It was 1994 and we, Susan, Myself, Lee, John and Sarah were on holiday in the area of Rastenberg, in what had been, until not long before, the communist state of East Germany. There was considerable reconstruction under way, but it was very obvious that the area was years behind the west in many ways.
The weather was very hot and we covered many hundreds of miles in the car, as the country areas in particular were seriously under-developed and the roads, largely unmetalled, were few and far between. Driving through a farming area one day, we began to notice that the fields around us had been spread with organic manure, the origin of which was best not thought about! Being such a hot day, and without the benefit of air-conditioning in the car, we had to drive with the windows open. This let in not only dust and enormous, ponderous flies, but also this increasingly dreadful smell, which one could almost cut with a knife! Eventually John made the memorable remark, “If this smell gets any worse we’ll have to put the lights on!”