WELL back again from a rather short holiday, which now seems aeons away. I can't say I recommend trying to get to Stanstead airport from Cornwall. It involved driving to Bristol, catching a coach to Heathrow, waiting around for an hour and then another coach to Standstead followed by a two-hour wait for what turned out to be a short flight of just over an hour. Being a German airline, it went on time and arrived early. I must add that I can't criticise National Express coaches. They too left dead on time and arrived on time, an achievement which no rail service in this country seems to be able to achieve. The coaches were fitted with television and even a loo, although I can't say sitting on a loo in a compartment approximately the size of a small coat cupboard travelling at 80mph is much fun. Germany was cold, displaying typical April weather of heavy showers and sunshine and the occasional flurry of hail and snow. These combined to force me into more shops than I would have cared to go in and despite the fact that most of them don't take any form of credit card apart from a German debit card – which mercifully I don't have – I managed to spend quite a lot of money out of sheer boredom. Well, that's my story. All German cities are clean, well cared for and lack the colourful addition of gangs of drunken yobs staggering round making life hell for normal people. I dare say there are areas where you might find this, but not in the main shopping areas, which makes shopping at least tolerable. You also don't see overflowing bins or litter everywhere, because this is a country which takes rubbish seriously. We could learn a few lessons here. Most district councils in Britain are making sterling efforts to teach people to recycle, not always with a lot of success because most of us are too lazy or too busy to take time to sort our rubbish out. Germany didn't bother with gentle persuasion. It passed laws to enforce recycling so that you can be landed with a hefty fine if you don't. In my daughter's house the recycling is in full swing, with bags for metal, paper, plastic and household waste. You have to learn the rules, such as paper cartons go in paper recycling unless they are, like milk cartons, coated in plastic and then they go into plastic. The household waste mustn't contain meat. Each household has three huge bins for recycling and one for general rubbish, which after everything has been sorted is a tiny weekly bag. By the end of the week I was frantically trying to work out if a cigarette packet was paper or, because of its inner bits, metal and if tea bags should go in household waste or paper (the former I was told). If you don't recycle you get a severe warning plastered on your dustbin, probably starting with Achtung, and if you ignore this you get fined. Oh, the shame of having a criminal record which reads 'failed to recycle her potato peelings in the household waste bin but secreted them in a pile of plastic yoghurt containers'. Sounds pedantic but it works. While we're talking pedantic, my daughter and I nearly choked in the NAAFI when one of the staff gave us a stern lecture about visitors not being able to buy cigarettes. My daughter innocently remarked that she didn't know this and the woman said it was in 'standing orders' and hadn't she read them? As standing orders are about as long as a small detective novel and just as complicated, she hadn't. The woman then said, with a totally straight face, that some people ordered copies of them and kept them in the toilet so they could keep up with the rules and regulations. Perhaps my comment that it would be handy if you ran out of loo paper was rather facetious. One other thing I approve of in Germany is that almost all houses have cellars. Not your nasty grimy spider's web dank type of cellar, but a three-roomed area which can be used for storage, as a utility area for washing machines, tumble driers or freezers and, in summer, as extra sleeping accommodation. This essentially gives you an entire extra floor to the house, making a small three-bedroomed house much bigger and far more family friendly. Other countries do this too, of course, but for some reason house builders here almost never do. When you look around at the tiny estate houses we now build, some with two rooms downstairs and three (including a bathroom) upstairs, with little cupboard space, you wonder why on earth each of them doesn't have a cellar included. Too expensive, said a British builder in Cyprus who was providing a quote for my daughter's house in Cyprus. Rubbish, said a Canadian builder who also gave a similar quote. Most German houses also have a completely boarded-in attic when you move in, so avoiding the worrying prospect of heavy unwanted household articles falling through the unboarded ceiling you get in British houses. Anyway, enough of that. I arrived back in Bristol to find my son had washed my car so that I didn't recognise the gleaming silver steed awaiting me at the bus station. Nor the gleaming interior which, I discovered to my horror, also contained an air freshener in the shape of a dolphin dangling off the interior mirror. It gave me a ferocious headache on the way home, but I haven't had the heart to remove it. Everything in the car had either been tidied up, the CDs put in their cases, the maps in the glove compartment, everything else in the boot. 'Where's my lucky rabbit's tail?' I said somewhat ungratefully. 'I thought about it,' he said, 'but decided to leave it where it was.' The lucky rabbit's tail was acquired one night on a lonely country road when we ran over its previous owner. We screeched to a halt only to see the owner rush off into the hedge, apparently unharmed. Closer examination, however, revealed that it had left it's poor little tail under the wheel. Thinking that that was some lucky rabbit, I retrieved it, hoping some of the luck had rubbed off on me. I'm glad I still have it. Mind you, I suspect my son washed it before returning it to the car.

At the moment the office is in turmoil because we are finally moving out of the building up to Webb's Hotel, now called Webb's House, in case anyone walks in and demands bed and breakfast. The paper has been in the same building since 1857, so it's going to be a momentous move and everyone is frantically 'recycling' rubbish and delving deep into desk drawers to see what stays and what goes. It's a bit like moving house, only times 20, and a chance to get rid of all those things that all of us hang on to just in case they come in handy although they never do. I'm going to have to wrench my unique collection of seed catalogues out of my own hands and dump them in the skip, sort out hundreds of pictures and books, and somehow manage to cram them into my allocation of boxes. The rest of the stuff will have to be stored in the boot of the car until I can sneak it into the new office. Only joking!