My pen pal snogged the girl of my dreams

I suppose pen pals don’t exist any longer, at least technically. What is the equivalent for the internet age, “e-mates”? “Digi-buds”?

What’s more, in the globalised world there is presumably no need to randomly connect with a bookish nerd from Essen or a devil-may-care BMX afficionado from La Rochelle, when like-minded bods from around the planet can be found in an instant, lip-syncing to your favourite song on TikTok.

Had I joined in with the rest of my class I would have ended up being attached to a lad called Marko. His letter was handed to me by our German teacher as we began the school exchange process one day in Year 8. Marko had big, curly writing and, at the end of his script – which included all the usual niceties about hobbies and pets – he had added a cartoonish picture of a man smoking a fat cigarette, with the word “cool!” beneath it.

Cool indeed. But regretfully I had to pass the letter back, since I already had a pen pal and had been excused a second. I’m still not sure what became of Marko.

My pen-palling had begun a couple of months previously, after my mother conspired to fix me up with the son of my aunt’s own childhood pen friend. Jochen, from Darmstadt, was a year older than me and seemed mature for his years, at least compared to me. Still, in occasional letters the maturity gap didn’t matter much and we wrote to one another happily and with reasonably regularity.

Needless to say, all correspondence was in English, in which he was completely fluent. I had only started German lessons that year and was just about able to explain that I had ein Bruder und keine Schwestern. I never really got much further as it happens.

It had been arranged that Jochen would come to stay with us for a fortnight in the summer term, with one week at school and the other coinciding with half-term. With no other exchange students expected, he would be the exotic stranger in our school. Little could I have known quite what a hit he would be.

As had immediately been apparent on his arrival, not only was Jochen older than me, but taller, cooler, suave, more handsome; and frankly, a ton more interesting. On the first Monday morning of his stay we walked across the recreation ground together, me a little spod in school uniform, he in his casuals looking like something out of a Brat Pack film or an alternative rock band. I saw heads turn, which never happened when I was on my own. In those few hundred yards, I wondered desperately if I might benefit from some reflected glory.

For a day or two, I guess I did. I had never been so popular, at least by proxy. The boys thought he was funny and cool; half the girls fancied him – and since he was my guest, they couldn’t very well ignore the fact that we came as a pair. And Jochen himself, delightful as he was, wanted me to be a part of it all.

But I wasn’t as sociable or as confident as he was. When, at the end of the week, he was asked to meet my classmates at the local youth club in the evening, I was too shy to go along. He went instead with my best friend – and ended up getting off with a girl I had a huge crush on.

At an agreed hour, I went over to the club to meet him; effectively to make sure he found his way back to our house. I was a little boy chaperone, on a walk of shame, cursed by my own pre-teen diffidence and by unfavourable comparisons with a Germanic God. I wished I’d got Marko.

I went to Germany for a week in the summer hols of the following year and watched hour upon hour of MTV, presumably holding Jochen back from what he actually wanted to do. But four or five years after that, and after our letter-writing had long fallen into abeyance, we met again in Cambridge, more or less by chance.

The age gap that had once yawned wide no longer mattered and we felt like olds pals, surprisingly easy in each other’s company. We slouched slowly around a cricket field together on a blisteringly hot Saturday afternoon, chatting about everything and nothing, before an evening of heavy and hilarious drinking.

Oddly enough, just as the digital dawn was breaking, that was the last I ever saw of him. I should write him a letter.