A moment from Stifel, Cologne - the human juke box

Sitting in the pub window watching the world go by, about eleven on Saturday night. A man dressed with a silver foil wrapped box on his head on which a number of rectangles with words are arranged stops. He is "Gerd Box" the human juke box, and will sing any song from his selection. They are all heavy metal classics. There are no instruments involved; and he can't sing.

What follows ends up with most of the bar singing acapella a song whose chorus is "loving you is like loving the dead". I have money of this being a Bauhaus song, but who knows? The gun club may even have approved.

At Cologne Cathedral

The situation of Colen is very delectable...

Their Cathedrall Church which is dedicated to St. Peter is a goodly building, but it is a great pittie that it is so imperfect. For it but halfe ended. Doubtlesse it would be a very glorious & beautifull worke if had been thoroughly finished....


Tommy Boy....


A few hours sleep after Underground and I am preparing for the walk to Dusseldorf, but first I want one last vision of Cologne's cathedral because Tommy has dedicated twenty something pages to its description, pretty much tomb by tomb. Who knows if this was real time reportage or copied from some guide in German?

So I am in the square that houses one side of the cathedral, a hotel, and the modern art museum. It's already about eleven, which means a late arrival in Dusseldorf. Today there are a new set of faces in the crowds that flock these spaces, faces I don't recognise from my many weeks of walking across Germany; and when I walk around the corner to the main station and its own theatrical courtyard of arrival and departure there are more and more of this strange type arriving by train.

They - as I am, high on the staircase gods watching the Lowry figures flock and separate below - are greeted by a new piece of art in the station square, perhaps twenty five metres high and wide: il papa, advertising "Germany's leading catholic radio station." In the image used the Pope's gesture is a waive, his arm is raised at least - oh god I am being charitable - that could just possibly be misunderstood, given yer man's history, nationality, and....well I am a charitable soul.

The faces are not the only unusual thing; the men, and predominantly this is a man thing, are dressed in olive green blazers adorned with medals. Many carry banners, in cloth, often with designs from the most brutal of christian art sources, St. Sebastian is big, all those arrows and homo-erotic poses... These are walrus men for the most part, with Colonel Blimp moustaches and deep double jowelled necks. Big, overweight, and certain...

But what are they? They are joined by a few women, dressed in Elsa Lanchester Bride of Frankenstein mode, the kind of style that might make the catwalk if The Wicker Man became a big seasonal influence on the people who've taken over from Alexander McQueen. (Yes the jacket and jeans doing very nicely thank you). They keep coming from the station, a relentless march of history straight out of The Lady Vanishes. Yes the Brides have a Margaret Lockwood air; yes it would be no surprise to see Caldicot and Charteris discussing the cricket somewhere....following live on the BBC website, these days.

They are joined in the cathedral's surrealist hinterlands this morning by those extraordinarily annoying silver mimes: angels, roman soldiers, more angels, and they take the majority of the attention for the genuine passer-by tourist child from China or Chigwell.

But not mine.

One green jacket particularly inspires me; a younger sort with a giant head that is buzz cut shaved and his only other facial adornment are a pair of black bull's balls that he has pierced into his nostrils. Think Hellboy meets the winner of the US Masters golf tournament. He's carrying a large St Sebastian banner and I am just thinking that he wouldn't exactly have been out of place on the dance floor to the death metal at Underground. Except that this guy means it. I get in close to these guys and take a lot of photographs. Not quite Robert Kapa in Spain, but there is a pretty strange vibe here, is it the country versus the town thing? Is it like the English football fans in Baden-Baden? No, this is celebration. I keep photographing. Beer bellies in Green, beards, those hats with a flower, more brides. Eventually I have to ask.

They are a pistol and rifle association, celebrating their 150th anniversary. Happy memories guys. From all over the state, and not really Cologne at all. There's going to be a mass in the cathedral....and there, outside the station, the Pope looks on. I mean they don't whack anyone who is taking pictures, but there aren't many smiles. I don't like this so much.

I find I've taken a couple of hundred pictures so I go off to wifi and publish a few and then realise I am exhausted. I'm not going to make Dusseldorf by foot today so I take the train...

Later there is salsa.

Underground

The older grey-haired busker is already at his spot, where he'll play a David Byrne song about ten thousand times, and noodle nice blues and chat to anyone and drink a lot and witness several dogfights and about ten thousand roller bladers in his day. It's about ten and the area in front of the cathedral is filling with paddle-led tour groups and the genuinely curious and lots of English speaking kids who may be on an Erasmus or a college swap or a who knows?

I've been trained well in going to art and know that in the next city, Dusseldorf, I have eight Kiefers that will take up the best part of a day; and Beuys...So I am not going near Cologne's very good art galleries.

