"I can't tell you on the phone, I'll come over." That sounds like a leftover from our parents' generation, either from the war when telephones might be tapped, or from country towns when the local switchboard might have been eavesdropping. Nope my twenty-four year old Welsh artist friend has been having German girlfriend challenges. Well Prince Charles had his mobile phone intimacies broadcast to the world, so who knows now. Over tea he tells me what's up. It involves two lovely girls both fancying him but now he is starting to fancy only one and he doesn't want to hurt the other. This takes a lot of discussion of course, but then he postpones the burden of how much truth or what sort should be told and we go off to the vast Templehof airport to have lunch in the workers canteen. This gigantic Fascist building is the largest building in Europe. It is eerily empty although complete with employees; there are almost no passengers as it costs much more to fly into this airport than the commercial Tegel airport. And I mean no passengers. A clutch of pilots and airhostesses sitting at the Air Lift coffee bar, all the counters manned, or wo-manned, and three single passengers scattered about. Unbelievable. In the employee cafeteria, called Casino, again there were five people serving and apart from us two there was one lone couple eating in the large claustrophobically Fifties dark wood panelled dining rooms. Weird. Very cheap the food, unfortunately it was not above institutional standards, although with an impressive range of dishes set out, gradually drying out and congealing. All the time I felt as if I was underwater or in some old film.
