When my train pulled into Essen on Tuesday, I had no idea what to expect. As a historian, I associate this city in the Ruhr region mostly with coal, steel and Krupp. The Krupp dynasty came from Essen, and it was here that they established their (in)famous empire of steel and arms production, fuelling Germany’s steep economic rise but also its military efforts in two World Wars.

Not least due to the Krupps’ efforts, Essen rose to become one of Germany’s most important industrial hubs. Also not least due to their efforts, it was the target of one of the heaviest Allied bombing raids during the war, which destroyed around 90% of the city centre.

What would I find in Essen now? A rebuilt city, marked by post-war architecture and post-industrial transformation, that much was clear. What I – perhaps naively – hadn’t expected to find was one of the poorest cities in Germany.

I was on my way to Altenessen, the most populous district of the city, but also one of those described as “problematic” by many of the locals I spoke to during my stay: many empty buildings and disused former industrial sites, high unemployment, high proportion of migrants, high crime rate, drug issues, a lot of homelessness.

Talking to social workers, youth coaches and teachers, I was told the same thing I’d heard in Dortmund again and again: the A40 motorway, which runs right through both cities, divides them like a “social equator”: North - poor, South - affluent.

This is much easier to explain than to remedy. In the decades after the Second World War, the Ruhr region recovered from bombing and ruin as West Germany underwent a so-called economic miracle, with eye-watering growth rates averaging 8% or more. For the recovery of the “Made in Germany” model, the country needed fuel, and the Ruhr region had that in spades with its vast coal reserves.

The West German government heavily subsidised coal mining, believing it couldn’t afford any gaps in the cheap energy supply this provided to the rapacious industries that underpinned the recovery necessary to stabilise German society and politics after the war. Jobs in the sector paid decent wages and seemed secure, so plenty of people moved in, from other parts of Germany as well as from Italy, Spain and Turkey.

In the 1950s, Essen built over 100,000 new flats. Workers could finally move out of makeshift and inadequate housing. At its peak in the early 1960s, the city had over 700,000 residents. It was the largest city in the Ruhr area and the 5th largest in Germany.

Much of this population growth occurred north of the A40 autobahn, where many of the mines were located. Densely populated and quickly rebuilt neighbourhoods emerged, marked by working-class culture. There were social clubs, small pubs and shops. Germany’s sharply tiered school system meant that in such working-class areas, school types dominated that did not lead all the way up to A-Level.

The speed and nature of rebuilding in the northern parts of the Ruhr district meant that city planning wasn’t done with social mobility in mind but to provide housing and amenities for workers and miners. Middle and upper class people meanwhile preferred the leafier areas south of the A40. There was less war damage there anyway, and what was rebuilt was done with their needs in mind. A sharp geographical class divide calcified, renewing itself with each generation.

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Then a sharp industrial decline began. First, German industry moved away from coal and towards imported oil. The figures show how quickly this happened: in 1950, coal still made up 87% of West Germany’s energy market. By 1964, the proportion had already shrunk to 60%, set to decline further at a rapid pace. The last of Essen’s once 290 coal mines closed in 1986. An era came to an end in what had once proudly been the largest coal mining city in Europe. Steel never recovered in Essen after what was left of the Krupp assets was dismantled, given the role the company had played in the war.

So now the north of Essen was a vast landscape built for and populated by workers without work. Many moved away – today Essen has just 570,000 inhabitants – others stayed, with some falling into long-term unemployment. The south of the city prospered in the wake of deindustrialisation, benefitting from the government’s supporting measures like the founding of a university in 1972 or the fact that so many big German companies, among them energy giants RWE and E.ON, are headquartered here.

The north struggled. Densely populated, it had little room for new greenbelts. Shot through by massive infrastructure such as wide roads and of course the infamous A40, it’s pretty segregated in terms of access to educational, economic and cultural opportunities.

This self-perpetuating cycle has produced some stark results. In a recent ranking of German cities, Essen is No 4 on the list of the poorest – topped only by three other West German cities. Around a third of children in Essen depend on social welfare – bearing in mind that the city has some very wealthy parts too, you can imagine how much worse the situation is if you just consider the north.

I found it disturbing to listen to a youth worker who explained how difficult it is to break the cycle. Most of the kids he works with are from the north of Essen. If he finds a homeless teenager somewhere to live, it’s invariably in the north because prices are too high in the south. So they stay where they are. Ditto the south. There is very little interaction.

On Tuesday, I visited a former coal mine in Altenessen that has now been turned into an education centre with the explicit aim of bringing kids from the north and the south together. The staff there were proud of the fact that their centre was in the poor north, which encourages children from the south to cross the “equator” if they want to attend the summer camps on offer. But they admitted that actual mingling is still tricky.

While parents from the south are perfectly happy to charter buses for their children to get to the site (note that some are clearly keen for their children to avoid using public transport and to walk to get there), uptake among northern kids is notably slower, even though participation is free for poorer families. Among adults, this disaffection is replicated in lower turnout at elections.

Most of the kids who came to speak to us for the BBC radio programme we were making spoke impeccable English. Despite being only 12 or 13 years old, some had fairly idiomatic American-accented English, indicating that they’d spent some time abroad. They told us that Essen was a “green”, “vibrant” and “cool” place to live. Their only worry was that there were still “too many cars” around causing air pollution. I rather suspect most were from south of the A40, which indicates one of the problems of dealing with the imbalance: fewer northern voices make it into public discourse.

This pattern proved a problem even for our documentary. It’s easy to find politicians, city planners, museum directors, academics and journalists who will happily tell you that Essen and Dortmund are now greener and eminently more livable places than they were fifty years ago. It’s much harder to find people who’ve lost something in that transition and who are willing to talk.

Both Dortmund and Essen have stark and visible problems with homelessness and rough sleeping — according to press reports, numbers have reached record highs. Both cities have large numbers of people living off benefits or just about getting by on low-income and insecure jobs. For them, the transformation of the economy hasn’t created so many new opportunities to participate, so they withdraw.

Eventually, I found a middle-aged man from a working-class background who was willing to talk to me. He was hanging around in Dortmund’s main shopping street with a can of beer in his hand at 10 am on a weekday morning. He said he’d “gladly” tell us what he thinks as he was “from the North of Dortmund” and “we don’t get asked too many questions.” But he apologised for not being able to do it in English as he had only gone to the Hauptschule, the lower-tier school.

Expecting him to be disgruntled about things, I was surprised by what he actually told me. The closure of heavy industry was “inevitable”, he said, and “all-in definitely for the best.” He still remembered how you couldn’t dry your washing outside when he was a kid. “The air was dirty like you couldn’t imagine. Anything you left outside for too long turned grey.” Now, he said, the air and water were clean, and there were new opportunities for “all the young people coming in”.

It’s just a shame, he added, that the northern parts of the city were sacrificed and ignored in this process. “It’s very, very bad where I live,” he said and pointed to somewhere over my shoulder, “and actually getting worse. Drugs, crime, homelessness and nobody cares. I don’t feel safe anymore. Politicians don’t care about the places where people like me live, you know, the housing estates in the north.”

Just a few metres away from him, I bumped into a man about the same age. He’d moved to Dortmund about five years ago for a new job. “A lovely city to live in,” he told me, “green, great infrastructure, vibrant culture and so much to do! I can cycle to work, and my kids love it here.” Would he recommend others to move here, too? “Sure,” he said, “the quality of life is great.”

This was a tale of two cities in more than one sense, and I found the stark social divides hard to get my head around. Coming from East Germany, I’ve grown up with an image of my home region as the “poor Germany”. Indeed, there are a couple of East German cities like Halle, Chemnitz and even trendy Leipzig that make it onto the Top 10 lists of poorest cities at times. But I’ve never seen a contrast as sharp as that in Essen in East Germany. Overall, the oft-repeated stats are clear: East Germany remains poorer than West Germany. But on the lists of poorest cities, you usually only find a couple from the east towards the back end of the Top 10.

Interestingly, when you look at entire regions, East Germany and the Ruhr are nearly on a par in terms of average poverty levels. It’s worth remembering this in debates about which regions need support and what that support can and should look like. A key issue in both regions appears to be the non-participation and/or exclusion of voices from the communities most affected by structural economic change.

When city planners, politicians, social workers and economists who, by and large, aren’t from the affected communities talk among themselves, they envision a future of people like themselves: a world in which university education, the culture sector, tourism and high-end tech jobs are the only answer to deindustrialisation and the loss of working-class jobs. Communities cut off from this brave new world, physically and culturally, are left to fend for themselves. What to do about it is a question that goes far beyond the old East-West divide.

If I said the word “Dortmund” to you, what would spring to mind? For me, it would probably be: football, beer, steel and coal. In that order. Until this week, however, I had no mental image of Dortmund’s cityscape in my mind at all. Okay, this visit would be my first, but I’ve never been to San Francisco or Tokyo or Sydney either, yet I have some notion of what they look like. As I thought of Dortmund when I was on my way here on Monday, I drew a blank.

That’s strange for a number of reasons. I mean, Dortmund isn’t exactly insignificant. It’s the largest city of the Ruhr region in western Germany, which is in turn one of the largest urban areas in Europe and a former industrial powerhouse so central to German history that I write about it often in contexts ranging from the Kingdom of Prussia all the way to West Germany’s “economic miracle” after the Second World War. So why was there a white spot on my mental map of Germany where Dortmund should be?

I was determined to find that out and change it this week. I was in Dortmund with a radio producer to make a BBC documentary on how deindustrialisation has changed the city and how the city is responding to this. It’s been a fascinating journey in which I finally formed a view on Dortmund only to have it dispelled immediately. Let me take you with me on a journey deep into Germany’s old industrial heart.

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“I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself,” Winston Churchill told the House of Commons in January 1948. Anyone who has ever watched a feisty British parliamentary debate will immediately recognise this as a typical, humorous retort to a challenge by the opposition. Indeed, Churchill was responding to criticism of his party’s pre-war foreign policy by the Labour Lord Privy Seal Herbert Morrison.

However, the retort was witty precisely because it was true. Churchill was about to publish the first part of his war memoirs entitled The Second World War, which he’d been working on with a team of researchers for the previous two years. They told the story of the interwar period and the war itself from his perspective and helped shape his place in history, not least because they were very widely read. By April 1954, 2.2 million copies had been sold in the US and 2 million in Britain and the Empire. In that sense, Churchill really had written his own history.

Had Otto von Bismarck, the first German Chancellor, done the same? Like Churchill, he also penned his own bestselling version of events: a three-volume autobiography called “Gedanken und Erinnerungen” - “Reflections and Reminiscences”.

But there are many differences between the two. Unlike Churchill, Bismarck wasn’t keen to get his books out as quickly as possible. On the contrary. He began working on them after his forced resignation from office in 1890, and by October 1893, the proofs were ready to go to print. But Bismarck hesitated, tinkering with the manuscript for years and having it checked by his lawyer for possible legal challenges. When Bismarck died in July 1898, his memoirs still hadn’t been published.

Bismarck had been particularly worried about his scathing depiction of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the young successor to the throne with whom he had so fervently clashed and who had eventually forced his resignation. After all, Wilhelm was still the head of state, and revealing unfavourable secrets or character traits of the monarch could be seen as a harmful act against Germany itself. To a lesser degree, the same applied to other office holders, as well as to treaties and foreign political considerations. So the first two volumes were published after Bismarck’s death, and the third – the one dedicated to Wilhelm II’s reign – in 1919 and 1921, after the Kaiser’s resignation.

Bismarck’s memoirs are widely seen by historians as the work of a former statesman at the end of his life, seeking to justify his actions and set the tone for how historians would write about him in the future.

Bismarck had already begun creating his own myth decades earlier. Even as a young politician, when he engaged in pistol duels, outrageous exchanges with parliamentarians and numerous love affairs, he built a reputation as a tenacious, intense and intimidating character. He actively fuelled this image. Take his famous 1862 speech in which he told the Prussian parliament that “Not through speeches and majority decisions will the great questions of the day be decided [...] but by iron and blood.” The nickname “Iron Chancellor” has stuck to this day.

But I think we go too far if we attribute Bismarck’s reputation, then and now, solely to his own mythmaking. Incidentally, the same is true for Churchill. Through their actions and characters, both already appeared as remarkable men to their contemporaries – long before they wrote their own histories.

Take a look at how Bismarck was seen by those who met him, and it soon becomes clear that he didn’t just portray himself as imposing but that he really did have this effect on others. Let’s start with his physical appearance. The man was huge and not in a lanky way, but broad-shouldered and bear-like. This never failed to make an impression on people.