I sit and write on the river front with with my Cologne geography now enhanced by last night's wanderweg. Somewhere in the middle, betwixt river front and punk bar, is Friesenstrasse where Cologne enjoys itself in the more bourgeois ways. I block out the brass bands for a while with a run through on the IPod, then give in to the mood and enjoy the pleasure (clearly expected) of the hundreds who line up, then drink out, on the disco boat that's going to be their life and the Rhine's for the next few hours. God, the music is miserable, matched only by an unfortunate sighting in Dordrecht on television of Jennifer Lopez's new single: I would have divorced her if I'd heard that song....it features some old Eurotrash melody and includes the line "put your glasses in the air" and incites people in Ibiza, Paris, LA and Worthing to get onto the floor. Ok, not Worthing.

I scrub up; which means change, and wander to Friesenstrasse, which is the usual suspect collection of All Bar One, other place, and a bunch of chic-er places that are empty, so far. There's an Irish bar, that's full of oom-pah-pah and so I order my aperol spritz and sit back to watch the "other" promenade. I am missing the river's protean People's debaucheries almost immediately. It would be no different in Lyon or Manchester, it's just that it's not me: I try the KGB bar, somewhat masochistically, and witness the world's worst burlesque for eighteen seconds. Ask the nice barman at my cafe is there is a bar with music, he sends me to the Irish bar's karaoke. Serves me right. I taxi to the deep suburbs and Underground, where heavy metal blares outside and from two discrete internal rooms, which I never make.

Hans is an architect, works in Dubai - has done for five years. Aggressive at first, suspicious of strangers - especially older English ones, "with their presumptions about Germany." Soon we're joined by chefs, gamers, programmers, a Freudian practicing in Paris; bar staff chilling out after long nights elsewhere...what do we talk about? Cologne mostly, those not living here are from here, and are here - as I feel in Stipel - in a kind of nostalgia-ridden return. "It's not as good as when..." is an almost constant refrain, and there's a lot of chat about computer games I don't know: I flannel badly, name drop Wired and tell a few stories about why I am walking. Don't get a standing ovation but Hans apologises and hopes I have a great time in Germany. I get it, he says; says the English in Dubai still behave as if they rule the Empire. And won't listen to anyone else. Forget the collapse in Dubai, there's still work. The Freudian is a Seberg, and as she talks I think only in Paris could you get away with this, but there, working with the banlieu kids, she does. Not even Lacan. The keanu-hair gamers take a shine to me and in a kind of Bill and Ted way we navigate the night and then the sun is coming up and back home the kebabeee smells, if possible, even worse.

In the morning I meet the gun clubs...

It doesn't sound like a Grand Tourist kind of day, but I'm tired of the galleries; they are they new cathedrals and the cathedrals are malls and digital flashlight and avoiding H&M is an almost impossible task. I have met some locals, tried to talk and found that Cologne can suffer nostalgia like a Tory politician. Did I mention the gun clubs?

Post Chamberlain, the Clash Years

Cologne at 5.30am for geo-spatial reasons which don't involve being a Time Lord, though I have been in conversation with a pair of Afrikaans who tease me about the riots and the rugby. It is a good time to see the Cathedral, which I know quite well. Tom Coryat devotes ten pages to its splendours and it was only half finished when he saw it. There are no tourists, just the very early workers emerging from the hauptbahnhof and the old streets behind the kunstmuseum are deserted all the way to the river, which is lacking its usual oom-pah-pah, but is nevertheless full of cafes and bars that will wake up soon enough. Always guilt in Cologne, the bombing and all that, and taking a very early morning wrong turn soon finds me in canyons of brand worship and modernity and it's hard to be a believer.

I take a kebab-smelling room in a hotel on the river, sleep a while and wake up for coffee outside with bright sunshine and an Aussie at the next table who's just flown in, via Singapore, for a show at the Messe. Hasn't slept yet, his Europe tip. Biggest Outdoor Equipment show in the world (just as walking from Dusseldorf, I'll experience the biggest shoe show in the world at its messe). These shows clog up the lone traveller's hotel options, closing down towns - which is good for business but bad for planning. So I am in the hotel kebaberee, where the phones don't work and the wifi is wilful and from my room, which keeps changing for no obvious reason the back street bar by my window echoes to karaoke 80s rock....I am a saint.

Soon we are onto sport and how, even when we have a good sporting team in England, we don't have the "arrogant, killer touch." No surprises for the country that does. I mention the Ashes; Robert mentions the number of South Africans in the England team. We move onto rugby, but Robert is an Aussie Rules guy. I say I've seen Irish Rules, hurling. "Yeah we play an exhibition game against those guys, but last time it got out of hand...they don't do blindside tackling off the ball there. There were a few fights....in the end we had to tell the guys stop the blindsiders or we'll ban you back at home."

