In June 2015, Innfield and Mrs Innfield, who had been living peacefully in Cape Town, South Africa, found themselves needing at short notice to relocate to Germany.

Now the wheels of officialdom in South Africa grind exceedingly slowly, which didn't make this fraught exercise any easier.

However, somehow it got done, and we found ourselves (and our two cats, whose tickets cost considerably more than ours did) in The Glorious Fatherland.

Mrs Innfield is German, so she knew what to expect. Apart from a couple of flying visits there some years before, it was all new to me.

Join me on this particular voyage of discovery to a green and pleasant country where everything works, where the people are friendly, hospitable, barbarously efficient and rightly proud of their homeland - and where everybody speaks English of one kind or another.