I had forgotten the Waller / Kelly much inebriated circuitous walk back to our hotel –in  Ypres I think?

Anyway Mick and I were in that extreme stage of drunkeness where  we had mutually agreed that we were the best buddies the world had ever seen and had agreed to proceed back from the bar we were all in to the hotel on our own –and bugger the rest !! We started off in fine style mostly holding each other up in conventional fashion interspersed with frequent fair imitations of Siamese twins–proceeding steadily with many tangential forays!

All was going well until we came to a point where we had to make a decision on which street was the one which would lead to the hotel–here we had a very strong disagreement on the right choice –like all inebriated disagreements, there was no concedeing on either side –end result was like ” you take the high road and I’ll take the low road and I’ll be at the hotel afore thee”–and so it went, with us shouting to each other to stay in communication  ( a bit like Nelson Eddy and Jeanette Mc Donald ” I’ll be calling you” )–of course the good respectable burghers of Ypres were sensibly in their beds at that late hour and inevitably objected strongly to all the noise –without the shouting we lost contact completely and, with that sense of treachery I had absorbed very quickly from the Strollers,I decided to head ( successfully ) to the hotel — on the inebriated assumption that Mick would make his own way home–as it turned out , this was a flawed assumption and , though I never found out how long it took Mick to find his way home, I thought it more judicious not to ask !!

However my own particular favourite memory was the year we were in Antwerp

We were all strolling down the street in the red light district in Antwerp taking the air and viewing the scenery before settling in to some more serious singing and drinking in the ” Blue Angel” In our company was the stroller of good standing with an almost legendary reputation with the fair sex ( you all know who I am talking about but , with unusual sensitivity for an ex stroller ,it may be better he remain anonymous–he may even be a god fearing respectable citizen now ? )

Anyway , we were passing one of those glass fronted cubicles where the ladies displayed their wares–our colleague proceeded to embark on ” negotations ” with the ( really quite lovely ) person in the cubicle through the glass door—the discussions became quite heated particularly as the thesis of our colleagues argument was that , because of his amazing sexual skills ,she should pay him rather the other way round –whereupon , the transvestite burst out through the glass door and knocked our colleague down with a very solid right cross before disappearing back into his lair–I have an abiding memory of our colleagues very fine hat disappearing below a parked car and having to be retrieved with some difficulty due to the prevailing hilarity !!