Exhausted, I can do little more than dribble in front of Facebook this morning. Yet it seems to be in Swedish, or possibly Finnish. Staring at the screen, utterly fogged, I’m on the verge of despair. Help!

As if by magic, a British Airways stewardess rings me. A honeyed word, and she has fixed it. The button, should you ever face this difficulty after a foreign jaunt, is in the bottom left hand corner. The choices for English, incidentally, are UK, US or Pirate. Try the latter, and see if your PC metamorphoses into a parrot and says, ‘pieces of eight.’

As usual, there’s no time for tomfoolery, though; the Old Boiler has booked me for lunch. Oh dear, I’m asked what I think of her new fringe. Now this is a trick question, right? Like, ‘does my bum look big in this?’

My answer, however, can’t be too hasty in case I sound dismissive and insincere. I stroke my chin a couple of times and ask her to swivel her neck before admitting she looks rather lovely.

In fact she looks rather more lovely than I’m comfortable with now that we’ve “mutually” decided to cut out the sex..

Remember Swedish Anna and Carl? All you need to know is that they have a summerhouse on the west coast of Sweden. They are in it, and I am passing.

Today’s events, then, take place at a delightful wooden getaway near Halmstad, meaning “straw town”. Like most of southern Sweden, Carl tells me, it used to be Danish.

It is midsummer weekend, a big holiday up here, and people are drinking – heavily. And Carl is breathalysed by the police at an impromptu roadblock. It’s an inconvenience, but nothing for an upstanding Swede like him to worry about; not a thimbleful has passed his lips yet.

But he has forgotten his driving licence. Oh, tut tut, here we go. Anna is just preparing to bribe the officer with a slice of salmon torte, when we are released from the roadside; it seems that there are bigger, drunker fish to fry over this festive period.

Physics Or Chemistry

Celebrating our escape from the vice-like clutches of the law, a drop of champagne is on the programme. Inside the holiday cottage, an upended teaspoon is languishing in a bottle’s neck. ‘Keeps the bubbles in,’ says Anna. Does it? But a teaspoon handle can’t be the tightest of hermetic seals, surely.

This is the sort of thing one ought to be taught in school physics classes; information like this is simply vital for everyday survival in real life. And, in chemistry, perhaps we could learn how to make champagne, instead of yawning through all that bally Brownian Motion or whatever it was called. I mean to say, having mastered reading and writing by the age of four, I’m wondering if I learnt anything at school.

Biology is Better

 

Perhaps I learnt things and then promptly forgot them. Yes, that sounds more soothing, as though ten years wasn’t spent only playing trombones while Physical Education teachers wondered why I wasn’t playing rugger on frozen playing fields.

Now, if I were to oversee children’s tuition, the Davies curriculum wouldn’t centre so much on daft molecules you can’t even see, but on more weighty subjects like retaining a decent Champagne’s bubbles.

Carl lights the barbecue as the sun continues to shine. There is even Earl Grey in the cupboard…and a croquet set. Aha, now we’re talking. As the hoops are planted, I knowledgeably talk of rackets, or bats or whackers, or whatever the term is.  Now: the rules.

It can’t be right to aim at another ball, and then thwack it out the way, can it? It certainly ameliorates the sport, but surely this defeats any sportsmanship and prowess. Not that prowess is featuring a great deal – we wouldn’t know a continuation stroke from a roqueted ball.

Cool Pants

The game rapidly descends into a free-for-all, each of us spending time in the bushes. Carl exposes some very trendy underwear as a result, and Anna explains his choice of the “Bjorn” label.

‘Calvin Klein are no good. They go up his bum,’ she says. ‘Gives him a wedgie.’ Now, given that the rules are in dispute, and the lawn is uneven, we’ll overlook my failing to make the first hoop. I amicably call it a draw.

‘You can’t come to Halmstad without going swimming,’ Carl tells me. ‘It’s not that cold.’ Hmm, I think you’ll find it is, Carl; the wind is hardly slight, and kite-surfers are out. And we’re up north, if you hadn’t noticed. ‘You didn’t cramp yesterday, though, did you dear,’ chirps Anna, reiterating my trepidation. She experiments with the silhouette photo technique, taking a picture straight into the sun, as we head into the briny depths.

The sea is thirteen degrees. My heart doesn’t actually stop but, apart from diving off a pier in the Shetland Islands at a vulnerable age, this is the coldest and shortest swim I’ve ever had. When we get out,

Carl hops about awkwardly with a towel, keeping his willy hidden from public view. He could almost be English, you know. But isn’t the exercise rather academic? After water that cold, there won’t be a great deal to see..

I was all set to do a piece on Gothenburg’s archipelago today. But Dutch Marco photographs me, chats a bit, and sets me thinking along other lines. ‘I saw a security girl in a deckchair,’ he says. ‘But I didn’t see the chair any more.’ Obesity, it seems, has even reached Sweden.

So, I’m abandoning the nearby islands and concentrating on a pertinent world issue: porkers. Yes, I’m for the high jump from the politically correct – yet again – but you know I never mean any offence.

We’re not talking about figures like Namibian, by the way – on the cusp of letting himself go; I mean real bloaters. His tummy is simply middle-aged spread, the merest hint of a paunch. David’s second driver, on the other hand, needs to cut down a bit.

Confectionery

The “pic ‘n’ mix king”, as this chap is now dubbed, is unable to walk and talk simultaneously. Deplorably breathless, he has either to stop, or let another party hog the dialogue. This is a good place to reintroduce Gentleman Steve, actually; we haven’t had any of his quotes for a while. Loquacious as ever, he throws in his tuppence worth on the subject.

‘Over-active thyroid?’ he snorts. ‘More like an over-active knife and fork.’ Bear with me; we shall return to safer, family topics – sex and drugs, for example – in the fullness of time.

Steve then puts the final nail in the coffin, quoting his Aunt Elspeth. ‘There weren’t any fat people in Auschwitz, you know.’ Ouch! Blimey Steve, are you allowed to say things like that?

Diet? Exercise?

Erm, where am I going with this? Advocating a balanced diet and a spot of exercise, that’s where. It’s not always that cut and dried, though, is it?

Sedentary jobs – long-distance lorry driving, for example, will never be the key to longevity – and crap food are partly to blame, I suppose. But you know when you overeat at Christmas?

Yes, that last kilogram of Quality Street on Boxing Day that overloads the pancreas. Well, when all the relatives finally bugger off, and your trouser button flies off, you diet, don’t you? Or if it’s a particularly harsh winter, perhaps you wait until spring. Either way, Plan “Weightwatchers” is in operation by May – to look yummy for the mating season.

I wonder what goes wrong, then, in some cases?

‘That’s the building,’ says Gentleman Steve. ‘Look, no satellite dishes.’ He grins knowledgeably. ‘Or if it’s not that one, it’s somewhere else in Marseille.’

He looks less eminent now, but his ramblings have been accurate thus far. ‘No, I have it on good authority. It’s definitely that one.’ As it turns out, it isn’t.

We’re looking for Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation, nicknamed “House of the Crazy”, and it isn’t opposite the stadium as first thought. Steve has got the right street though; a fifteen-minute walk brings us to a housing slab, raised above ground on sculpted legs.

‘Ah, the iconic street in the sky,’ he says. In 1947-52, to combat post-war overcrowding, a scheme to build upwards was introduced.

To be honest, it’s an anticlimax. Unless you’re an architect, the building won’t send shivers down your spine – you know, the sort of shivers that emanate from having your earlobe nibbled, or inner thigh stroked. But for some reason, I’m drawn to these things.

I guess it’s like knowing that a revolutionary hydrogen engine is on display nearby; it may be as dull as dishwater to the non-motoring enthusiast, but I feel I ought to make the effort to see it.

Anyway, that’s it for the south of France. I haven’t had time to visit my manicurist in St Tropez, yet we’re heading once again up to Paris. Maybe I could finally get some washing done there?..

Peter and I are discussing Cambodia this morning – how we love the Mekong, and the magnificence of the Angkor complex there.

But my stomach is rumbling, and I strongly suggest we think about breakfast. Clutching a Nikon camera and my email address, he agrees…but hardly leaps into action.

Peter is unstoppably mid-rant and is bearing the expression of a man cheesed to the back teeth with language; he is cocking a snook at the word “ongoing”, regarding it as an Americanism. ‘Why can’t people say “continuing”, as they should?’ he asks loftily. Do let me know if I become as pedantic as this, will you?

Steering him into the kitchen ought to get breakfast off the ground, I think naively, but the unadulterated jabber continues; he nonchalantly leans on the sink, with not so much as a kettle boiling in the background. Why can’t men multi-task? I wonder fleetingly.

