After I left school I intended to go to University, but I ended up taking a year off instead.
When I did eventually go to Uni, I ended up leaving after a term. Mostly I regret this, but the amount I regret it is directly proportional to how unhappy I am at the time. And the unhappiest I am is when I've got a job I hate. So I'm okay for at least the next 3 weeks.
During my year off, apart from being the co-creator of the board game Year-off, I did do some other stuff aswell, including going to work in a chemical plant in Duisburg, West Germany (as it was then).
It was hard manual labour, but I got to eat sausages at break time, and I was looked after on the whole by my work colleagues, who were a mixture of Germans, Turks, Poles and other Eastern Europeans.
I lived with a German family, including Horst the father who was quite an angry man, and he was also pretty racist. He was from Berlin and he grew up during and after the Second World War. I got on really well with him at first, but then I invited my mum and brother over to visit and I was showing off a bit at the dinner table and talking to them in English about chocolate spread and I offended him with something I said, and things were never the same after that. We sort of patched it up before I left but things were never really right again between us.
I went over there on the Transline 24 hour bus from Leeds. It didn't go to Duisburg, but it did stop at the ice rink at Krefeld, which was a few miles away. Give him a ring, he said, when I got to Krefeld, and he'd pick me up, or rather his daughter Ellie would.
The bus got to Krefeld at 5 am, and it wasn't until it was disappearing round the corner that I realised I didn't have any change for the payphone. I only had notes and the smallest I had was a 10 Deutschmark note which was worth about £5 then.
It's not the best introduction to living in a foreign country to be hanging around outside an ice rink at 5 in the morning, accosting strangers in broken German trying to find somebody with change for a fiver.
Eventually around 6 someone took pity on me and gave me some change for the phone, and I thanked her and then managed to arrange my lift.
Horst and his family lived in an apartment near the chemical plant in Duisburg (he had 5 children, but only the youngest Nicole was still at home) and I rented a room off them on the floor above. I could see the Rhine out of the window. I had my own sink and toilet but a lot of the time they invited me downstairs for meals and let me use their bathroom.
For 3 months I lived there and all I had was what I had been able to take in a suitcase. Some clothes, a copy of Wandering by Hermann Hesse, a Walkman and a few cassettes. Back home, my brother had taken the bedroom that I'd vacated and what possessions I'd left behind would probably have fitted into a shoebox.
Horst lent me a bike, which I used sometimes, but mostly I just walked everywhere. I got nearly all my meals at the works canteen or at Macdonalds, I did a heavy manual job, lifting sacks of powder onto palettes and most days I went into the centre of Duisburg, which was about a 3 mile walk each way.
On my days off, I got the train to other cities, like Hannover, Dusseldorf and Essen and I just walked around there for hours on end. I didn't buy maps, I just walked around and found things out by looking. In the 3 months I was away I lost a stone and a half in weight, and when I got back I was the thinnest I've ever been.
On my travels I met a beautiful girl from Dortmund called Britta Biernoth who worked in the travel agents in Duisburg, and by a process of hanging around in her shop asking pointless travel questions that I didn't really want to know the answers to, I got to know her well enough to ask her out for coffee. It was Britta who stopped me taking sugar in tea and I always remember her surname because it means 'the necessity of beer'. I used to meet her on my days off and sometimes we'd go out for lunch, and one day I went to Dortmund with her to look at Leeds Square (I'd been to Dortmund Square in Leeds and I wanted to match up the two). It wasn't a romance though. She was a few years older than me and she had no shortage of male admirers, most of whom were at least 6 foot 5 and drove Porsches or bought her diamond earrings, but we got on pretty well. Come to think of it, the guy with the Porsche might have bought himself the diamond earring, I can't remember now.
When I left Germany after the 3 months, I stayed at her parents' house in Dortmund the night before, and caught the bus home from there. Her mum gave me a lift to the bus station and on the way pointed out all the buildings that had been newly built after the war because the Allied bombing had destroyed the ones that were there before.
Apart from being a bit lonely while I was there, I was pretty happy on the whole, and being there with only what I could put in a suitcase for 3 months made me realise how little stuff we actually need.
There's some stuff I like having, like plates and bikes and cups and forks and shoes and things to sit on, but I only like having stuff that gets used regularly. I can't stand keeping things that never see the light of day. Which is why I'm always trying to throw stuff I don't use away. It's tricky living with other people though, because sometimes I want to throw their stuff away as well.
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