Summer 1988

We got to London in C's Peugeot 206, but not before I'd inadvertently thrown the map out of the window on the Belgian motorway system. This was before we got lost in Brussels.

It turned out to be the summer that shaped the next twelve years of my life, as I was contacted by a big producer of musicals to maybe take part in an upcoming foreign production of The Phantom of the Opera. They gave me a ticket for the London production and I instantly knew what direction I wanted my professional life to go in. No more ballet piano for me come the following summer; I was going to hand in my resignation as soon as I got back to Koblenz (you still had to give ten months' notice, hence the forward planning). C and her recently-arrived boyfriend managed to get a couple of standby tickets and felt pretty much the same way as I. Our instant, simultaneous love for this form would prove to have legs...

Apart from pottering about London, we all took a trip out to Stonehenge and visited Salisbury, the beautiful city where I spent most of my first six years, my bedroom overlooking the cathedral. We tracked down 96, Exeter Street but our other address, 48, Culver Street, had been turned into a multi storey car park. I calculated that we must have parked pretty much where my bedroom used to be, as the view through the windscreen rang more than just a few bells.

Stonehenge had started becoming Elf 'n' Safety conscious; cordons were up and 'Though Shalt Not' was written on quite a few walls. I still remember it as a three-year-old, when we were able to run over and play on the stones as if it were Druidworld. Now, I gather, you aren't even allowed within twenty yards of the things.

Back in London, I got an invitation to a wedding. A gay American friend from college was getting married (for obvious reasons). He was there with his companion, she was there with her boyfriend, and I met someone called Elsa. Slightly older but oozing charm, erotic and, yes, sex, we got to know each other a lot better very quickly in one of the spare rooms. High on the atmosphere and the forbidden fruit I felt I was going to explode. One of Elsa's virtues was her complete absence of morals once she'd taken her clothes off. I couldn't phone her, as she was married but how I wished I could have. She went on holiday soon after; by the time she'd returned, I was back in Germany.

Someone else I met at that party, albeit completely platonically, was a former fellow student from the RCM called C...She was going off to Turkey to sing in a nightclub for a few months and promised to call on her way through Germany. She never did, and only about a year later did I find out why when our paths crossed in Vienna, an encounter which sealed the prelimenary steps towards musical theatre I'd just made a few days previously, but that's for a later post.