‘I was just thinking,’ says L , ‘that in the sixties I wore a lot of second-hand clothes. Really good quality stuff, silk dresses and angora sweaters and so on. When I think of that now, I really wonder where it all came from. It might have been clothes from deported Jews or ardent Nazis. It’s sort of sobering to think about the history I might have been wearing.’

’And what about all that ex-army gear we wore, the gas mask bags we used to carry our books in?’

’And the same decontextualisation applies to new clothes too. All you know is the designer, the country of origin and the price, almost nothing about the conditions in which things were produced. So it’s cheap because there’s no collective agreements, no minimum standards…’

We decide to wander through the back streets again in the general direction of the National Palace of Culture (NDK). We cross Boulevard Alexander Stamboliski and a little later head to the left coming out on to Boulevard Vitoscha, a street lined with shops and cafés.

In spite of the dark clouds gathering over our heads we continue along it to the point where we can actually see the Palace of Culture but then get pinned under a shop’s sunshade with a number of others as the rain tumbles out of the clouds all at once. The sunshade is not giving us much protection because of the sheer mass of water coming down. The shopkeeper comes out, takes one look at us and disappears back into his premises. We are all thankful when he appears a minute later at another door and waves us into to the hallway of the tenement in which he has his business. We move inside and watch the water level rise. It turns the whole street into a river bursting its banks. If we tried to cross over now, like the rather determined young men over there, the silt-laden water would reach over our ankles and we would be soaked to the skin before taking more than a couple of steps. It’s impossible to photograph, going anywhere near the door envelopes you in the mist produced by rain drops bouncing off the awning next door or fragmenting on the tree canopies lining this side of the street. All we can do is wait, watch and listen to the drumming and enjoy the slight cooling effect of the downpour. Car boats float down the street, giving off double wakes like the speedboats in some Miami holiday fantasy.