Trains are not the only form of transport in Germany that can debilitate the unwitting foreigner; bicycles in that country have been specifically engineered to cause the utmost misery. What’s worse, the mysterious workings of footpath etiquette are something I was never able to get a handle on.

Being a born and bred Aussie (where people drive on the PROPER side of the road), I’m naturally inclined to veer to the left on footpaths, escalators and various other walkways. Living in Konstanz, in the south of the country near Switzerland, I devoted a great deal of my time and energy to reversing this trend, to mixed results.

I found that difficulties tended to arise when it came to shared footpaths – one side for bikes, one for humans. This is truly an invitation for broken limbs and disfiguring facial wounds. Eventually I discovered that there were various scattered and extremely well-hidden points throughout the city where special blue signs delineated one side of the path for bikes, the other for pedestrians.

This would have been all well and good if it were a uniform pattern throughout the city: no sooner had the thought crossed my mind that I just may have caught on at last, when I heard the ominous warning tinkle of an approaching bicycle (and boy, do Germans like to tinkle their bells!).

To this day, the sound of a bicycle bell never fails to fill me with trepidation, because I know that I must step to one side, but which side?

One foot wrong and I could end up splayed catastrophically over the handlebars of some surprised Sunday pedaller, or worse, in an icy ditch somewhere, utterly forgotten, until my perfectly preserved carcass is extracted at some point in the distant future by beings who will probe my crevices and extract my brain by way of my nasal passages…