After three weeks at home in Leeds for the Christmas holidays, I flew back to Berlin on the 31st of December at 4.45pm. My lovely grandad gave me a lift to the airport, and thanks to 17 years in the military his punctuality is such that it goes way past being sensible and gets rather ridiculous. Four hours early, then, I checked in and sat drinking Guinness and reading until my flight – the last flight out of the airport that day, as everyone who wasn’t a moron had already got their flights out of the way, not saved them for last thing on New Year’s Eve.