Today we tipped our caps to our Charlottenburg hostel and our red fish-netted friends, and trundled off to meet up with Count Willy, whose family, conveniently for us, happened to own quite a pad in Berlin.

‘It’s just a small place’, Count Willy said. ‘It’s really only for when my parents swing by now and then’ (daddy is the German Consul-General to China, and mummy the women’s delegate to the UN as well as Countess of Someplace in central Germany).

Anyway, the ’small place’ turned out to be a thirty roomed pad which took up the entire tenth floor of an apartment building, complete with dining hall lined with severe-looking portraits of severe-looking predecessors dating back to the fifteenth century. It’s worth mentioning here that Willy himself has not just a title but twelve middle names and some very impressive dental work.

We’d arranged to meet up at the Reichstag building, assuming he chose that site because it’s a large landmark and even topographically-challenged travellers like ourselves couldn’t possibly miss it. But as it turned out he’d obligingly used some family connections to get us on the list for a private tour of the place.

Before we managed to get too excited though, we were seated dutifully in the parliamentary chamber and our guide proceeded to lecture us for 45 long and painful minutes - in German - on all 120,000 laws of the constitution of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland.