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The bicycle puncture, that I’d meant to fix since finishing the Lou Reed tour last July, finally gets repaired. Oh, all right, I fit a new inner tube – if you think I’m going to fool about with glue and patches in these temperatures, you’re mistaken.

With nineteen other truckers on the tour, most of whom are old pals, it’s terribly easy to lose a day chatting. But I’ve never been a social butterfly, preferring instead to explore alone. Or with Namibian – because he’ll follow faithfully, and he’s jolly handy for taking photographs of me.

From experience, as soon as more than two truck drivers embark on a cultural afternoon, stops for alcohol inevitably eclipse any historical interest.

Not one hundred metres from the Arena is one of the best sections of the Berlin Wall – 1200m long. In 1961 the East German military sealed off the city with this 3.6m high barrier, stretching 100 miles around West Berlin.

Although it was built – uniquely – to keep a country’s people in, rather than the enemy out, it was actually the enclave of West Berlin that was surrounded. To reach West Germany from West Berlin meant passing through East Germany and then through the Iron Curtain. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, the city went beserk celebrating; aspirin soon ran out.

Namibian and I are having a silly day today. How many times have I been to Berlin over the last 10 years? Well, if I don’t know, I don’t suppose you will either. Let’s say about a dozen.

Yet today, in a fit of madness, we’re doing the tourist thing: taking photographs with guns and hats, and stamping my passport with “Checkpoint Charlie”. We warm up with lattes at Snackpoint Charlie..

 

 

 

 

Incessant, driving rain and a filthy windscreen hamper progress to Antwerp. That, and searching diesel stations round northern France – heavy trucks need road tax for Belgium.

I’m now back on the European leg of the Tina Turner Tour…and there are no White Cliffs of Dover until early April; we will be touring solidly on the continent until then.

At 06.35, after just three hours in the bunk, drunken colleagues stand outside my truck window. A loud, slurred, somewhat incoherent conversation ensues. Don’t you just love these twenty-truck tours?

Then “Namibian Colin”, who shall feature regularly in this blog, accidentally blows his airhorn at 9 o’clock. When doing his daily sit-up getting out of bed, his bulky paunch catches the stalk on the steering column; he’s simply too fat..

24th January:

Good heavens! I could hardly look. Four bendy young honeys in miniskirts degrading themselves on stage…IN LEATHER. Yes, of course I watched Tina’s show. ‘All this crumpet is bad for my blood pressure,’ I wheezed chattily to Spotlight Operator Number Six. ‘Not mine,’ he said. ‘I take tablets.’

A sexy camera angle captured a guitar riff and four swaying rumps – in deliciously tight outfits. The rhythm section sizzled. Dancers’ tousled hair flew in all the right directions in ‘rolling on a river‘.

There was a token sensible haircut among them, though: the “thoroughly modern millie” of rock ‘n’ roll. ‘Big wheels keep on turning…’ yelled Tina.

My eighteen wheels certainly did. Sixteen forward gears; 750 kilometres to Berlin. Probably a bit less if I hadn’t let Namibian Colin go in front. His narration over video footage is pure gold: ‘This is me getting us lost.’

600 km in one day seemed quite enough, so we pulled into Bobby’s Diner for cheeseburgers.