Alas, poor Charlie Garlic! I knew him, Clazzy B

LockerRoom: More Tales of Woe for Them with the Stomach for It.

1: 72 Virgins and a Pretzel, Please Brace yourselves. It gets worse. The week begins with an admonitory email from somebody called ClazzyBurd (first panicky thoughts: surely not the editor?) Anyway Clazzyburd has a little go at us for conveying a sense of, uhm, misery in our World Cup opener.

Did Wilfred Owen have to put up with this, when he looked for the tenderness of patient minds? Think not. So back to the G & Ts Clazzy B and count your blessings. In the World Cup trenches we will toil on, deranged and drunk on inappropriate metaphor.

This week we have been on a tour of the games you wouldn't watch the highlights of. Trudging up and down Germany for seven days, the highlight of which was France's scoreless draw with Switzerland.

"I'm at Mexico and Iran!" I texted a friend merrily the other day.

"Why?" came back the rather deflating answer.

The schedule actually involved two viewings of Iran. For this and other sufferings the sports editor promised, quite specifically, that when I reach paradise I will be given an abode where there are 80,000 servants and 72 virgins (none of them Ann Widdecombe), over which stands a dome decorated with pearls, aquamarine, and ruby, "as wide as the distance from Al-Jabiyyah to Sana'a'." Which, the sports editor says, is a fair distance but not if you were depending on the mileage for a living. Pressed for more specifics, he added it's not the sort of gaff you'd paint on your own. Fair enough.

We thought of our reward on Monday when we had to get post-match from Nuremberg to Stuttgart, a journey which involved a stopover in Augsburg and some odd luck.

A late change of route had meant the only stage of this torrid, day-long adventure for which we had a railway seat booked was the final passage from Augsburg to Stuttgart. We were happy enough with this in our own grumpy way and looked forward to making the acquaintance of the seat as we stood on the platform at Augsburg just after midnight in the company of about 30 inebriated German skinheads. There's a lot to be said for the wheelie suitcase but it's not the manliest of weapons to have at hand in such circumstances.

Anyway the train (a short, dumpy little local thing) duly arrived and the skinheads hopped aboard and spread themselves out along the two carriages in various poses of rest while I wrestled the wheelie bag and its smaller, assistant, junk-carrying receptacles on board. I stumbled towards my seat knowing full well it would by now be occupied by a young man with short hair and an aggressive attitude. How wrong can one hack be.

The seat was filled with a woman with a sleeping child on her lap. In the soft light as we prepared to pull away from the station they looked as if they were Madonna and Child as carved by Michelangelo. The skinheads were all around whispering politely and reverently. It felt terrible having to reach my foot in and kick the woman softly to wake her up and shift her (to the corridor).

Ninety minutes passed quickly. Now, be warned by this digression, that next week I shall be writing an insightful feature on Jürgen Klinsmann based on my extensive knowledge of his family background and also because the sports editor requires mention of football at least once a week in these dispatches.

What luck! It was half-one in the morning when we hit Stuttgart with the gear. Our lodgings are some distance away in the country and Rolf the great, big, happy taxi driver proposes a scheme whereby he will drive if I give him money. Count me in, I say.

On the way, Rolf, who is so much more buoyant than I he should be drug tested, says he has a surprise for me and wheels the car with sudden violence off into a dark, narrow road to our left.

"Oh no, Rolf!" I cry, but he is beaming manically and waves away my qualms.

About 10 minutes later we are in the little town of Botnang, outside the white-painted Klinsmann family bakery. Rolf is talking in whispers like David Attenborough. I am nodding. Nodding off mainly, but nodding.

Martha and Siegfried Klinsmann operated the bakery and made very good pretzels, apparently. Siegfried died. Martha takes an interest. Of their sons, Jürgen is the manager of the mannschaft. Two others went different ways (according to Rolf, who is vague on this) and Horst is the pretzel king. If we wait for another hour we will see Horst arrive to begin his baking.

"Horst is the good son," says Rolf, "Horst vork wery hard."

There is a silence between us.

"Only fools and Horsts," I say softly.

Rolf nods. We wait another 10 minutes. No Horst. I promise Rolf I'll come back in the morning to see Horst. Of course, I don't. I'm shallow that way.

2: Here's Your Hat, Where's Your Knoblauch?

Which reminds me. In Frankfurt the racetrack is almost beside the football stadium. Two things. First: Germans go racing? Second: the German word for racetrack is Gallopbahn. Brilliant.

The German language is something of which I have absolutely no knowledge. But as with other things, that won't stop me writing about it.

Imagine this. I went into a German chemist at Berlin railway station the other day because I had a cold and a sore throat (see, ClazzyBurd, feeling pretty sorry now?) and I stood in the queue behind another foreign journalist suffering the same tragic ailments.

He was looking for infusions. He had gathered a few and the last on his list was garlic.

"Garlic," he said to the chemist, who had pretty good English.

She looked back blankly.

"Garlicen," he said.

Still blank.

"Garlische." Nothing.

After a minute or two he attempted to draw a picture of a garlic. She mistook this as an onion.

Finally out of nowhere I found myself uttering the word knoblauch.

Ah, knoblauch! She ran and got my Aussie colleague a splendid garlic infusion and then turned to me and began speaking in German, of which I have none apart from the world knoblauch. Which is embarrassing.

People I have related this story to expect that my unexpected linguistic genius will be based on my having thought that a knoblauch was some sort of male chastity belt and the word stuck in my head.

In fact, Chuck Knoblauch was a pitcher for the New York Yankees who lost his nerve and got the yips and couldn't throw anymore and somewhere in the back of my head was a newspaper headline: Poor Charlie Garlic.

You can gather learning from even the most unlikely places.

3: Roger and Me

I play a game on the trains. I have escaped from Colditz and if questioned I am a cobbler from Hanover travelling to see my aunt in Frankfurt. I stay in character by loudly saying things like Bitte! Hauptbanhof! and, lately, Knoblauch! whenever I speak to a German person.

Yesterday I was on the train, travelling to see my "aunt", who would give me papers with which to get over the border to Switzerland, when I found myself surrounded by Allied forces.

American surfer dudes, cruising Europe and going to Kaiserslautern to see their brave boys play.

They literally spoke about nothing but surfing for the first hour I was on the train sitting behind them. I dozed off, all the better to enjoy my favourite surfing dream (seeing, as you ask, it involves the fact that cats have wonderful balance and should by rights make grand little surfers. Myself and Jackie Brown (jnr), our house cat, are on Dollymount, like an Adonis and a non-furry Adonis . . .). Anyway, suddenly I awoke with a start. There is a small, stocky, black man trying to get into the seat across the aisle from me. The German woman in the seat is having none of it. But the Americans are in uproar. One of them has recognised the guy.

"Dude! You're Roger Milla! You should soooo like play for the USA tonight. We totally need you, Roger baby! Dudes, this is Roger Milla, the Cameroon guy! Give me skin, Roger. Wow, dude, look at you." And he's right. It is Roger Milla.

We all stare at Roger Milla now. He is still hoping to get into his seat, this giant who once organised a tournament for pygmies. The German woman is still having none of it.

Roger glances down at his ticket and says suddenly, "Sorry. Wrong car." And he bolts off up the train looking for peace.

I shout after him. "Is it because you is black?" But there are no Ali G fans in the carriage.

(Actually I made the last bit up. I never shouted that. This is still a liberal newspaper, whatever you might think.)

Anyway back to the World Cup trenches.