In June 1878, the British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli attended the Congress of Berlin, where the “Eastern Question” arising from the breaking up of the Ottoman Empire was being discussed. Bismarck saw himself as the “honest broker” mediating between the other parties. He chaired over twenty debating sessions in person, switching between German, English and French as he went. Disraeli was impressed by his presence and skill. “Bismarck soars above all”, he wrote, “he is six foot four, I should think, proportionately stout; with a sweet and gentle voice, and with a peculiarly refined enunciation, which singularly contrasts with the awful things he says: appalling from their frankness and their audacity.”

The gift for using his voice and his words to great effect is also not a myth invented by Bismarck himself. Others saw it too, some long before he was famous. Even in his early school reports, his teachers described Bismarck’s eloquence as astonishing. Using exceptionally evocative verbal images, he found it easy to provoke, irritate, soothe or charm even his most hostile adversaries.

You can see that in his memoirs too. There is biting criticism of his enemies, especially Wilhelm II, but also wit and irony. They are marked by the same peculiar mix of refinement and bluntness that impressed Disraeli when he saw it live in action. For instance, when Bismarck writes: “For the preservation and development of the state, the overwhelming weight of those who represent the interests of wealth is most useful.” It’s an eloquent way of saying that Bismarck knew power lay with the upper classes, whose interests he staunchly defended, despite introducing an element of democracy into the newly founded Germany.

When Disraeli returned to Britain after his visit to Berlin, satisfied with the outcome of the congress, he told Queen Victoria that Bismarck was “an extraordinary man” and he meant it with all the contradictions this entailed. He’d known the German chancellor for years. When the two had met in London 16 years earlier, in 1862, when Disraeli was leader of the opposition and Bismarck Prime Minister of Prussia, the latter had told the former with shocking frankness that he believed war between Austria and Prussia for German supremacy was inevitable and from Prussia’s point of view, the sooner it happened, the better. There was something about Bismarck’s demeanour that caused Disraeli to see more than sabre rattling in this. “Be careful about that man,” he warned the Austrian envoy, “he means what he says.”

Four years later, in 1866, when Austria and Prussia were on the brink of war, Francis Napier, the British Ambassador to Prussia at the time, formed a similar impression to Disraeli’s when he tried to persuade Bismarck to reconsider and seek a peaceful solution. But after meeting with Bismarck in person, he wrote home: “I do not know how far any person, however familiar and trusted, could influence the resolutions of a man of his peculiar temperament”. Bismarck was “so impetuous, indiscreet and – ​many would ​­say – so unscrupulous in the ardent pursuit of his aims”. Napier found him difficult, duplicitous and resolutely ambitious.

When his successor in the post, Augustus Loftus, demanded to know “what in the name of all that is rational, decent, and humane, what can be the justification of war on the part of Prussia?” Bismarck told him frankly that he believed only “the sword” could settle this conflict and that at this point in time Prussia had “the most favourable opportunity for doing ​­so – an opportunity which might not occur again for a century”. So it just had to be done, whether that was morally justifiable or not. The war did happen, between June and July 1866 and was a resounding victory for Prussia. It achieved exactly what Bismarck had intended it to: asserting Prussia’s dominance in German-speaking Europe – a brutal reminder of his callous but effective Realpolitik.

Of course, Bismarck had plenty of faults – indeed, you could count his ruthlessness among them. This essay is not an attempt to glorify him. The point is rather that there is no doubt in my mind that he appeared just as overbearing, powerful, intimidating and irritating to his contemporaries as he has to many historians after his death. There are plenty more examples. Vicky, Queen Victoria’s oldest daughter, who was the wife of Kaiser Friedrich III and the mother of Wilhelm II, saw in Bismarck a fierce political adversary for power and influence at court.

Even Bismarck’s son Herbert found his father an immovable obstacle at times. When Herbert wanted to marry Princess Elisabeth zu Carolath-Beuthen, the older Bismarck was set against the match. It would have been a scandal. Elisabeth was not only 10 years older than Herbert but also a Catholic and a divorcee. Otto tried tears, blackmail and even changing the law to disinherit his son. In the end, he even threatened suicide should Herbert go ahead with the marriage. Herbert relented and did not marry Elisabeth. He became a very bitter man and fell ever deeper into alcoholism and bouts of depression. As I say, Otto von Bismarck was not a nice man, but it would be difficult to doubt his stubborn determination and ruthlessness.

