I’d read somewhere that the agricultural hall sometimes functioned as a giant church for star ecclesiastical performers, accommodating congregations of twelve or thirteen hundred. There weren’t that many here today, but we were still a sizeable audience for an aluminium shed with a gravel floor, and corn mice scuttling between the plastic chairs, alarmed, as indeed I was, by the music and the sentiment. I suppose I ought to have been pleased to get my German brass band at last, but it was too late for me – all I could see now were sleeping-car stewards. They went through the usual disheartening brass band routine of thinking to surprise you with what they could do with ‘pops’ – a spirited ‘Sweet Gingerbread Man’, a less banal but still banal medley from Cats, and so on. Then they did something which in all truth was a surprise: they went straight from the ‘Lincolnshire Poacher’ to the ‘Luftwaffe Theme’ from the film The Battle of Britain. They let it rip too, giving it plenty of martial swagger and air space. But it wasn’t that it should be played so feelingly that startled me, simply that it should be played at all. ‘Trink, trink, Brüderlein trink,’ the Liedertafl Choir, all neat in blue blazers and grey flannels, now rose and sang, which struck me as all very well, but. They didn’t win me over with, ‘In München steht ein Hofbrauhaus,’ either. It was only when they got to ‘Ich hatt’ einst ein schön’ Vaterland’ – the song of the migrant, the plaint of the forever exiled – that the tears sprung out of my eyes and I was every man’s brother once more.

Mind you, I had been drinking.