1983 - Avoiding Swingball in the English Garden

After the trip to Munich in 1983 I wrote a book about the trip.  It was only an exercise book with about 32 pages so it was hardly War and Peace, but it had a poem in it.  The whole book is of course lost now, and if it's ever found I doubt The Time Team members of the future will be knocking each other out to get their hands on it, but I've had a go at recreating the poem.  Some of it rhymes and some of it totally doesn't but I haven't got hours to sit around trying to shoehorn phrases into it that rhyme with Badminton and the word incriminating, so just pretend it's one of those modern poems that don't rhyme because the person who wrote it is so clever it doesn't need to.


Avoiding  Swingball in the English Garden

In 83 we went to Germany
but it wasn’t football and it wasn’t a war

There weren’t any tanks and there weren’t any trenches
We sat on the grass, there weren’t any benches

The most dangerous thing we faced all trip
Was a naked German with his designs on a game of Badminton

As we sat on the grass and politely declined
His penis swung dangerously near
We made sure we reclined. 
Bloody hell it’s supposed to be badminton not swing ball
I didn’t yell after him.

We got to see German girls breasts and underarm hair
The English kept their tops on, it wasn’t fair

We used to go swimming in the English Garden
The water was cold, I lost my trunks
I was fully naked but no-one saw
because my penis had shrunk

(Except Helen Winn, but she would have needed an electron microscope to see anything incriminating.)

I got lost going to see Tootsie,
the police couldn’t find me
A young English idiot in a stripey top
asking for directions in broken German
It should have been easy.

We saw the castle from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
But I haven’t got any pictures
Because I mostly photographed girls then
(And also  I’d have had to be miles away to get the whole castle in
and I only had a crap disc camera and it wasn’t even any good at photographing stuff close up.)

There was one girl in particular
She was called Pamela
I liked her but she liked Darren more
So I had a lemon ice cream
To commiserate myself with.

It was okay in the end
Because I was friends with Darren too
And we went out for a picnic together

I proved I could handle rejection like a man,
a skill I would need a lot in later life
Not just with girls but with interviews.

I was always trying to be funny then
Just like I do now
Sid was there
he was trying to be funnier
But he cheated by taking a Monty Python book
I had to make my own stuff up

After we came back we mostly lost touch
But then we waited 25 years and they invented
Social networking.

So I got to reminisce about 83
With Pamela and with others

About being thinner
And about going to Germany
Not for football, and not for a war
Where there weren’t any trenches,
And there weren’t any benches
And there weren’t any tanks, except for the memories.