READERS’ RIDE

ESCAPE FROM COLDITZ
ANOTHER MOVIE DEPICTION BITES THE DUST… WORDS/PHOTOS CHRIS PRIOR

It didn’t start well. The strong westerlies that battered me as I rode from my home in Cheshire, in northwest England, to the ferry port of Hull on the east coast made me doubt whether this was the right time of year to tour Europe on two wheels. Being retired gives me freedom to choose so I’d decided to go when the main tourist season was past, but the weather still pleasant, or so I hoped. I’d lived in Berlin in the 1970s and had long wanted to see how it and the other former eastern block countries had changed since the collapse of communism. The hedonism of the West then contrasted starkly with the austerity of the Soviet dominated East.