“I tell you in all sincerity: in Berlin I went around all alone to rather vulgar bars and cabarets. At the time, I was living with Karl and Muschi the cat in the same study where he painted his Czech friend with the Russian hound, but not me. I wasn’t interested in the world above.”

I don’t have either the French or the German version in front of me, but “high” (yours) “above” (Smyth’s) and “before” (Bob’s, sort of) are close enough to all be derived from the same word. Yours makes the most sense to me.

You can tell, as Terry at Vertigo mentions, that Bob considers this still a work in progress.

My German is horrible (and getting worse all the time!), so I have no idea what ‘foulierte mich’ could mean, but I googled it and could find no reference to it whatsoever, except on Bob Skinner’s website and the reference to it on this very page. I wonder if it might actually be the verb ‘foutierten sich’ which, although I don’t know what it means, is more frequently used (according to Google), and looks a lot like the French verb ’se fouter’, which is the one used in Bernard Kreiss’ translation, and which means something like ‘to not give a toss’.