Because I had friends in London I soon travelled on. I had met Theresa in Brussels on my Easter escape and together we had hitchhiked to Luxembourg, to Dinant and next to Appingedam. She wore a miniskirt and always had a notebook handy for poetic ideas that she wrote in spotless pale blue calligraphic characters on the pages. Now she took me to Gerda and Bernard and their sons Paul and Richard, an unadulterated Cockney family in Islington, where I could sleep and eat and was welcome as much as I liked. At their house I first tasted my first shockingly fat English breakfast and was addressed as ‘love’ in a corner shop. The Tube I found to be a particular bonus-experience with its intimate arched atmosphere, the trains that brought a sigh to the platforms with their air displacement and the ads that invited the travellers to linger for a look-and-read feast.
Theresa dragged me along the Carnaby Street circuit and thus I cruised, conquered and left London behind, with the gain of Turner’s seascapes.

Soon the tarmac was calling again and I hitchhiked to Scotland, where the warden of the same youth hostel where one was requested ‘to flatten the tins as the garbage man only comes once a year’, revealed to me the secret of what he was wearing underneath his kilt. I was not impressed and could only agree with the ban forbidding kilted Scottish soldiers on the top of double-decker buses.
When in thought I extended the inhospitable precipices of the Scottish Highlands to beyond the surface of Loch Ness, it took little effort to find room for prehistoric life forms. And as everyone there sticks to the rules, doubt soon gives way to the good-natured spirit in which the local population cherish their ‘Nessie’. Moreover, you can shout out to such a distance there that the echo sounds like a message from the past. From Inverness I made a daytrip through the northern mountains that not really added to my exploit.

Southbound again. A bit under Edinburgh and I was tired, so tired that just off the road I sat down against a wall for a while. A slightly too old girl came out and invited me to rest inside. I gratefully accepted and was offered to lie on the sofa. I woke up again to muffled voices: ‘And George was riding me like a horse’ and then I was wide awake, but that was it. After a sandwich and a lot of ‘ta’s’ I went almost non-stop to Groningen. On my way in Hull I slept at the Salvation Army Hostel in a neat single bed compartment, a disconcerting improvement on the antique photographs that showed how formerly the redeemed had to sleep standing up, only resting their arms on a thick rope suspended across the room.

To be continued: 'Derelict denizen'.