The summer has flown by. Well, you could hardly call it lost, it was packed with good things. Although I have a good friend in Duisburg, probably the only thing that keeps me going there is my old motorcycle. Duisburg would not be high on a list of picturesque and historically significant German towns. It was a steel town, like Sheffield, or Gary, Indiana, one of the cities which make up that part of Germany called the Ruhr, where vast mills smoked up the heavens and spewed forth the tanks and artillery that overwhelmed Europe twice in the last century.
But the glory days of Krupps and Thyssen are over. The immense factories stand idle or are converted to other uses, such as offices or museums. During my first visits, in the nineties, the town shared in the general prosperity of the economic miracle. Today it suffers seriously from unemployment, and is generally shabby, unkempt, and not at all what you expect to see in Germany. My bike is an old BMW Funduro, and my friend Dirk Erker, a master mechanic, keeps it alive for me so that I can run around Europe in a pleasing and economic fashion.
When I go to collect it I usually spend a night there, and in the nineties I got into the habit of visiting a particular restaurant in the centre of town. There were no windows onto the street so that it had a very private, almost club-like feeling. When you went in there was a large polished counter to the left, displaying various beer pumps, and a few tables to the right. All the furniture was wood and everything was very solid and grounded.
The back of the room was raised up like a dais, with a couple of steps and a railing, and there were more tables up there. The customers all looked as though they had been there for ever, and were obviously known to the two severely practical ladies who ran the visible part of the establishment.
The kitchen must have been in the basement because the food came up on a dumb waiter. The menu was quite broad and the wine was very reasonable. I was very fond of the North Sea muscles that were brought to the table in huge specially designed pans, but all the fish was good.