Perhaps, then, we have to accept that sometimes the active mythmaking of politicians and statesmen can be based on the truth. The fact that they wrote something themselves doesn’t automatically mean that it’s wrong. Of course, anyone would do well to read the memoirs, autobiographies, letters and speeches of historical figures with their eyes wide open to distortions, embellishments and omissions. But we don’t have to discredit everything they contain. In writing his own history, Otto von Bismarck may have cemented his self-styled image as the “Iron Chancellor”, but there were many more witnesses to his steely disposition.

One thing I didn’t expect to hear when I got up yesterday and turned on the news was the East German national anthem. After all, it’s now nearly 36 years since Germany was reunified and the GDR became defunct, and with it its anthem. But there it was: “Auferstanden aus Ruinen…” – “Risen from Ruins…” sung by a room full of people in the town of Dessau in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt. The recording wasn’t from 1989 but from Tuesday night.

This made headlines across many media outlets because it happened at an event organised by the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Two of the far-right party’s most prominent figures were on the stage: Tino Chrupalla, the party’s co-chair, and Ulrich Siegmund, leader of the Saxony-Anhalt branch. In Saxony-Anhalt state-level elections are scheduled for September, and the AfD is leading in the polls with above 40% of the vote share. They are even hoping for an absolute majority. So what’s happening in Saxony-Anhalt is currently being watched by the entire country.

That’s why the news that party leaders were singing bits of the GDR anthem created such a stir despite the fact that it’s obvious from the video footage that neither of the two men had expected to find themselves in this situation. It appears to have unfolded at the end of a panel discussion, when Chrupalla told the satirist Uwe Steimle, who was on stage with them, that the AfD always sings the German national anthem at the end of their events. So could he please start them off on that.

Instead of launching into the official German anthem – the third stanza of the Deutschlandlied with its 19th-century lyrics by Hoffmann von Fallersleben – Steimle began singing “Auferstanden aus Ruinen,” the GDR’s anthem, written in 1949. The host of the event, former Green politician Antje Hermenau, can be heard trying to intervene by saying “No, no, no, no” and waving her arm about. Chrupalla and Siegmund looked at one another. Chrupalla shrugged, and when Steimle just carried on singing unperturbed, they joined in with bits of it, though Siegmund, in particular, who was born in 1990 after German reunification, appeared reluctant and unsure of the lyrics.

The incident has since developed a life of its own, with widespread reporting in Germany and internationally. Even Thorsten Frei, the head of the German chancellery, commented on it, saying that he found the whole episode “extremely disconcerting. And that’s especially the case when this is being done by political representatives who clearly do this to convey political messages with it, too.”

It’s true that the AfD taps into and fuels a sense of East German identity with its messaging and rhetoric. But quite apart from the fact that the initiative for singing the GDR anthem in Dessau didn’t come from the two AfD politicians, its origins and legacy are also more complicated than the headlines suggest.

Perhaps the most striking feature of the GDR anthem is that the East German regime itself began to dislike it. Or rather, from the 1970s onwards, it didn’t like the lyrics anymore when they seemed to convey an inconvenient message of national unity at times when politics was moving in the opposite direction.

Risen from Ruins was written and composed in 1949, the year when two separate German states were founded, but also still a time when most Germans wanted to live in one nation-state, and the leaders of both states were keen to show that this was still on the cards. Division was seen by most as a temporary political situation, perhaps even a punishment for war and genocide. The song is a product of the immediate post-war era. Set to stirring music, its lyrics reflect a desire to build a better Germany from the ruins of the Second World War (translation from Wikipedia):

I

From the ruins risen newly,

To the future turned, we stand.

Let us serve your good weal truly,

Germany, united fatherland.

Triumph over bygone sorrow,

Can in unity be won.

For we shall attain a morrow,

When over our Germany,

There’s the shining sun!

II

May both peace and joy inspire,

Germany, our fatherland.

Peace is all the world’s desire,

To the peoples lend your hand.

In fraternity united,

We shall crush the people’s foe.

Let all paths by peace be lighted,

That no mother shall again

Mourn her son in woe!

III

Let us plow and build our nation,

Learn and work as never yet,

That a free new generation,

Faith in its own strength begets!

