1 February 1991
My overnight ferry from Harwich edged slowly forward down the Elbe river, breaking the surface ice as it went. I ventured briefly onto the open deck, hunched up against the freezing cold wind as the ice floated slowly past me in solid blocks. The city of Hamburg loomed slowly into view, cool and uninviting. Perhaps I was already anticipating the frosty reception awaiting me on the first day of my new job in Germany.
I didn’t make this up for effect. My arrival coincided with the coldest of cold snaps in Northern Europe for many a year. The overnight temperature dipped as low as minus ten degrees Centigrade in my first week. The Alster lake was completely frozen over and the city authorities decreed it was safe for the general public to be set loose on its ice. A multitude of stalls were hastily set up to sell Glühwein and as many varieties of sausage as this sort of occasion demands. Naturally I assumed it was always like this in mid-winter. In fact, this stunningly spectacular event would only be repeated once more in the next two decades.
In the event, the welcome in my new office didn’t turn out to be quite as icy as the Alster. Even so, I tried to turn the temperature up a notch by spilling coffee over my brand new employment contract. But it soon became apparent that there was another issue I needed to deal with: my relative youthfulness. This was not something I had anticipated - or indeed, something that has ever troubled me during the current millennium. Back in the UK, I was used to being one of the oldest in my peer group: I hadn't graduated from university until I was twenty-three, having taken a gap year after school and a four year languages degree. Most of my joiner group were barely twenty-one. I was well into my fifth year of career experience (in German: Berufserfahrung, a very important concept) when I took up the opportunity of a manager level role in Germany.
I already had an inkling that people were giving me strange looks. I checked my trousers regularly for inadvertent fly slippage - to no avail. Then all became clear in a meeting with the office administrator, a stern looking lady “of a certain age”, as the French would diplomatically put it. She had been charged with writing a short piece for the in-house magazine about the arrival of a new and exotic creature von der Insel (“from the island” - a popular German name for exceptionalist Britain).
Already looking at me as if it were way past my bedtime, she went for the killer question:
“Wie alt sind Sie, Herr Burton?”
(How old are you, Mr Burton?)
“Siebenundzwanzig Jahre alt, Frau Dingsbums”
(Twenty-seven years old, Mrs Thingummyjig)
“SIEBENUNDZWANZIG!! Aber sie sind doch schon Manager! Mit siebenundzwanzig??!!”
(Expression of mild surprise that someone of my youthful good looks had climbed the greasy pole to manager with such alacrity)
After the killer question, came the brutal and typically direct conclusion:
“Das darf nicht wahr sein!”
(Literally: That is not allowed to be true! Or shouldn’t be, if her opinion counted for anything around this office).
Clearly on the back foot at this moment, I stammered in attempted mitigation that my next birthday was coming up in April, at which point I would be twenty-eight. In my eyes, this was ancient, already a massive psychological hurdle I was preparing myself to jump come the spring. Luckily, this appeared to placate her for the moment and she duly noted it down, before scurrying off to talk to some grown-ups.
A week or so later, the promised publication appeared. I turned with anticipation to the news of my arrival. I was greeted with a couple of lines of job description and background, all fine, then came the awful truth of the final sentence:
“Mr Burton is 27¾”