When you’re driving across Europe from Messinia to Kent, time can hang heavy on the hands. And it is another rule of life that, when the hands are heavy from the time thing, the Devil will rise from the bowels smelling of sulphur, and find things for those idle hands to do. It is odd, is it not, that Beelzebub only messes with idle hands when they’re  heavy, but that’s Satan for you – he’s a complete Jeremy and no mistake.

As my hands weren’t idle (they were busy avoiding Greek motor cyclists, Italian wannabe F1 Champions, and French speed flics) it was my mind of which the Dark Hornéd one took possession.

High hopes had been tragically dashed the previous month, and this meant a continuation of the ’85 alternatives life-all-over-the-place’ experience I’ve been going through for some time now. So a lot of the time was spent driving on automatic pilot, while using the limited brainpower left to try and puzzle out where life might be leading.

I don’t know about you, but life has always led me, rather than the other way round. I’ve always wanted to lead a life, but life had other plans. This is why life is ultimately very funny, because most times when aspirations are dashed, one’s underachievement is so colossal, it’s hard not to giggle later. It’s just that, at the time, it’s about as funny as secondary lymph cancer.

Within about 400 kilometres I realised that there was no way I could crack a problem that intractable. So I fell to thinking about the ridiculous, the nonsensical, and the downright vulgar. If you’re not careful, the rapid result of doing that is getting trapped in the ‘Obama, Fallon, bureaucrats, bankers, Venizelos, Blankfein how could they be allowed to exist’ train of thought. So I quickly dumped the existential in favour of the surreal.

One of the things that has always struck me about Marlene Dietrich, for example (apart from the fact that she never hit a correct note in her entire singing career) is not that she became famous for her song about a prostitute, Lili Marlene, but that during the Second World War she managed to be on both sides at the same time – and she wasn’t even Swiss.

From Alamein to Tripoli and from D-Day to Götterdammerung, Dietrich was adored by both the German and British armies. From quite a young age I could never understand this: apart from anything else, I always wondered if she might be a bloke. Her tone-deaf voice suggested she might be a lot more Mannfried than Marlene, but on top of that – I mean let’s face it, she wasn’t Edith Piaf was she? – she clearly wasn’t little Mabel that Tommy had left behind in Blighty either.

So it was that, somewhere between Milan and Turin, I began to think of an adaptation of her Lili theme-tune’s lyrics more in keeping with the way I saw her…especially as I know that in real life she was something of a multi-directional swinger. This is the result:

Underneath the lamplight, off the village green/ I ‘ad a little sex wizz a naughty French marine

I geff ‘im a blowjob and what’s more/ ‘e came inside my little back door

Oh it is so much pain/to be Lili Marlene.

I’m sorry if this shocks all of you who think of me as a pure being, but you must surely by now be a dwindling corps. Anyway, the only way is up from that low point….and so perhaps we should move on.

As you may already have read, I stopped at Modena the first night, and of course Modena is alleged to be the place that invented balsamic vinegar. If something is Balsamic (I reasoned) was there perhaps a more radical type of vinegar that was Balsamist? And if so, what would its flavour be like?

This is my vision: a Balsamist vinegar would explode on opening, and cover your face in acidically burning vinegar while shouting “Behead all those who worship Malt vinegar and the false God of Cod and chips!”

Then I remembered that a chum of mine – having seen a shot of me wearing skinny-fit jeans and sporting longer hair than normal – remarked, “Jesus, you look like f**king Max Wall”. And for some reason the name Maxwell popped into my head. And from there it was but a short step to Robert Maxwell wearing skinny-fit jeans.

I met the Bouncing Czech three times in a successful bid to win the launch advertising for his now infamous lead balloon, The European newspaper. He was easily the widest person I’ve ever met – and here I mean physically rather than morally, although as it turned out, both were true. We never got paid (standard procedure with Cap’n Bob) but looking back now, the image in my mind of Bob Maxwell wearing skinny-fits is a wondrous thing.

  What an amazing sight that would’ve been. Equally amazing (but far more predictable) would’ve been the spectacle of Cameron, Balls, Miliband, Osborne, Johnson, Hunt, Blair, Haig, Brown, Brittan, Thatcher, Kinnock, Mandelson and all the other principals with no principles in pursuit of the Man in the Mirror.

 

Somewhere south of Dijon, I began to muse on interesting anagrams, and guess what? – the one that sprang to mind – astonishingly – was Grant Shapps, the man of a million malign alien aliases. And on passing Reims, I recalled being told by one hack that – if you interview Mr Shapps – he simply cannot resist getting out his laptop and showing you lots of lines going up within diagrams representing increasing Tory support in areas where the Conservative Party has next to no support at all. Like pretty much everything Grant utters, these visuals are probably hastily cobbled-together bollocks. Halfway to Lille, the anagram Graphs Pants revealed itself. It works for me.

But it was in a service area not far from Calais that I fell to pondering my latter years alone, and thought of the great screen goddess who constantly insisted that she wanted nothing more than to be left alone. Don’t ask me why, but the lesser known dyslexic film star Greta Garbled was thus invented. She it was who kept telling directors and fans, “Be want alone to I”, “Alone be want I to” and even “Want be to I alone”.