THE KICKER:THE REEPERBAHN MIGHT well be the most depressing sex tourism drag in the world. Is that a strange qualification? Possibly, but I think it's needed. There's something camp and naughty about strolling around Pigalle, Soho or Amsterdam's red light district, but the Reeperbahn combines the bleakness of prostitution with the poignancy of an historical destination at the end of its useful life. And it's face-shatteringly cold.
Maybe it's depressing because I wasn't in the market for a prostitute or a €25 beer, a dubious kebab or a sex toy, a fight with a Surinamese pimp or a canter around the aisles of the Aldi situated across the road from the Beatles memorial. But within 30 seconds of emerging from the U-Bahn station in the St Pauli district, it was clear that all of the above were moments away, should I be desirous thereof.
Back in the 1960s it was probably a neon hub of activity on 4pm of a Monday - sailors swarming the alleys and comely maidens cavorting in boas - but in 2008, nobody needs to go to the Reeperbahn to get their kicks. Matter of fact, getting smashed in the face by the Surinamese pimp was the most attractive proposition, such was our boredom and exhaustion that day. The ships in Hamburg harbour arrive, unload, turn around and clear off in jig time, and the only people who can't move so quickly are those at the mercy of capricious, cheap European flights.
We are the lost souls who are killed by time when their flight is cancelled, as well as trying to kill it. You only get out of a place what you are willing to put in, the cliché goes, and we never wanted to go to Hamburg in the first place. It was Monday at 4pm, yet we were meeting the sad-eyed gaze of goose-bumped sex workers while the fingers of frozen fog from the Baltic wrapped themselves around our necks, and the dampness of that chill froze our noses.
In Berlin's Tegel airport that morning on the way home from a weekend break, it was as if a tiny little pill managed to doom the schedule. The Xanax I took was the butterfly flapping its wings in China, and barely had I swallowed it when the word "cancelled" flashed up on screen right beside the 9am to Stansted; our flight. To my right, a television began to show footage of environmental protesters storming runways in London. Of course. And as a 200-passenger-strong peleton of high dudgeon beetled past, towards the customer service desk, I considered a trip to the bathroom to forcibly eject my panic button. As if I hadn't borne enough residual guilt about taking Xanax on a short-haul flight as it was.
By the time we joined the queue, it snaked around the departure lounge, and as we had bought our flights in one of those over-exclamation-marked winter madness sales for a tenner, hanging around to be told to forget about any kind of help felt like a monumental waste of time. Already, I was spacing out, eavesdropping on the touring Canadian ice hockey team arguing furiously with each other in front of me. At the departure gate earlier they had been so cheery, discussing skates and pucks and in which manner they preferred to wax their skis.
Xanax barely works for flying, such is the unpleasantness against which it is pitched in the battle for serenity - the overwhelming noise and discomfort, white-knuckle terror, shoving, bumping, baby-crying and lottery-ticket selling; the freeze-dried, vacuum-packed horror of flying. But now I was on Xanax on terra firma, and utterly slack-jawed in the face of complicated, expensive decisions about how to get home. I got exactly what the little pill does for you. It turns you into a moron.
We had to get back to London that day. But how? The next flight from Berlin was at 8pm, and clearly this plane would be stuffed with the 200 people in front of us, if not the passengers who had booked it before them. A friend with a computer texted us about a flight out of Hamburg that night, but had we known what existential nadir waited on the Reeperbahn, would we have left that queue? It is blissful, the dumbness. Because we didn't know that staying in line would be easier, we left the bickering snow jocks and stepped outside, beneath an icy charcoal sky. We thought our day might be somewhat Jason Bourne-ish - dashing around Europe finding envelopes stuffed with money and duplicate passports in train station lockers, hot-wiring scooters and leaving a trail of wasted secret agents in our wake.
Like a day in the life of Robert Ludlum's spy, the taxi to the Berlin Hofbahnhof was the first of nine modes of transport. But by the time we reached the Reeperbahn, we had also circumnavigated the Hamburg train station district on foot three times, drunk coffee in three cities, drunk wine, Coca Cola and water in two, eaten a steak lunch in one, snacked variously, sat down, stood up and used various public conveniences everywhere, laughed, cried and snoozed, all with equal levels of hysterical intensity. I never saw Bourne do any of that.
Back on the Reeperbahn, we reached the end via a pedestrian subway which managed to surpass the bleakness of all previous pedestrian subways. An old hunched figure pushed a shopping trolley and muttered about the apocalypse. It was dank down there, the fliers advertising prostitutes clinging to wet tiles. We climbed the steps to street level. A car whizzed by splashing dirty rain water. And 50 per cent of The Beatles were dead.
Jason Bourne never accidentally sedates himself in the morning. His mobile never runs out of batteries and his credit card never fails. He can speak German, doesn't get airport shuttles, and can pay for speedy boarding. The only thing Jason Bourne doesn't kill is time.