I go to Germany. The Germans are not ready for me.

Ages and ages ago I promised my brain twin, Mrs. Jones that I would blog about the time I lived in Germany.

Now, while I am trying to ignore the domestic chaos and general levels of plague that beset me, seems a good time to start.

I didn’t live there for very long, four months in all.  It felt longer it has to be said.  As is the case with most things I do, it did not go smoothly and it put me off being an achingly hip and cosmopolitan world traveller for life.

Disaster follows me like the cloud of filth that follows Pig Pen from Peanuts.  These days I am consoled by the thought that it will all make good blogging material.  At the time I had no such consolation, and all was a bleak wilderness of dead pigs and arcane German by laws.

I should have known it was going to be complicated.  Like the time my dad decided to make us go to Italy on a coach with a male voice choir to save air fares, it was not a straightforward deal from the get go.

The university that I attended, St. David’s University College, Lampeter, was very odd.  Originally it started life as a theological college with only a handful of students.  By the time I arrived in 1990 it was a humanities university.  You could study things like Church History, Latin, Swedish and Welsh.  You could study Islam in great depth.  You could do History and English and German.  You could do Geography.  You could not do maths or chemistry or art or anything scary with numbers in.

When I was there we had less than 1000 students.  It was smaller than my school. This was because very few people wanted to go to Mid Wales to study Latin and Welsh in a place so small it made Broughton Astley look like a throbbing metropolis.  Most people ended up there through clearing, which is the process by which everyone who failed to get the right A Levels scramble to university.  They ring every university with places left to fill, confess that they have a CSE in woodwork and a 25 metre swimming badge and then sign up for a degree in environmental issues because they can.

It meant that it was rather an unusual place to study.  I was fine with this.  I spent three years mucking about with my mates learning to grow up and not really feeling too much pressure. Admin, rules etc were very lackadaisical and it was all a bit come day, go day.

The university had links with the university of Bayreuth, deep in the Bavarian heartland. All the students studying German would be packed off there to do their   year abroad.  For some reason, in my second year, the powers that be decided that they would strengthen the links with the English department at Bayreuth. It was decided that two students from the English department would go to Bayreuth and study there for a term as a gesture of goodwill and wondrousness to all men.

They advertised for students willing to go.  There was only me.  And my friend Kate, who wasn’t actually studying English. She was studying Latin and Church History, but fancied coming along.  As we were the only ones who volunteered, it was agreed that we could both go and Kate would do a term of English with me.

Mainly we decided we wanted to go because we were sharing a flat with three other friends and things had become rather intense and strained.  We wanted out, and thought that Germany would be the best place to go to.

I felt reassured because Kate had done A level German.  I don’t know if Kate felt reassured by the fact that I was very good at poetry.  I doubt it.

We set off one fine spring morning, waved off by our parents.  We were due to meet a group of students from our university who were all going out at the same time, and hook up with them to sort out where we were living etc.  It was all going to be brilliantly organised and executed with German efficiency.

Except we forgot to calculate how much our Anglo/Welsh crapness had interfered with things.

We flew into Frankfurt airport and then had to get two trains to Bayreuth. We staggered on under the weight of our luggage.

Bayreuth is famous as the birth place of the composer Wagner.  There is an enormous opera house there where they have a Wagnerfest every year for which the waiting list for tickets is (and I kid you not) ten years long.  Other than that it has very little going for it.  I am not a huge fan of Wagner, and I hate opera.

Oh dear.

We arrived at the railway station in the middle of somewhere similar to my local market town, but with more houses that look like gingerbread cottages.

There was nobody to meet us.

We had been told that the people who had been allocated to put us up at their houses would be there, as would the rest of our group.

The platform was deserted.  It remained deserted.

Eventually we found a phone number for someone who might know what was going on.

Kate rang it.  I listened while she hung onto the pay phone, grimly saying ‘uh huh. I see. O.K.’

It turned out that the German contingent had not heard from the Anglo/Welsh contingent about us.  They had therefore decided that there had been no takers and had cancelled the whole thing.  Nobody knew we were coming.  Hence nobody to take us on to our waiting accommodation.

There was no waiting accommodation.

Woe…

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