As you may have read, I am keen that we remain in the European Union. But not half as keen as I would be if the European Union were made up of just four countries: England, Denmark, Holland and Germany. That coalition of like-minded peoples would, I think, work well. Especially if we put Germany in charge.
Oh sure, we beat them in two world wars and one World Cup, but after spending last week on a filming trip in Bavaria, I was left with one all-consuming question: how? How does anyone beat this lot at anything?
I began the trip in a small, guttural-sounding Alpine town, and as I stood outside the hotel, blowing smoke in the general direction of passing American tourists, I noticed that every single shop was small and privately owned and fantastically neat. There was no German Home Stores hosting a closing-down sale, no charity shops and no gaping holes where Woolworths used to be.
And there was no litter. By which I mean none at all. And because there was none, I had no clue what to do with my cigarette end. Simply tossing it away would have been like taking a dump in the middle of the Somerset House skating rink. I was therefore forced by custom and example to extinguish it in a flowerbed and then put the butt in a passing American’s rucksack.
The following morning, however, I received a shock. While having another cigarette, I noticed that in the middle of the perfectly cobbled street there was a discarded plastic coffee stirrer. Later I told our local fixer about this, imagining she would find it funny that I’d noticed. But instead she looked shocked. “Where was it?” she asked in the manner of someone who was going to drive back into town to clear it up. “It was in the street outside our hotel,” I replied. There was a long pause as she thought about that. “It must have been dropped by one of your film crew,” she said.
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We may scoff and roll our eyes at that, but what’s so wrong, I wonder, with living in a country where it is inconceivable that someone would drop a plastic coffee stirrer in the street?
“We laugh at the Germans, but why? It’s nothing more than a country that works
The next day I pulled onto a grass verge while the film crew waited for the right-shaped cloud to form and, immediately, a local person pulled over and told me that I couldn’t park on the grass verge because I’d leave wheel marks and possibly squash a flower.
My natural reaction to this sort of interference is to tell the busybody to eff off and leave me alone, and I was on the cusp of doing just that. But then I thought: “She has a point.” So, with an apologetic wave, I moved on. And as I drove away, I looked in my rear-view mirror to discover that, sure enough, I had left marks in the otherwise perfect grass and I had bent a couple of dandelions.
After this I decided to see whether I could find something wrong with Germany. Apart from the wine. And the pop music. It didn’t take long. It has a truly lousy mobile phone network. Most of the time there’s barely any signal at all, and I never once saw the 3G symbol flash up on my phone. But then, why do you need a fast data delivery service when you can leap into your car and, thanks to the autobahn speed-limit policy, be 200 miles away in an hour?
Which brings me on to Germany’s drivers, all of whom are excellent and all of whom have up-to-date car insurance, or, as they elegantly call it over there, Kraftfahrzeug-Haftpflichtversicherung. Then there are the roads, which are as smooth as the glass they used to make the Hubble telescope. Every repaired section is as invisible as the tucks on an ageing supermodel’s face. There is not even a word for pothole.
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And nor does the German language cater for “striking junior doctor” or “fly-tipping” or “lying police officer” or “the football ground failed to meet safety standards”.
Nor would you be able to say: “It seems that when he was a young man at university, our prime minister went to a party and placed his gentleman sausage into the mouth of a dead pig. So now he must resign in shame.”
Because when it comes to this sort of thing, the Germans are a lot more tolerant . . .
A couple of years ago, someone posted photographs on the internet that appear to show a younger Angela Merkel enjoying a naturist holiday with a couple of female friends. And nothing happened. There were no strenuous denials from her office. No efforts were made to take them down. Because in Germany everyone knows that they are either fake, in which case so what? Or they’re real, in which case people now know their chancellor — unlike her incongruous Barbie doll double — once sported a 1970s welcome mat between her legs and a pair of excellent breasts. And again, so what?
In the past I’ve mocked German lavatories, which come with a shelf to catch your stool and a supply of lollipop sticks that enable you to examine it for defects before flushing it away. But actually it’s simply an early warning system for colon cancer, and what’s wrong with that?
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It’s a question that cropped up time and again as my week in Bavaria rolled by. We laugh at the Germans, but why? Because it’s nothing more than a country that works.
You don’t queue for security at the airports. You don’t spend half an hour in your hotel room trying to turn out all the lights. The hot water arrives instantly. So does your train. And shopkeepers don’t waste your morning with idiotic small talk. That’s why I’d put them in charge of a new, slimmer EU. The English would then do the banking and the jokes, the Dutch would organise the parties and the Danes would make the furniture.
And think how good the football team would be, especially when it came down to penalty shootouts.