That Lizard

Roger takes a photo of a lizard in each country he visits last week, including England on the bottom right (note that Madeleine wants her brother in the frame). Roger does this for his 10-year old daughter and I think he is on to something here. It is pretty damn silly and totally connects his journey - an easy blog concept that I'm sure would generate mucho interest. Roger?

I'm back from Köln where Hans and I pitch up some business and drink beer (a lot). Beforehand I allow myself a few hours to visit an old friend and Museum Ludwig which is modern art and has the largest Picasso collection in Europe. No doubt, Dear Sister, I am able to impress our afternoon meeting with my knowledge of German contemporaries. For dinner we head to Frue, a famous brewery that serves traditional fare - sausages, saurkraut, mash and studel. They only brew one type of beer. All year round, just one beer, but I am not complaining. Afterwards we go to a bona fide beer hall nearby our hotel - crowded, smokey and jammed packed with young and old. They and we drink .... beer. As Hans says: "The beer here is good." And amen.

In a further nod to Big Brother, unified traffic wardens and attendants have been renamed Civil Enforcement Officers. They give out 7.8-million penalty charge tickets in 2006, up by 169,000 the year-before. This excludes the latest development of CCTV, which adds another 2-million tickets according to Daily Mail, up from 320,000 in 1997. It is the way of the future man. Nobody cares.