By the time you read this, I’ll be finishing packing and out the door towards Berlin, where I have a meeting. And it will be fucking freezing, because, for some reason, I only go to Berlin when it’s fucking freezing. I’m sure Berlin is a lovely city, really, but whenever I’m there it’s full-on icy Cold War grimness just the way we and television drama imagined it in the 1970s. Bad enough that I barely speak the language any more — I studied it at school for a few years, but I retain so little of it that the cab drivers laugh at me and say I’m from Monkey Island, which is what Europeans call us because we put so little effort into (or are simply, as a people, so bad at) learning other languages. It’s a fair cop. I can’t even do what I do in France, which is apologise in French for being English. It’s appalling. I simply have no facility for languages. I’m still learning English.

The most terrible thing about that is that I genuinely love Germany(and France), to the point where I spent a beautiful Millennium eve in Hamburg. But off I go, armed with ten words of German, the Word Lens app and a lot of well-meaning sign language.

Note: I’ve had to reset my personal website to a generic theme because about ten things broke when I moved it to its current hosting company.