Morning comes with the most complete hangover I’ve had in months. The carpet ripples below me; I can only open one eye; memory loss is extensive and complete. It feels, to quote Withnail, “like a pig shat in my head.” Almost nine years after my first blackout, though, my homing device in tact where my dignity does not: I awake in the right room of the right hotel. Lord knows what nick I must have been in passing reception. I can only hope I was quiet. Rather than self-flagellation, though, I prioritise going to McDonalds and the now open pharmacy for painkillers. Then I crawl back to my hotel room to ride out the rest of the day.
Several fevered hours later I scrape my nauseated body off the mattress and flush myself downstairs. A car is here to take me to Hornum, the southernmost town in the island. I’m here to visit a posh restaurant at a new boutique hotel but arrive far too early so bum around the dock, taking pictures of nothing in particular.
The meal, as it turns out, is five courses of superb nouvelle cuisine which I wash down with their selection of matching reserve wines. As the sommelier brings over the second (which has hints of banana, apparently) I chuckle: this morning my shaking hand struggled to stuff a McMuffin into my puke-prepared mouth and now here I am, tucking into a 120 euro dinner. This is my life, this is what I do; pauper to prince and back again in a few short hours. Cinderfella indeed.
I get up early the next morning to pack up and head off and am just about to leave my room when I look out the window. To my surprise (and distress) a parade of naked pensioners are marching into the cold, unforgiving surf, keen it seems to end it all in the North Sea’s dawn waters. Perhaps they’ve had some kind of premonition.
From the hotel I walk to the train station and catch the express to Hamburg. Despite being regarded as an island, Sylt is connected to the mainland (the seagull’s tether) by a long dyke, on top of which runs the train track. It’s a nice journey through the German countryside, but before too long I’m making another connection to internal flight back to Frankfurt.
Sitting on the cramped Lufthansa plane, I get talking to the people next to me, a Canadian couple who – incongruously – work as teachers in Saudi. It’s a bizarre moment, not least as they’re only on this plane because own transatlantic flight developed a problem mid-air and had to make an emergency landing in Hamburg.
Frankfurt airport has a typically efficient train service to and from the city. It is designed to be fool-proof, but alas the world is populated by fucking morons. I get my ticket then stand watching a Spanish dad fail his wife and son again and again by repeatedly misunderstanding the simple instructions on screen. I try to help them, but quickly get pissed off, then too embarrassed to shoo away his useless fingers. His son is disappointed in him too, I can tell. I wait until they are suitably distracted and head into the city.
Two things strike me the moment I step into downtown Frankfurt. The first is that it’s a very pretty place, all gingerbread houses and Ye Olde architecture. The other is that, more than anywhere on Earth I’ve been, there are a preposterous number of hobos, bums, bored yoofs drinking in the middle of the street, in the middle of the day. It’s quite a spectacle, especially one Laureate of Skid Row type who insists on berating a deeply uncomfortable gaggle of school girls.
Equally disturbing is a clown who looks like a psychotic lorry driver who’s either lost a very big bet or his mind, and is now charged with entertaining kids. To death.
From there I head to the river, where there’s a shitty funfair on. I try to take an arty picture of the carousel and nearly have my camera trodden on by the gypo worker dude. Thankfully he just misses and the picture turns out alright anyway.
I’m just about to vacate the scene when I turn into Senor Fuckwit and family. To my surprise, they stop to test out their pigeon English. Disturbingly, the 10 year old son is the most fluent of the lot. On the downside, he’s a Real Madrid fan. They’ve been on holiday in Norway and are just heading back to the Spanish capital. They’ve had a good time, but it’s been cold and expensive ¡dios mío! So expensive! We shoot the breeze for about 15 minutes or so then check our watches – it’s time to go so we head our separate ways, never to see each other again.
