My Berlin obsession has been rekindled by my sister’s visit to the capital. I’m now sidling up to random people on the street and begging them to give me a job or a place to live here.

Ok, that’s an exaggeration, but I am genuinely obsessed with Berlin. Today we took the same guided walking tour I did with a friend a few weeks back, and this time I was the dorky loser who got to put my hand up every time he said ‘So, who knows what this is…?’

But our guide himself admitted it’s his own obsession with German history that sees him still here three years after arriving in 2002 for a three-week holiday - he used to sidle up to people on the street and murmur ”Uh huh, Brandenburg Gate right there, built in 1871′…So anyway, after my second arrest for doing this I thought I should really try my hand at being a legitimate tour leader…’

In the evening we go to see an exhibition of Near East and Islamic art, which is quite impressive, if for no other reason than it appears a bunch of excavators had pretty much just nicked a huge number of monumental chunks of palace walls, statues and altars from their original sites in Syria and Iran and dumped them in a Berlin museum.

Finders keepers I guess.