Tanya Heaslip

And I got a very rude shock because I'd harboured these images and longings since I was a little girl and I'd written stories about them and I'd read all these books and yet Europe was full of freeways and...

And towns and... No, instead you're in some sort of awful place in Slough in England next to a traffic island with a wimpy bar underneath and the lab breaks or something.

Exactly.

The closest I found was I hiked a lot through Switzerland and Austria.

and parts of the German forests.

And that was the closest I came.

But overall, at the end of the year, and I backpacked solo, much to my mother's horror, because you remember, 89, you'd have to go into a little tobacco and get a card to ring home from a telephone box once a month or two months.

But I made it to the end and I was just very disillusioned.

I'd found these beautiful places, but these childhood longings hadn't been assuaged, hadn't been fulfilled.

And I didn't know why.

And I thought I couldn't work out what I'd done wrong.

And I didn't know what to do next.

Now, this is where our lives sort of kind of overlap, Tanya, because we get to the end of 89, November 89.

And you and I, by the sound of things, we're in the same place.

We're both in London.

We're both watching the Berlin Wall fall on television.

It's like the most exciting thing in the history of the world.

Yes.

So you go and buy a plane ticket and go to Berlin.

I did that and you did that too, didn't you?