So, it is let’s feel sorry for Dresden time of year again. No let’s not.

Better if Dresden spent its time feeling sorry for Coventry, or Swansea, or the East End. For, to sound like a five year-old, they started it.

Perhaps a lot of the wrong people died through being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but that was the fault of the Germans, not us. They had had six years to stop the war, but despite being obviously on the losing end were still fighting.

They tried to get my dad, wounded and invalided home from Arnhem, and even my mum, unexpectedly stuck on Bank station on the first night of the London blitz.

Perhaps the Mayor of Dresden would like to apologise for that.

The bedroom in which I was born was in a short row of Fifties house in a Thirties street. Wartime photos show the wreckage of the original houses, hit by a land mine in 1941.

Dad’s uncle was in the RAF and never came back from the War.

Let’s feel sorry for him, and the tens of thousands of other airmen who never came back.

Now we see Angela Merkel trying to tell countries messed up by Germany how to run their affairs.

I am enjoying the new Greek Premier telling the Germans they can pay his debts, and who can blame the Russians for not being interested in German views on Ukraine.

Perhaps Russia was not very nice, but at least they were among the Allies.