Or I do, but they’re ordinary images, not the kind of scenes you’d expect from an attempted assassination or a declaration of war. Honestly, you won’t believe it – all I can see are people picnicking, with little picnic blankets, in a field, surrounded by small bumpy hills.

That’s what these people are watching? Other people eating?

At last a journalist starts talking but I can’t hear what he’s saying, I can only read the words that appear beneath him.

‘Live from Sopron.’

Sopron?

Obviously that isn’t going to make you jump, but I did. Sopron is the name of a little town in Hungary, with sixty thousand inhabitants, near the Austrian border. Don’t imagine that I’m a total geography swot, it’s just that Sopron, if you remember, is the town my family comes from, on my mother’s side.

Crazy, right? I warned you.

For what stupid reason have all the cameras on the planet gone to Sopron?

I sprint, believe me, I sprint to C29, our bungalow.

Everyone is at number 25, where the Germans are staying, Jakob and Anke Schreiber, Hermann’s parents.

Everyone is at number 25 because they have a television. We don’t.

‘What’s happening, Ma …’

Mama Palma raises a finger to hush me. No one turns around, they are all sitting on their plastic chairs, staring at the screen, and it’s still showing nothing but these families in tracksuits eating chicken legs and drinking beer. What is this madness? What is happening in Hungary?

The resurrection of Sissi?

The end of the world?

A flying saucer landed on one of the picnic blankets with ant-sized mini-aliens inside?

It takes me a few minutes to work out why the whole world is focused on these yokels having their lunch. The yokels are Germans on holiday in Hungary. East Germans, to be precise. And the hills are Austrian.

Have you got it?

Not completely? OK, let me give you the background.

Today, on 19 August 1989, the Hungarian authorities decided to open the borders. The ones belonging to the Iron Curtain. For the Hungarians this had been possible for a few weeks, and generally speaking they’d go home after taking a little tour of the West. But this time they’d got rid of the border for everyone, with no regard for nationality. Operation open gate! Lasting exactly three hours, from three till six, long enough for people to organise an enormous picnic, a Pan-European Picnic, as they call it. The army sat back, folding their arms.

Then the rumour went around, and the East Germans didn’t need to be asked twice.

More than six hundred of them, who happened to be on holiday in this corner of Hungary, crossed the border before the gates closed again. And according to the journalists, they’re in no hurry to go back.