The maitre d’ is hovering over my shoulder. An original Picasso is hovering over his.

“I’m terribly sorry sir,” he says in an accent so fluid I can’t tell if it is French or Hispanic, “but there’s a problem.”

I begin to sweat under my cravat. It is Las Vegas, October 2005, and I am about to reap the whirlwind.

It is the Alsace, October 1998, and I am in the back of a Citroën 2CV going very quietly insane. The autobahn streetlights are following me. Twilight is closing in, and the trees bunched around the border crossing are screaming at each other across the Rhine. Astrid and Gabrielle are talking in the front, but I can’t make out the words. I think it’s about me. Petrified, I sink down in the seat as low as I can in expectation of the cramps.

In this state, there is no way for me to clearly remember the reluctance with which, two hours earlier, I had accepted an offer of a second café au lait.

Gabrielle and I are at the beginning of a three-month backpacking tour around western Europe which I am already concerned to find scattered with little hours of madness. Having flown into Stockholm three weeks earlier at the end of a thirty-one hour long day long to discover my backpack was enjoying an unexpected but exhilarating side-trip to Bangkok, having to first sleep in, then dry myself with paper bedsheets bought from the hostel which smelt—unfairly but convincingly—like urine, and then recovering the backpack three days later with a long-lost sibling hug and an inadvertently ardent moan which distanced me from the others in the hostel foyer, I was finding the traveller’s life a bit like coming over the crest of the rollercoaster to find the rails missing on the other side.

I made up for it by drinking a lot of coffee, and this, I reason in Astrid’s kitchen in Freiburg when I start to come down, was proving to be a tactical error. Something is going on with me and coffee.

“Perhaps you should try drinking something else instead,” Gabrielle suggests.

I switch to Coke.

Two days later, after a long and thirsty walk in the Black Forest, it takes an hour to persuade me, with admonishments that a entire nation is not trying to kill me just because its hostels offer marinated chicken wings for breakfast, out from under the blow-up lilo in Astrid’s spare room.

On the train to Florence, Gabrielle and I reason it out. It doesn’t take long.

“Let’s face it,” says Gab. “You’re tired, you’ve had a rough start and neither of us can afford to eat properly.”

“Agreed.”

“And every time you have a cup of coffee or a Coke, it makes you sick.”

“Okay, yes.”

“And—well, a pain in the arse.”

I consider this. “I like me,” I say.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Gabrielle says, “you’re charming enough, in your own way. It’s just that we’re going to be spending the next three months together, and you may never get to do this again. You’re going to have to stay away from caffeine.”

I let Verona and Bologna pass by in a funk of reluctance. I never much cared for cola drinks, but my love affair with coffee has been long, passionate and at times downright dirty. What will I do if I can’t have coffee?

The rolling fields of Tuscany roll by like giant rolls caught in the middle of the most satisfying roll of the season, and I glare at them for enjoying it so much. Sunflowers, I note sourly. Grapevines. Vegetables of some sort. More vines. Lots of vines. More sunflowers, then more vines. What the hell do they do with all these grap—

“I’ve got a plan,” I tell Gab.

“Fantastic,” she says.

In Florence, I switch to wine.

The maitre d’ is holding both my gaze and, I am very aware, the attention of everyone around me.

“Is everything alright?” I mumble.

He makes a well-trained sympathetic pout. From over his shoulder, a cubist woman’s eyes glower at me from one side of her head. “I am terribly sorry sir, but we have searched the kitchen and we have no Lady Grey tea.”

He watches me benignly. I didn’t order any tea. The tables around me have fallen silent.

Oh God. He has heard me.

...to be continued in Girlie Grey, part two.