I am packing again. On the phone earlier on I thought about hugging knees and back massages. I am so tired I might come apart, like the dust of mosquitoes three months dead. Pick them up by a leg, and they disintergrate silently. It could happen.

Plane to Germany with Chrisie at 7.15AM. We have to be up at 4.30AM. I thought about going to bed, but see no point. To sleep and be woken half way through a dream is worse than no sleep at all.

Tomorrow we will blissfully submerge ourselves into the language, like sinking onto a worn sofa, threadbare but comfortable anyway. Watch bad German TV curled up on the sofa bed. Let ourselves be fed banana cake. Bananenkuchen. Apfelsaft. Ich gehe jetzt duschen. Ich habe dich lieb. 

What’s Germany like, then? asked Joe as we sat on the steps of the Royal Exchange Square, smoking and drinking mocha. He wriggled against the stone step, as if settling down for a bed-time story.

I think I disappointed him when I said like England, only…slightly different. Different language. Different food. The shops…

It is impossible, I realised then, to pinpoint slight cultural differences, the nostalgia lurking in every corner of Oma’s flat, the dialect of the guy selling chips with mayonnaise at the lakeside. The way German shopping centres are bigger, better, different. German stationary, the little stalls selling Kaesestangen and Pretzel. The cake eating culture. Mohnkuchen.

The butchers. I said to Joe …the butchers… and trailed off, not knowing quite what it is about them, or why I’d mentioned them even, apart from them being different. The smell, the Fleischsalad, Herringsalad, breakfast around Oma’s small table being what it is. Warmed up bread rolls. Broetchen. All this I’ve missed, without realising it quite, not until now.

A few hours away, and I’m hoping everything will be as I remember, that the stairwell will smell the same, that Oma won’t have moved our old school photos from the shelf, that she will be there standing with her arms spread out in the doorway of her apartment, waiting for me and Chrisie with our luggage to run over to her and subject ourselves to a squeezing, with those tears rolling down her cheeks. They scared me at first, those tears of happiness, still do to an extent. They remind me of that time when Opa was still alive, in his wheelchair, and I danced with Oma and Opa cried, and then suddenly we all cried, cried all night almost.

Germany, here I come, baby. It’s been one long year.