THE FINAL SPEAKER of the day, a jocular professor and business expert from a local university, was making his way through closing remarks. I didn’t speak German, but judging from the guffaws of laughter erupting from the audience it was going quite well. I kept an eye on my watch however because I had to get to the airport for a quick flight back to London to meet my wife and daughter who were arriving that evening from New York for a week’s vacation.

The conference hall was in the center of Frankfurt and walking distance from the hotel in which I had stayed the night before. The city center had until 1945 been the largest medieval centrum in Europe.  Almost completely eradicated during the war, the so-called old town was now a collection of skyscrapers giving Frankfurt a distinctly modern profile. The only trace I saw was the ornate old Opera House, which had stood in ruins for many years apparently until being restored to its former splendor in 1981.

The hotel I had stayed in the night before occupied the top 20 floors of one of the taller skyscrapers.  From what I could gather, there were several styles of rooms ranging from more conventional to aggressively modern. Because of limited availability, I had been given a room that could be best described as Post-Modern Bizarre, where every detail – down to doorknobs and curtain cords – had been so heavily designed as to render them almost without utility.  The small room was divided into several smaller spaces; the open plan bathroom had a window through to the bedroom, directly over the bed. The bed itself, typically european, didn’t have a top sheet – just an eiderdown.  The pillows had been sculpted into rounded pyramids, or flattened Hersey’s kisses. I had arrived after dark and couldn’t appreciate the 35th floor view, so I had to be content with watching re-runs of Dynasty in German. Gute Nacht, Herr Carrington.

The next morning morning just as I was checking out, there was a fire drill, which included the elevators shutting down for the duration.  I wondered why they had planned a fire drill for 08:45 in the morning on a weekday.  Needless to say, I wasn’t looking forward to walking down 35 flights of stairs, so I waited for the drill to finish, and then ran the 3 blocks to the meeting.

His speech finally over, the professor was enjoying the warm applause of an appreciative audience while I was slipping out a side door to get to the coat stand ahead of everybody else.  Coat and carry-on in hand, I ran to the curb outside the conference center and hailed a cab to the Frankfurt airport.

In the course of the previous year, I had had several run-ins with late or cancelled flights between London and Frankfurt, and was anxious to get back to London’s City Airport in enough time to stop at my hotel on West India Quay and then head to Paddington Station to meet Mary Elizabeth and Charlotte, who would be taking the Heathrow Express and would probably arrive at about 10pm.  So I left several hours before my flight was scheduled to leave, thinking that perhaps I could get on an earlier flight by flying standby.

Go to next chapter – The Big Smoke.