Guidebook

Change is in the air. Dangerous, reckless change. Yes, the BBC is cancelling Top of the Pops. It is, apparently, out of date and not relevant to the modern young audience. Well, I beg to differ. I may not be young anymore, but I am not quite old just yet, and have these people no idea of tradition? If it wasn't for TOTP I'd have never seen and been scared by the video to Duran Duran's Wild Boys or been made to feel... funny by Louise Wener of Sleeper in 1994. Great days.

Of course, the rot set in years ago. First Going Live, then Sportsnight, then Tomorrow's World. Bastards. These were the foundations of my childhood. I watched Going Live for gunge, Sportsnight for ice skating and crown green bowls and Tomorrow's World for a glimpse of a world ruled by robots and to be made to feel... funny by Phillipa Forrester.

Nowadays it is all much different. Phillip Schofield left Going Live to be Joseph in his Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, whilst Peter Simon now makes his living as a bitter shell of a man flogging diamonique jewellery and no-effort weight loss programs on Bid-Up TV. Sportsnight was never really that good anyway, and even the excellent music has been ruined by having Jonny Vaughan steal it for one of his many short-lived and hateful Letterman rip-offs - why the BBC ever though giving that man money was a good idea is beyond me. And now it actually is the 21st century Tomorrow's World has been passed by events, whilst these days Phillipa Forrester presents some God Slot programme on BBC2 on Sunday morning and can now only be described by the word "homely". Oh, the passage of time.

But anyway. Our principal subject today is the perennially thorny one of foreigners. Now I know some of you who choose to subscribe to my irregular but depressingly frequent column are, in fact, foreign yourselves, but don't worry, you can't help it and I sympathise as much as I can.

I may be joking there. But I am off to Germany on Monday with work for a week, and I have been thinking about travel generally, having bought a new Lonely Planet guide to take with me. The sight of a hundred LPs for a hundred countries in Waterstones always makes me want to head off with my backpack for as long as I can afford and work will let me get away with. I lived in Germany for the 1999/2000 academic year and reading my guidebook in Caffe Nero I found myself smiling widely and laughing at old memories. The holiday season is here. Thank God.

I am lucky in many ways. I live not too far from a couple of decent airports and Ryanair or Easyjet can generally get me to somewhere European for about thirty quid. I have taken plenty of advantage of this cheap and easy way out of the country. I find it invigorating. You meet some cool people and do things you wouldn't normally do. I tend towards the Lonely Planet and backpack method of travel, so it's always a slightly enclosed existence. Like being in a bubble. I like that a lot, it makes me feel like Bill Bryson. Perhaps that's not as cool a travel writer as I could choose, but he has a way with words I admire greatly. Plus it's my blog, so there.

There's nothing to compare with being 19 and spending a week in Rome eating nothing but pizza and trying to persuade a girl from Sweden called Christa to let you see her naked. In a more measured example, an Australian girl called Mindy and I accidentally crashed an art gallery launch party in Krakow (no blame attahces itself to us in this - we were looking for coffee, and the sign in the window said it was a cafe. The fact that it turned out to be an exhibit in said gallery, we did not know) but were allowed to stay because we spoke English and I knew who Paul Klee was. We got riotously drunk on free Bulgarian wine and ate our weights in Pringles.

You see things that you'd never see. An open-air rave on the Reeperbahn in Hamburg, a street which belies its fearsome and seedy reputation as Germany's biggest sink of iniquity by having a huge furniture shop and a theatre playing Cats halfway down it. Six men with astounding moustaches on Castle Hill in Prague singing ancient and beautiful folk songs that, if you picked up the translated lyrics from their stall turned out to all (and I mean all) be about hunting down Russians and skinning them alive. Buying beer like liquid honey and foot-long cigars for the equivalent of three pounds in Lublin. Getting into an argument with an East German about architecture. Meeting six members of the USAF in two days in a hostel in Paris. Wearing a water melon on my head on a Roman beach.

In fact, Christa turned out to be nuts. She lived in Brighton, which is much less impressive than Sweden, and spent her days stealing clothes from BHS because they were a big chainstore and, in her words, no-one got hurt. I was very careful with my wallet after that. For each excellent person you meet there is always someone you never want to see again, even naked. Mindy was nice though, and taught me the most space efficient way to pack a backpack. Useful.

I'd bore you with more, but I won't. I will be off now to read in my LP about Karlsruhe, the German city work are sending me to. It's work, sure, but I can get Apfelschorle whenever I want. And perhaps that's the greatest reward of all.

Good Night, and Good Luck
Dougal