German youth, for whom the striving

Of our people is at one,

You are Germany’s reviving,

And over our Germany,

There’s the shining sun!

Soon, the line “Deutschland, einig Vaterland” or “Germany, united fatherland” from the first stanza appeared increasingly out of sync with the GDR regime’s desire to stabilise a situation where two German states existed and both were members of the international community. This seemed to come about in the 1970s, when East Germany became a member of the United Nations and was recognised by many countries around the world.

When the East German leader Erich Honecker was received by West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl with full honours in Bonn in 1987, Honecker admitted with a view to the brutal regime at the Berlin Wall and the inner German border that “borders are not how they should be.” But he also didn’t express hope for reunification. Instead, he said that he wished that the day would come “when the border will no longer divide us but unite us, just as the border between the GDR and the People’s Republic of Poland unites us”.

But this vision of two co-existing Germanys wasn’t what the anthem said. So it simply wasn’t sung at official events anymore. Only the music was played as an instrumental version, and the notes were printed in school textbooks without the text.

The line, “Germany, united fatherland” resurfaced with a bang in 1989 when it was on many protest placards as a reminder to the regime that it had suppressed notions of German unity even when they appeared in its own national anthem. Shortly after the Fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, it became part of the clamour for German reunification in the East, most famously during Helmut Kohl’s visit to Dresden in December 1989.

When reunification happened, there was a brief debate about whether the reunified Germany needed a new anthem or whether the Deutschlandlied would remain. This had been adopted by West Germany after the war but, as mentioned above, is much older than that. Originally a 19th-century rallying cry for all Germans to forget their regional and other differences and unite as a liberal nation state, it had also been the anthem of the Weimar Republic. Then the first stanza was also sung by Nazi Germany together with the Nazy Party song, the “Horst-Wessel-Lied”.

There was a vocal minority in 1990 that demanded a fresh start, and the most popular suggestion for a new German anthem was Berthold Brecht’s Kinderhymne, or Children’s Anthem, written in 1950 and, like the GDR’s anthem, set to music by Hanns Eisler. All three anthems partially follow the same meter and could therefore be sung to the same melody. So some suggestions proposed a combination. None were adopted, and the shelving of the GDR anthem became part of the pattern of East Germany being voluntarily annexed by West Germany rather than the two countries merging. Some people continue to see this critically. I wrote here about current-day attempts to revive a discussion around anthems before.

I would urge the (West German-dominated) media landscape in Germany to take this complex legacy into account when reporting on this incident. Headlines like “AfD celebrates brutal injustice regime” aren’t exactly helpful in describing the complicated relationship between East Germans and the GDR anthem — even if that’s a quote from the Christian Conservative Party in Bavaria. Such words are more likely to compound the rise of a new eastern identity that we’ve been seeing in recent years, and that is indeed connected to AfD voting in the former East – albeit not in a direct and linear way.

The anthem headlines have also overshadowed some of the unpleasant remarks made in Dessau on Tuesday. For me, the most disturbing incident was that the comedian Steimle, who initiated the singing, made a rather crude joke about the German Chancellor: “By now, I have to say that when I see Friedrich Merz, I sometimes wonder: Where is Stauffenberg when you really need him?” This refers to Claus von Stauffenberg, who famously tried to assassinate Hitler. Of course, comedians have a licence to be crude, but implicitly comparing Merz to Hitler and expressing a wish for him to be assassinated is a disturbing and dangerous thing to say in times when politicians are increasingly targeted, as we’ve just seen in the UK with the murder of former Conservative Minister Ann Widdecombe.

There’s already a widespread loss of trust in traditional media and a particular sensitivity towards opinionated reporting in the former East. I think it would help if a calmer, more explanatory tone were struck in news reporting and opinion were kept to opinion columns.

If you’d like to know more about this particular incident, I can recommend the report by the journalist Martin Debes, who actually appears to have been in the room. You can also watch the video recordings that caused the stir here and here. You can listen to the East German anthem with English subtitles here.

As ever, I’d be interested in your views on this. Leave your notes below the article on Substack if you have any thoughts. I apologise for not responding to comments as much as I usually do in recent weeks due to all the travelling I’ve been doing, but I always read your remarks and questions and will do my very best to reply more regularly.

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