‘We’ve run out of teabags so it’ll have to be a blend of Darjeeling and Earl Grey,’ he apologises. After living in Deutschland for nearly thirty years, though, I’m not convinced that Peter knows what he’s doing on the tea front any more, and so I opt for coffee.

Monika, meanwhile, has finished her ablutions, and puts out an array of jams, meats and cheeses. ‘Peter forgot to prepare bread,’ she says, looking over her glasses in a mildly reprimanding manner.

Fifteen minutes or so has now passed since there was talk of coffee. ‘Shit, I forgot to put the water in,’ realises Peter, raising one hand to his forehead. ‘Erm, shall we all have an egg?’ Great Scott, this is exhausting.

Leaping out of the door at 11.20 sharp, Peter guides me on a delightful walking tour of Bonn, pointing out where he married one of his wives, and launching into a digression about London air shelters in World War Two.

He is a fascinating chap and, before taking me to Beethoven’s birthplace, fills me in on his 25 years as a professional photographer. After two-and-a-half decades, however, he admits losing his touch, or ‘going off the boil’ as he puts it. He is the original intrepid reporter, though, a character filling me with inspiration.

‘They sent me to cover The Golan Heights in the 70s,’ he begins, as we stroll through this pleasant city on the banks of the River Rhine. ‘I was hoping to go home after that,’ he continues, ‘but they told me to hang around in Israel because Nixon was coming.’

‘I covered that, looked forward to seeing the kids, then I got sent to Lisbon for The Revolution.’ Wow, those are some commissions, but it sounds like he was in the same boat as me; just when I think I’m finishing a tour, another one starts.

Wives, girlfriends and families get put on hold. Remind me I should get out of the industry, won’t you, if I’m still bumbling about in rock and roll trucks in a few years.

As a photographer, Peter has covered royal tours as well. Yet looking at his pictures of a party we were at together three years ago, I notice he’s cut off my head in one of the photos. Hmm.. Well, he did say he’d gone off the boil.

So, to Beethoven – the big draw in Bonn. Ludwig was born in 1770, in Bonnegasse, a little street in the centre of town, and his old house is now a museum. Though precociously dashing off sonatas at the age of twelve, the poor devil had developed hearing problems by the age of 30. There is a selection of his crude ear trumpets upstairs.

Basset horns, an organ keyboard and scrawled manuscripts also fill the rooms. ‘The floorboards in here are the noisiest I’ve ever heard,’ says Peter as we enter. ‘I think that’s what made him deaf.’..

At 11am, as I am beginning to despair, Crazy Sandra materialises – for an adwenture (sic). Patricia, her blonde pal, is in tow.

Pat is also crazy because not only does she go to far too many Metallica concerts, but she is also a paid-up member of their fan club. I don’t know what that entails but it’s probably fairly crazy.

A marathon has wreaked havoc on the roads today and so the girls are late, relying on an unfamiliar public transport system. We look at each other helplessly, thinking about where we could go. Ah, that wonderful tool, the internet, supplies the answer.

Since the death of the coal and steel industries in the Ruhr Valley, Gelsenkirchen is now making waves as the centre of Germany’s solar industry. That’s a potential scoop; we’re off to the Pholtovoltaic Information Centre.

The girls lead off decisively, boarding a tram back to Crazy Sandra’s car. I think of querying their choice of tram, sensing that it is heading north, not south. ‘Barn, we are wrong,’ they admit a little later. Yes, I know.

What is worse is that it’s nearly lunchtime now, and there isn’t a sandwich vendor in sight – the situation looks decidedly unpleasant. After a good hour of embarking and alighting of trams, we pass the Veltins Arena – our starting point.

This marathon is ruining everything; Crazy Sandra is wrestling with the wheel, thwarted at every junction by plastic barricades. The spaznav is going beserk. Exhausted from three-point turns, and foiled yet again by a closed road, she pulls into a carpark full of interesting cars, to turn around.

Stepping out to take a photograph, I find that we are, in fact, at a tourist attraction: the Zollverein coking plant.

Beggars can’t be choosers; intrepid reporters must remain flexible and spontaneous. We’ve stumbled into the neighbouring district of Essen now, and this is a World Heritage site, built in 1958.

Extended in the ’70s, it became one of the largest and most modern coking plants in Europe. Sounds riveting.

Rather than bore you with the coal to coke process, I shall instead recount the girls’ joint translation from the information board outside, sending them into peals of giggles.

