This is an intimidating as well as a long title. How can I possibly write something grown to its challenge? But for an Englishman, the journey to a German girl's heart is similarly strenuous, and so it’s accurate in form as well as content. There will be misadventures. The Englishman will need to learn a patience that belies the paranoiac energy with which his British attachments have been conducted. The insecurity he had long thought to have outgrown will crack his ego once more.

I make the impression that I can offer practical wisdom, but really I can only give you a story. The first lap was called Christine. Christine was cool. She was fucking unflappable. She was so cool she was anaemic. Her mouth was small and round, but I never saw it round, because it was always closed. It was a cartoon line, slightly down-turned, and her eyes, hedged by a clean, black fringe of hair, were large, dark and pretty. And using the sharp lines of which her face was composed, she kept me subtly separated from the rest of her life. I was as soberly organised as her ivory face was. I never knew any of her friends, and yet I was held as a platonic intimate. And here is lesson one: German girls like to keep their worlds separate. They never let their social circles overlap. It causes them a subtle but deep stress, and affects their beauty.