My Visits

I visited Germany many times. I was there as often as I could afford it and when I couldn't, Claudia paid for me to visit. In the first couple of visits, I was at weddings, one of Claudia's brother and the other of a friend (who became a former-friend in later months.) With a couple of exceptions, my visits were brief. Not more than a weekend. And in retrospect, we clung to one another for those few days trying to promise each other that it would all be OK and that the two of us would make it. We would throw two single matrasses on the floor and snuggle together on one, clinging like limpets weathering the storm that was battering our lives. In the end, I was just better at clinging than Claudia.
I mostly stayed with Claudia at her parent's house. It never felt right despite them never doing anything deliberate to make it feel that way. We were never in the way, we were always offered the meals that were cooked by Claudia's long-suffering mother. Her father would love to chat and I could have joined his passion for football as it was great to have something we could both talk about -albeit in a very limited fashion. As I have mentioned, I have a jaded view of soccer, but I was always conversant about it because it was unavoidable. If you did not talk about football, you would never open your mouth in certain circles in which I have worked over the years. Fitting into a workplace in any job in the UK is not possible without some fluency in the (chokes) 'world game'. I knew my Arsenal from my Everton and all the key players in the big European teams. Her father and I would talk, but Claudia would always interrupt and drag me away in a fashion that made me feel hen-pecked and annoyed. She did this because she thought I was just being polite and Claudia didn't do that sort of polite.

I could just never shake the feeling of failure - that the two of us, in our thirties were having to live with her folks because we could not get our shit together. It was pathetic, but it was our making. I spent six weeks there between Christmas 2003 and the end of January 2004. The idea was that I would look for work and try to give everything a bit of momentum. In Holland I had been able to find work with relative ease by just dropping in on the state employment bureau and then all the private work agencies. Easy. In Germany, Claudia did everything to convince me that this would not work, that Germany was not the same - and I came to believe her, right or wrong. I could not speak German and that was the main obstacle, then I had no trade and that would also be a problem. Germany is obsessive about qualifications and that was why Claudia could be proud of what she got to do in Australia and why in Germany she was good only for serving breakfast or entering data - or so she quickly came to believe. And I could never inject a bit of self-belief in her.

Never Fly with RyanAir

Claudia climbed onto a Ryanair flight from Prestwick to Stanstead to get an onward flight to Germany. Her luggage did not go with her. Her bag was just an ordinary little black trolley bag - a BK22 in airline-speak. It was not on the carousel in Stanstead when she got there. She stood in a state of shock as her flight dispersed through the customs leaving her alone. She reported it at a desk and got directions to some back offices to register the missing luggage. The farce that emerged was an appalling catalogue of indifference, shockingly lax airline safety measures and buck-passing.

( Enter text from one of the letters written to a RyanAir customer sevice dept that appears not to actually exist)

Claudia never got over the loss of the bag and it was perhaps a further reason for her reluctance to visit me where I was. It was just so painful to lose so many personal items - including her precious camera filled with the memories of our last real holiday together. Whenever I visited her after that, there would be a mention of something that was lost or that she would have worn had she still had it. I have known people who have been violently mugged and robbed who have been less traumatised by the experience.