Nice Aquascutum tweed jacket tie even took my earring out! With my fancy clothes on
Nice Aquascutum tweed jacket, tie, even took my earring out! With my fancy clothes on, I made a polite request for an upgrade when I checked in. The response was `Plane full’.”The winner, Brian Loy of Ilkley, was luckier:”`Come with me,’ beckoned the official as we waited in the departure lounge for the KLM overnight flight from Lagos to Amsterdam. But others, he says, are more fortunate: “Some friends recently travelled to Mexico City with KLM. On the homeward journey they were ushered into business class.
“Then, about five weeks ago, my neighbour, together with her granddaughter and niece, travelled to Seattle with KLM. Call me stingy (as I’m sure the family will, when we exchange presents), but this column’s modest end-of-term prizegiving ceremony is about to begin
Two competitions are to be resolved First, the KLM upgrade saga.
You may recall the tale of a ticket issued by the Dutch airline which uncompromisingly warned NO UPGRADE. Graham Hookings of South Glamorgan writes to say that he, like me, seems consigned for ever to economy. About the only surviving Beatles connection is their old drinking haunt, the Gretel & Alphonse bar at number 29 Grosse Freiheit. The proprietor cashes in with Lennon posters and McCartney T-shirts.Paul called in at the bar one day in 1991 when he returned to Hamburg for a concert, and bought every customer a drink. If he had repeated the exercise when I was at the Gretel & Alphonse, there were so few customers that he would have had change from a DM20 note (about pounds 7). These days, the Magical Mystery Tour around Hamburg has few takers.The Travel Section’s annual end-of-year competition will appear next Saturday, 27 December.
Its contents are still a heavily guarded secret – but a copy of the Beach Boys’ greatest hits from Santa could help.. The rest of the band straggled back to Liverpool under a series of similar clouds. The Reeperbahn is pretty grim these days.The Beatles’ first visit to Hamburg ended messily, when a 17-year-old George Harrison was deported for working under age. They soon began to moonlight at the Top Ten Club, just around the corner at Reeperbahn 136. Today this is a 1960s disco called the Music Box, with the Beatles performing on CD rather than on stage. The mauve gables above the entrance, presumably hangovers from the 1960s, look especially exposed now that the club is wedged between the Eros Centre and a tacky amusement arcade.
For the Mersey, read the Elbe – the broad, leaden waterway that is still the lifeblood of Germany. After an exhausting drive across Europe, the Beatles’ battered van emerged from the 1,000-foot tunnel beneath the river and took them a few blocks to the Reeperbahn.The local police happily help the beat pilgrim (it makes a change from busting drug dealers). The location for that first performance, they say, was the Kaiserkeller at 36 Grosse Freheit. In fact the Indra (number 58) was the original, though the band was obliged to move on to the Kaiserkeller after complaints about the noise.Each band member was paid DM30 (which was then about pounds 2.50) for every five-hour session. In the summer of 1960 it must have looked much like Liverpool, scarred by war and struggling to make up for lost time and lost lives. Sources argue fiercely about the geography and chronology of the Beatles in Hamburg, but most agree that the band never played this seedy dive.