Degsey (Part Four) -Lederhosen

Disclaimer 1) Drugs can be fun, but may affect one's health & sanity. (Yeah, I know it's pretty obvious)
Disclaimer 2) Germans do not all wear leather trousers all of the time, & some do have a sense of humour some of the time.

I don't know whether it's a good idea to change the title to 'Degsey' at this stage. I didn't think the story was going to be this long & we haven't even reached France yet.
I guess I'll just carry on until we lose interest. At which point, I might shut up. Or, I might just finish the story anyway, but tell it to the hedgehog in my garden...


There were times of fear & confusion, as we travelled through the rainy Rhine valley. Maybe it was just a hangover from all the smoking in Amsterdam, or maybe it was because we were entering dunkel beer & sweet wine country.

We weren't really your common camping family, & we became aware of our different style as we checked out a campsite near Köln (Cologne) for the night.
As we drove in, and circled round, the other campers stopped what they were doing.
The burly men stopped Bar-B-Qing, the women stopped setting the tables, and the children stopped playing. I think even the rain had stopped.
I can't remember whether we'd played 'Old MacDonald' on the horn at this point.
All eyes were on us; there was fear in the air.
In a rare moment of sanity, all four of us seemed to think as one. -We floored the accelerator, & drove off, with the Rocky fanfare parping from our horn as we exited. Unfortunately, Degsey couldn't quite manage the wheel spin.

We continued heading south, but for a while after this, we decided to park up each night in quiet lay-bys. There was no mutual fear with anyone, and it was free.
I remember this time as being quite calm & homely. It was always fun when it was just the four of us. It was only when we met other people we'd get into weird situations.
Since I could speak a little German, I was doing the shopping, Jay was making us nice dinners, and Tim & Nicey were having stick fights & running off into the forest to explore.
Beer was less than 3 Marks a bottle & we only needed a couple....

One night, near Koblenz, we met an inebriated local guy wearing leather trousers. He asked us to have a drink/smoke with him.
We got a few bottles of beer, and he showed us a good spot for a campfire, about a mile from where we'd parked.
He was a nice kind of strange bloke rather than a strange kind of nice bloke. He said he was an x-punk, and then we began to get wasted on the beers.
We asked him his name, and he mumbled something back.
At the time, I thought he was trying to say Lederhosen, but I'm not so sure now.

(This is how I choose to remember him)

After some pleasant talking shit, & general drunken spiel, we got up and said we were going to walk back to the van. Maybe we should have invited our new friend, but it was our home. Most of our passports & all of our money were there; in any case, we weren’t some kind of travelling Kibbutz.
He decided to come with us anyway.

The long journey back to the van seemed to go really quickly. I have a vague memory of Nicey & Tim singing Tottenham Hotspur football chants but I must have ridden the beer bus most of the way.
Lederhosen seemed to have peaked & his face was quickly losing colour.
As we got closer to our home, I think the four of us were silently trying to work out how to say "Yeah, it's been cool man but we're goin' to chill now", but it's hard to find those words when you're young & wasted.

Just as we got back into Degsey, Nicey realized he'd lost a 50-mark note.
It was a sobering experience. This was a big deal to us and we had to try & do something.
Nicey & I walked back to the embers of our campfire with a torch, trying retrace our drunken steps. We were about to give up when somehow the note landed at our feet. It just seemed to present itself to us, quivering in the night's cold breeze.
Nicey was really happy. It was so cool.

When we finally got back to the van, Tim, Jay & Lederhosen were all sprawled out asleep. There was only room for four to sleep. Nicey took control...
"Lederhosen.... Lederhosen.... Oi! LEDERHOSEN...You can't sleep here...." And our poor dishevelled, leather-trousered friend, staggered off into the night