‘Er, the female frog when she met the man frog. They have to met before the small sea [she means ‘pond’], then the man frog has to jump on the female frog. They will not have sex before the sea. She carry him, and then they have sex. Yes, Barn – look, it is written there.’ Rightho…

You remember how Germans amalgamate words? Well, try this for size: the Volkerschlachtdenkmal Monument, in Leipzig.

Fancy asking directions for this mouthful while travelling by bicycle. You’d get as far as Volkersch, then choke and have to apologise for covering somebody in spittle.

Fortunately, it is also known as the Monument to the Battle of the Nations, and it is Europe’s largest monument at that.

In 1898, the first turf was dug and 82,000 cubic metres of earth were removed for the foundations – they alone took five years to complete. Why was it built? To commemorate the Battle of the Nations, obviously.

In 1813, Napoleon was given a sound thrashing at last; Russians, Prussians, Austrians and Swedes fought the biggest battle EVER in world history – it involved 500,000 soldiers and marked the decisive turning point in the war of liberation from Napoleonic rule. There is an excellent view from the top.

Cycling back into the city, I make a beeline for Coffee Baum, one of the oldest coffee houses in the world – apparently, Cafe Procope in Paris pips it at the post. The cafe is described as a ‘coffee temple’, and has been in operation since the first half of the eighteenth century, a period when Leipzig was Germany’s biggest producer of coffee grinders.

Coffee, the last gift of culture from the Orient, came to Europe via Arabia – though the origins of how the Arabs got it are a bit sketchy.

When coffee did arrive, however, the Muslims went mad for it, welcoming a non-alcoholic stimulant with open arms. Thus, in the mid-sixteenth century, the coffee house, or ‘tavern without wine‘, was born. And did you know that coffee is the most important world trade product after mineral oil, and grown in more than 70 countries around the equator?

Yet, as you well know, there are times when only a cup of tea will hit the spot. In an English crisis – say, a death in the family – you will still to this day hear a rallying cry of, ‘now, we’d better all have a nice cup of tea.’..

Back in Nuremberg, after our splendid walk, Bettina took me to a party – three minutes walk away from her flat.

A well-endowed, golden-haired girl called Connie loitered in the kitchen, catching my eye instantly. Well, one has nothing to lose by grabbing a bottle of red off the table, approaching with a quick and resolute step, and introducing oneself.

In fact, ‘Whatho, I’m English, don’t you know,’ turned out to be a capital opener. German parties, it transpires, are not to be sneezed at.

All good things come to an end however, which is where I find touring so irksome. Just when I meet somebody both intelligent and attractive, I have to move on to the next city.

Sulking, heart torn asunder and plunged into lugubrious dejection, I’m off to Leipzig. Connie will have to plod through life without me. It might be the other way around, actually – I’m sure she’ll be fine.

It isn’t just my heartstrings that are in dire straits, though; my notes are a shambles, too. Though still using the old moleskin notebook from Grandpa, I now have a “half and half” system in progress.

Namibian’s writing pad is dog-eared and full of my doodling, yet somehow I still have tea-stained scraps of foolscap in various pockets (I sometimes take the rash option of carrying neither notebook nor pad).

To make matters more complicated still – call it inefficiency or gross ineptitude, if you like – I have occasionally been caught with none of the above, nor indeed even a pen. In those situations I’ve used text message drafts on the mobile phone to record anecdotes.

So to recap, writing the blog lately has been an exercise requiring a good deal of poor organisation. Not that anybody appreciates it..

Perhaps, before we continue with this outdoor leg of the AC/DC tour, you should know that we now have nine more trucks. Good grief, you ask, what on earth do twenty-nine trucks carry? Well, this and that.

Don’t quote me, but as well as Namibian’s ‘load of crap in the back’, there are two other lighting trucks, various sound trucks, a couple of rigging trucks, two trucks just to carry the train for the stage, video trucks, and a truck for catering. You get the picture – add an inflatable doll and six cannons, and the fleet rather starts adding up.

And all those trucks mentioned are only the ones that go to every show. There are also three stages on this tour, each of which is carried by about a dozen or so trucks. The stages are set up well in advance – for us to plonk our “production” gear straight onto.

Erection of the stage takes a few days…and so three teams of “steel” drivers are needed – to leapfrog to every third show. It is a huge operation, employing a lot of people. Now you know all that, we’ll probably steer things back to tourist attractions..