Luck does have this funny way of inverting itself. I’m in Zürich airport again, glued to one of these plastic Internet terminals, when I could be sitting on a screaming metal box in wet leather clothing in a hundred-mile-an-hour airstream filled with bits of lukewarm water. All down Europe the weather is just how motorcyclists don’t like it. “Of all the terrible times to lose my keys!” I wailed on Thursday evening, and, “Of all the lucky moments to lose my keys!” I marvel now.

The weekend continued in its wonderful vein. On Sunday morning I donned a stretchy black tank top, Peter picked up another friend from Duisburg and off we drove along with 750,000 other poofters to the Christopher’s Day Parade in Cologne. We elbowed our way onto the big bridge across the Rhine, and as the floats began to approach we could feel even that massive steel-and-concrete structure bouncing up and down. Cologne is Germany’s San Francisco, with barely enough straight people to provide recruitment fodder for the Gay Agenda, and so we bounced up and down to the Madonna and Village People, snatched at the condoms flung out in handfuls, and cheered at the luscious lissom boys in their unbearably tight cropped shorts dancing their gay little hearts out on float after float. I blew up my first condom and let it bounce away across the heads of the crowd, but Peter stopped me from doing any more.

In between floats I marvelled at the mature Apollo who was sitting up on the railings opposite us: perfectly lean, chiselled by Hephaestion from his perfect blond hair to the taut musculature disappearing into his artfully distressed jeans. He looked like Peter O’Toole might have if he’d stayed off the booze for a few more years after Lawrence of Arabia.

Before half the parade was past we were exhausted and sunburned (I have a most fetching little tank-top outlined into my skin) and Peter and I tottered back to his place where, without much premeditation, we got up to a little gay parade of our own and, ah my dear, you don’t have to be Peter O’Toole.