4.40 the previous day in Budapest until we were on a ferry to Dover at 4pm the next day, we ate nothing.  But at least we were nearly home.
The white cliffs looked so welcoming.  We said goodbye to Geoff when we landed, as he lived in Kent.  And we said good bye to Mr Cock Up. Or perhaps it was a moderately irate, 'Fuck off!'

That Bloody Film Made Me Do It

Now, THAT'S a good idea....

Violet Beauregarde claims that she's been chewing the same piece of gum for months, all day long, except at meal times, when she sticks it behind her ear. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory proved influential in that it gave me an idea of how to get into the Guinness Book of World Records without much effort or talent.  I saw myself being interviewed by Roy Castle and Norris McWhirter on Record Breakers.  Roy would be so impressed by how many months I'd chewed the same piece of gum for, that he'd celebrate my achievement by hitting the highest note on his trumpet, causing his arse cheeks to clench so tightly that you'd be hard pressed to slide a credit card between them (Billy Connolly's joke, not mine).

I started my chewing marathon one afternoon and come dinner-time, I secreted it behind my ear.  But this was about 1978 and like most 8 year olds I already had a large quantity of hair behind my ear, to which the gum stuck, requiring me to cut it out with scissors, thus rendering the gum thenceforth unchewable, my hair-cut somewhat lop-sided and my record-breaking ambitions up shit creek.

There was a lot of paper-talk in the 80s and 90s about how violent films were responsible for making children do violent things.  You actually needed to be strongly disposed towards violence in the first place, of course, in which case (regardless of what films you watched) you'd still carry out violence against others.  Films merely compensate for a lack of imagination, by giving you ideas of HOW to do things you were likely to do anyway.  I was likely to do the sort of stupid shit that all kids do and films usually gave me ideas on how to do it.

When you've got younger siblings, then OBVIOUSLY you want to scare them senseless whenever possible.  The Omen was pretty bloody scary, more so given that we were brought up Catholic and therefore believed in the feasibility of the Devil walking the Earth incarnate in human form.  Consequently, all that needed to be done to make my brother shit his pants was to turn the lights off and shout, 'Damien!'  If this wasn't terrifying enough, we watched Salem's Lot later on, and agreed that the scariest thing we'd ever seen was when a dead child returned as a vampire to haunt his brother by floating outside his bedroom window and tapping on it.  Needless to say, the shouting of 'Face at the window!' when someone was alone in a room, prompted an even more traumatic soiling of underwear.  But imagine the extent to which fear flew out the back end of my brother when I hid just outside the bedroom, perched on the coal-shed roof, and then tapped on the window after he'd been inside alone for 5 minutes.

Some film-inspired actions can fortunately be seen as innocuous and merely daft, rather than psychologically traumatising.  Rocky inspired many children of the 70s and 80s to want to box, but it also caused me to drink a glass full of raw eggs.  It was like swallowing snot.  That in itself was bearable in small amounts, because in the 70s every kid was snotty and so had to swallow back the occasional teaspoonful of sloppy mucus, but a whole glass of it.... grim!

Films didn't just make you do daft or nasty things, they could also shape your outlook on life.  Every time I see a new-born baby with a full head of hair I think of the babies in both The Omen and Rocky II, in both cases the child in question looked like it had been in utero for about 5 years and had come out with not just a bushy busby of black hair, but most probably a full set of teeth and politically conservative views that most of us don't have until middle age.  I always balk at seeing babies with full heads of hair, thanks to those films. (Apologies to any readers whose own children had hairy heads, I'm sure they were much less werewolfy eventually).

Sometimes you don't realise how much one particular film shapes your daily existence for years and years afterwards.  Everyone enjoys allowing iconic lines from a film to seep into their common parlance, as they subconsciously quote lines as part of their usual vernacular.  Often, these phrases are well known and instantly recognisable - maybe from Casablanca, The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars or Pulp Fiction. In my case, it's the film version of Please Sir!  About 10% of all exchanges with my wife comprise of quotes from this 1971 TV spin-off film.  Especially the less politically correct lines.

Finally, to conclude... Er… there's nothing to conclude.  Films just make you do daft shit.