As I discovered after having folded all my knickers up out of sheer boredom, the day had been far more eventful than I’d thought. Wilken had spent his day diligently handling a number of taxing issues that had, unbeknownst to me, arisen in the kitchen.

The first incident had to do with the stash of snacks I’d bought in preparation for our next trip. Willy had neatly laid them out on the kitchen bench with a handwritten note saying, in English (and hence mostly for my benefit, as opposed to the houseful of brothers) “Don’t eat”.

Despite this careful measure, at least one bar of chocolate (the one with the caramel and honeycomb layers) had mysteriously fallen prey to thieves.

Having spent half his day on the hunt for the wily burglar, Wilken had at last given up and spent the next half of the day bracing himself to break the news to me that we were minus one stuck of chocolatey goodness.

Meanwhile, little brother Carli, in a vain attempt to soften a killer hangover, had thrown some buns in the oven and turned it on heat, so to speak, then wandered off to play Call of Duty for three hours. Some time later Wilken marched in, ostensibly on the hunt for the aforementioned confectionary crook, to find the kitchen full of black smoke and the buns as black and hard as the meatballs that Frau Bruns had so meticulously prepared that morning and hidden in the back of the oven so no-one could possibly stumble across them before dinner.

Into damage control went Captain Willy, carefully assessing the damaged meatballs with a firm finger and concluding that they were indeed utterly inedible, and that the only possible solution was to butcher and pluck a full chicken in their place.

At this, I retired to the bedroom; after all, I had a chocolate bar to eat.