Robert's company is Chinese; he spends a lot of time there. In the next hour I learn more about the economy, and the Chinese take-over. "You know we were in Vegas for a show and I walked over to an American company and the guy said, we're not talking to you, you're with them." Well, them seem to be doing nicely. its hot, I feel I am burning, so wander off for art, but get weigh laid by just watching the Cologne riverside, on a Thursday, as the small patches of grass fill with people catching the last days of summer. Buskers sing in English....and soon enough men in identical shirts, stags who knows, are singing songs and the music is blaring. Over the next two days I'll watch this part of Cologne a lot; as the brass bands and the rockers, and the disco boaters, and the generally soused enjoy this part of town. There is never a hint of trouble, except when dogs get a bit frisky.

Often, for large swathes of the day, there isn't a cafe seat to be found. "Empire State of Mind" does well with the punters, and there is a gymnastic healthy vibe to the small stretches of grass; not a description for those who lounge the cafes knocking back the local beer, the Kölsch, which I've known from other Time Lord Lives and will ignore all weekend in favour of enigmatic red wine (a conversation starter later in the outdoor club Underground). But the booze kicks, the brass band romps (generously) through Neil Diamond and that song about Alice that I thought had died out in 1608, and well, you know the repertoire. There is much singing along; later a rockabilly band does some decent Elvis...

This is the populist core of Cologne, but I am now obsessed, and not because of Rory Stewart, with the spaces in between.

Thomas Coryat may have had many problems on his walk, but he didn't have to find the coolest cocktail bar in Cologne, with the beds downstairs and the best vibe etc etc. And as it is on Mozart street, a schlep and a half even for such a seasoned walker in the humid evening, he wouldn't have found it even if he'd had Latin GPS. It is literally, well not literally, thousands of kilometers away and I walk across town for two hours, past malls, then into residential districts, dodgy estates; I ask local after local and decide this place must be in Copenhagen, so cool and discrete it obviously is. I try again in a park where some guys are fooling' around and others playing boule and I find Beethoven street, but not Mozart. I find hosts of places, a KGB club (always bad). I console my heavily sweaty self that I now know another Cologne, but of course I'm wrong. I've passed student places and Charles Eames stores, and then finally when I hit - after more directions and bemused looks - Mozart street my bar is deader than Leninism. I end up back in the park with the boule and the university crowd talking cultural materialism and conferences in Dublin and drink very bad red wine thinking: I could do this in Bloomsbury, which is not the objective. I wanted to see "Media Cologne." Across the river the satellite dishes and steely modernism of "Vox" channel declares its power, so where are its players? It's not unpleasant, but really Russell Square sur Cologne? There are, perhaps, one too many sets of red clogs for my liking. Tom probably went boozing about 20 metres from the cathedral, where if my nose for this sort of thing is good, which it is, he'd now be singing Take Me Home Country Roads, in Latin of course.

Hair is un-reconstituted here, which is a blessing, and discussion on the intense side. One of the downsides of academic globalism is that the lingua-franca English that glues the Germans, Irish, English, Danes etc. is the inevitability of conversations about world music...I know, sorry. It must have been the same with Tom, not surprised he was hooked up with fellow Latin speaking Englishmen by now, there is only so long you can tap your foot to pan pipes. I could wander back to the self printed group t-shirts of the riverfront, but I am in a sort of post Chamberlain mountain English guilt, post riot, hacking, mood. I keep going in honour of smorgasbord Cologne. I am lucky not to have found the Friesenstrasse demimonde, tomorrow is that joy, as by now I am a middle-aged sweaty, and would look strange taking an aperol spritz and noodling on my IPad. Luckily my wanderweg takes me to a student street that shouts: "No" and texting, but there is Stipel: ancient monument to German's punk movement and in the space of a couple hours with pierced social workers (drugs, teenagers, "not here in Cologne, the smaller towns, that's where the problems are") I learn a little about another Cologne. The artist who graffiti-sprayed the front of the bar wants to talk about success, which he feels is corrupting - for everyone. "They become arseholes," he reminds me, talking first of Damien Hurst, but then moving on to pretty much everyone. There's a game of pool which is pretty intense and then I think well sod the cocktails. I have found a tiny part of Cologne. Later I will watch older Germans passing the Stipel (the boot). They always - always - smile in recognition of earlier days when they once came here, when their generation had hope - and kein cocktail. But by then they are playing The Clash, perhaps for me as I have met the DJ, though I cannot remember his name. And maybe my memory is playing a few tricks. I have recommendations for tomorrow night, some institution of metal and otherness...By the time I get back to the river even the oom-pah has gone to bed. My room smells like a group of Oil riggers have speed vomited a kebab house. I paint my nose with "Kiehls" shaving foam and fall asleep. In the morning I have culture to consume.