I have lived for almost four years with a German Fraulein, and undertaken six trips to her homeland. It has been a gruelling journey with many dangers and losses of liberty.

However, I am now regarded as a friend to these people, and as such am able to study them and observe their ways in great detail.

Their dwellings and customs are strange, and I am only beginning to understand the surface layers of it all.

Their cake and cheese are offered to me, as sacrifices to a sullen god. I eat all and occasionally indicate signs of content in a shared language of grunts and hums.

The mastery of their odd and guttural language still eludes me, and if I did not know better I would name them Savages. However, they have fire. They have the wheel. They have flatscreen televisions and a world class league in a barbaric custom they call ‘Football.’

There is more to these people than at first meets the eye.