Teutonic totty

So, now that I have been released from the British Library, I am available for less high-minded pursuits. And thus it was that I found myself on a lesbian stag weekend to Cologne.

Sicily, M and I arrive at around eleven pm and trot off to the quaintly named Bastard Bar to meet the girls, who are downing tequila shots, smoking furiously and shrieking in true, er, stag party fashion. We then take cabs to another bar, which is very dark and very empty. I try to make conversation with one of the group.

Me: So, what do you do?
Her: I’m a media lawyer. I specialise in defamation.
Me: Oh, so if I publish a book and I get famous and someone says something libellous about me, I could hire you?
Her (tossing her head): You wouldn’t be able to afford me, darling.

I decide in that case I probably can’t afford to buy her a drink, either.

The second night we regroup in a strange shopping mall-type place where we are going to eat and whose menu appears to be built mostly around white asparagus. We frisk about under a giant glitterball, posing for snaps and confusing the other diners, who are respectable middle-aged couples. By this point I am feeling somewhat confused myself. This is probably due to the shots of melon schnapps that appear every few minutes, mixing uneasily in my stomach with the buckets of white wine that preceded them.

On the way to the Elle-Word, the club night that, we have been told, will be attended by 1000 women, I catch sight of the nails of the wildly glamorous French opera singer who has just joined us.

Me: Oh my god, you’re wearing Chanel Rouge Noir!
Her: I know. I had to go on the waiting list to buy it!
Me (excitedly): Yes, it sold out in two weeks, didn’t it? I’m wearing Rouge Peche on my toes.
Her: Cherie, are you REALLY a lesbian?
Me: Er, not a very good one…

We arrive at the club, somewhere on the side of a large roundabout on the outskirts of the city. On entering, we are enveloped in a fog of smoke and hormones rising from the dancefloor and I remember why I don’t go to these places in London. Sicily, M and I decide to have a nice, cooling glass of prosecco, and stand at the bar drooling in anticipation of longstemmed champagne flutes. Imagine our despair when we are handed three small cans of warm fizzy wine. With straws. Sicily is almost apoplectic with wrath. I just drink mine as quickly as I can and move on to gin.

In Cologne you don’t pay for your drinks as you get them. On entering you are given a small piece of paper like an old-fashioned dance-card, and the barperson ticks off boxes as you get your drinks. Dangerous. The bar staff are all male and loving the power as a thousand drunken women crowd about the bar, brandishing their dance-cards as desperately as Jane Austen heroines at a ball.

At three-thirty in the morning, M and I decide that one of the barmen looks a bit like Zoolander. We get thoroughly over-excited. He looks slightly nervous.

M: Can we take your photo?
Barman: Uh, ja, if you want
M: Can my friend stand next to you?
Barman: Er, ok, then.

And so it was that, in the middle of what was supposed to be teutonic totty heaven, I end up with my arm round the barman, grinning inanely and having my photo taken.

I give up on myself.