My big night out: I woke up on a llama farm in Germany – hungover and lying beside a naked punk

The clock that ticks at 6am on a Saturday morning at a llama farm in rural Germany, when you wake up hungover next to a naked punk, ticks much more loudly than any other clock. In this case, it was a proper rustic European clock – none of your chrome or plastic nonsense – wooden and ancient, with little figurines which bustled around inside it, on the hour, every hour.

I was 20, on a European road trip, chugging around in an older man’s van in 2014, perpetually hungover.

The older man was a friend who was actually only 40 or so at the time, which I certainly wouldn’t consider old now. He had two treasured attributes, extremely rare in London to this day – he could drive and he owned a vehicle. It was a ritual for him and his boyfriend to explore Europe each summer, and that year they invited me along.

We wended from city to city, stopping in Krakow, Gdansk and Vienna. In Krakow I got lost and had to ask one of the ladies with the pink umbrellas (if you know, you know) to walk me back to my hotel, where I politely thanked her and informed her I was a homosexual. She was unimpressed.

We allegedly had one night in Berlin – but I can’t remember it, so it doesn’t count – before heading to Cologne.

In a cavernous gay club, which is probably now a branch of Ikea, dancing to a track that was probably by Cascada, I saw him. A pale punk with a bright green mohawk, dancing like a windsock, wearing a Donnie Darko T-shirt and a scowl. I chatted to him and he offered me some of his horrible energy drink and what may have been a mint.

I wasn’t remotely attracted to him, but I did love Nicole Richie at the time, and her words suddenly floated into my head. She had said she liked men who were “really skinny and pale and look like they’re dying”, and I decided to emulate her. We danced for a few sweaty hours, then I blinked and we were in a taxi, on a pitch black motorway, headlights illuminating horror movie flashes of warning signs and conifers.

Because of his mohawk and his general vibe, I’d assumed his place would be in the heart of the city, a short vroom back from the club … perhaps a chic loft apartment with a big sliding metal front door, Franka Potente quietly lighting a spliff on an ergonomic sofa while waving us towards a bedroom doorway framed by resilient house plants and bare brick.

This was not the case. His place was a ramshackle chalet about 30 miles out of the city, and as we left the cab I saw the ghostly shapes of llamas drifting around behind a collapsing wooden fence, chickens cooing in their sleep nearby. What had I done? Was this how I died?

When we got in, he flipped on a light so bright it should have been illegal, to reveal a sofa, covered in some sort of mesh fabric, which had burst and begun to disintegrate. We proceeded to have really bad sex on it. Halfway through, he jumped up and ran to the kitchen, returning with one of those cans of budget olive oil cooking spray. What happened next is best left to the imagination.