George Bush Snr. in Koblenz

I can't remember whether it was in my first or second year in Koblenz that the then President of the USA, George Bush, came to town. My American neighbour, beside herself with excitement, dragged me along to witness hoards of serious, Ray-Banned Secret Services aides jogging alongside the Leader of the Free World's limo before the man himself climbed out and held a speech about, well, I don't really remember that either, to be honest. The event was held at the Deutsches Eck, the north-facing promontory where Rhine joins Mosel and host to a splendid spiked-helmet-type monument whose inscription reads: "Never Shall the German People be Divided, Should you Remain Honest and True". The flat-topped mausoleum lookalike used to be crowned with an equestrian statue of Kaiser Wilhelm. The Americans, though, on the last day of World War II decided to revert to playground behaviour, trained a cannon on it and blew Kaiser Bill half way to the Lorelei. A petition was already in place in those days to have him replaced with a like model. Years later, a Düsseldorf businessman put up the readies and gave his horse a leg up to regain his rightful place in German history.

All this took place in the run-up to the fall of the Eastern Bloc, Reagan later exhorting Gorbachëv to 'tear down this wall' while Honecker put his fingers in his ears and went 'lalalalalalalalala', organising massive celebrations in honour of the DDR's 40th anniversary. Not two years later, sitting in a squalid East German café just over the border from Lauenburg an der Elbe, did I remember all this as I looked at my sugar packet which proudly proclaimed communism's 40th anniversary on German territory. The Wall had fallen, collective euphoria was still high and the East Germans didn't know whether they were coming or going, as evidenced by the fact they found my dented, ten-year-old BMW the height of urban chic ("Äh, geiles Auto, Mann!")

Bush's appearance in Koblenz was strategic and symbolic. Mighty international European waterway meets slightly lesser international waterway where effigy of former central European Emperor got his balls blown off by a transatlantic cannon of peace. Military intelligence had it that borders were going to be opened and a new Europe would emerge, so where better to appear than a rather ugly monument which by night becomes THE gay meeting place in Rheinland-Pfalz? Sound illogical? Not when you consider the de facto capital of Europe is now Brussels, and if you're not happy with the Old Bailey's decision you can always take it to Strasbourg.