Berlin

Well the year isn’t finished, but thanks to what looks to be the combination of the world’s most peaceable religion, a truck and a temptingly bustling Christmas market in Berlin I’m going to have reprise my most frequently written piece of recent years. So here we go again. On Monday night a truck was driven into a busy pedestrian area in Berlin. In the immediate aftermath the media were understandably wary. It could be a Glasgow-like accident or it could be a deliberate act. Struggling with this conundrum the BBC plumped for ‘Lorry kills nine at Christmas market.’ Naughty lorry. To date the attack still doesn’t have a hashtag that’s stuck. There was an early push for ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’, but for some reason it didn’t catch.

On a windswept square beside the river Spree, across the road from Berlin’s Museum Island, there is a brand new building which epitomises Germany’s shifting attitude to its imperial past. For 500 years this was the site of the Berliner Schloss, seat of Prussia’s royal family. After the second world war it was demolished, and now it’s being rebuilt from scratch. The Berliner Schloss has always been a barometer of German history. It was the residence of Frederick the Great, that daft enlightened despot who put Prussia on the map. In 1914, Kaiser Bill addressed his loyal subjects from its balcony. In 1918, Karl Liebknecht stood on this balcony to proclaim his ‘Free Socialist-Republic’. That balcony has been preserved, cemented into an adjacent building.

Scientists are experimenting with growing replacement vocal cords in the lab, as well as transplanting them from dogs. That was the Sun’s imaginative angle on my somewhat croaky debut as a Today programme presenter (only one of mine is working properly). It led me to ponder which species of donor would be fitting for my new role. Rottweiler? Too aggressive. Terrier, perhaps? Annoying after a while. Maybe a shepherd or a pointer would fit better with the mission to explain? All suggestions gratefully received. Bar one, that is. Husky is out. If my first programme had not been dominated by events in Paris, I had planned to talk about the world’s greatest city. I speak of Manchester, of course.

Oddly enough, the cabin service people on the plane are constantly eating during the night, helping themselves to the first-class snacks. They are bulging out of their uniforms. They cannot pass each other in the aisles without difficulty. This is the sort of thing you notice during a long flight; at least the sort of thing I notice. I arrive in the morning at Johannesburg after an 11-hour flight from Heathrow, to promote my new book, Up Against the Night. I am met by a minder who turns out to be the wife of an admiral in the South African navy. He is stationed in Pretoria. I point out that there is no naval base within a thousand miles of Pretoria. She says her husband has noticed this. The book tour is a strange institution.