Trip to Berlin - July 24th/27th 2006.
Day one.
Music Clique and spinach pasties.
My lad, Tony, decided that I could have as my birthday gift, a trip to
anywhere. This trip was a long time in planning. I contacted a number of my
fellow Stokie friends and asked them if they would like to be involved. Those
friends were Mark Eltringham, his brother Lee, and Stephen 'Winger' Foster (the author of
'She Stood There Laughing' and
other works). That would make five of us with me
and Tony. At first, I decided that a trip to Iceland would be the thing but
after some research, I decided against it because of cost. Anyhow, after some
debate, we decided on Berlin. It turned out to be a great choice. Both Mark and
Lee spent two years as kids in Berlin when their dad was stationed there with
the British forces during the time of the Cold War. This year was Lee's 40th
birthday. Both he and Mark had decided to celebrate it by re-visiting the place
of their childhood. It was great that we could amalgamate the two projects.
This was the first time Lee had been back to Germany since he was a kid. Mark,
apart from the two years he spent at school there as a kid, took one of his
degrees at a university in Muenster in the late 1980s and also spent six months
working in
So, I arranged the flights with Ryanair (bring your own parachute and helmet) and Mark arranged the accommodation at the Hotel Berlin - A Clarion Hotel on the Luetzowplatz near the centre of the city - a great choice of hotel. All Winger had to do was turn up on time. He did....and wasn't happy that we made him wait by making a detour to The Navigation Inn at Shardlow on our way to Nottingham East Midlands Airport. We enjoyed a late evening meal and a pint and Winger had a chocolate bar. Our flight was a late one and we landed at Schonefeld at just after ten at night. We jumped into a taxi and told the driver to take us to the Hotel Berlin. I reckon the guy was related to Michael Schumacher. There wasn't much difference between flying with Ryanair and sitting in his taxi flying through the streets of outer Berlin. I was glad to get out in one piece.
The weather forecast for our 4 days was for hot and sunny weather. It turned out even hotter than we suspected. Thankfully, we returned a day before it reached 102 degrees in the shade!
We checked in and settled in the bar for a drink or two. (This was to become our routine at the end of each day.) It was here that the 'music clique' was born. These guys are all more than twenty years younger than me and their music scene is the 80's. Lee is an anorak on 80's music! The hotel background music was.....guess?.....80's music! All I could get out of them for the next hour or so was arguments about who first recorded this and what position in the charts so-and-so reached. It could have all been so boring had I not had such affection for these guys....nothing queer mind!
Perhaps its time to introduce you to the 'music clique'.
L to R...my lad Tony, Mark, (Mark is a proper writer who knows stuff. He earns a bloody fortune cus he knows where to put commas and that sort of thing) Winger (the famous author), and Lee (the anorak). Tony and Lee are honest working class lads and the other two are middle class gayers. All I could add to the debate was Del Shannon. It did have Winger pondering a title of Shannon's hits but otherwise I was pretty much ignored as an irrelevance. We retired to our rooms around 1 am. Winger's partner, Trezza Azzopardi, had packed him a couple of spinach pasties for a late night snack. He wouldn't share them....the mean sod!
The trip had started well.
Neunundneunzig rote Ballons! Jezus wept!