This is my piece of the Berlin Wall. It normally sits on the windowsill of my study. I would like to have been in Berlin yesterday, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the crumbling of the wall, but had carelessly allowed my passport to expire and was in London getting a new one. Still…

One thing really pleased me, though — that Mikhail Gorbachev was there, and was properly honoured by Angela Merkel. If the story of the disintegration of the original ‘Evil Empire’ has a single hero, then it’s Gorby. “His achievement”, commented the Economist last week,

“was not in making great intellectual discoveries, but in spelling out publicly what people had said and thought in their Moscow kitchens for years: that people in the West lived better than in the Soviet Union, that the Soviet economy was inadequate and that ‘we can’t go on living like this any more.’ This was common sense. Saying it openly, however, was a breakthrough.”

This triggers a rueful thought: Gorbachev was a lot more perceptive than yours truly. In 1977-78 I was a Research Fellow at a Dutch university. One of my fellow academic visitors was a Soviet scientist. He was a Vice-President of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, which meant that in those days he was a Very Big Cheese indeed. (Once, with a single telephone call, he had several seats cleared from an overbooked Aeroflot flight to make space for a friend of mine who was visiting Georgia.) Before he returned to Moscow, he and I had a coffee together. I asked him whether there was anything he would miss from his Dutch sojourn when he returned home. “Oh yes”, he said, “the photocopier”.

“Eh?” I replied, baffled.

He went on to explain that he regularly spent two days a week in periodical libraries back home copying out extracts from scientific papers in longhand. “You see”, he went on, “in my country photocopiers are regarded as devices that need to be strictly controlled. They can be publishing machines for samizdat.”

At that point I ought to have twigged that the Soviet system was doomed. If it couldn’t handle routine information technology like photocopying (and FAX) then it would be unable to modernise. So it was only a matter of time before it crumbled.

As I say, I ought to have spotted that. But it was only years later that the significance of the conversation really dawned on me. Gorbachev’s genius was that he saw the problem, understood what it meant — and had the courage to state the obvious. That, and his refusal to use force to save Honecker in East Germany, were the critical factors in the remaking of European history that took place twenty years ago. But he’s been effectively written out of the story. Which, I suppose, was predictable. History, after all, is usually written by the victors.

Apropos my musings about the evocative power of the Beatles’ Here Comes the Sun, this wonderful little chap emerged just before dawn on Saturday morning, yelling loudly to make sure that everyone knew he’d arrived. The funny thing was that we had been told by the ultrasound folks to expect a girl.

He’s my first grandchild, and his arrival has been the most wonderful, moving experience. Everything people say about it is true. He also seems to me to be extraordinarily handsome. Note the rakish angle at which he wears his hat. And the way he is already fashionably bored by all the fuss going on around him.

This is wonderful — a NYT photo-feature to mark the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It’s a set of photographs of the same locations taken in 2009 and 1989. You can wipe from one to the other. The one I like best is the view of the Reichstag, but theyt’re all terrific. Sobering and moving too.

Just listening to Jerry Springer on Desert Island Discs One of his choices is Here Comes the Sun by the Beatles. He chose it because it was played as his wife came down the aisle at their wedding. As the track plays I am suddenly transported back to the moment, forty years ago, when I first heard the song. It was a glorious, crisp Autumn morning at the beginning of my second year in Cambridge. The sun was flooding in through the bay window of the College flat that Carol and I and our first child then shared. I had just finished constructing a crude DIY Hi-Fi system. A few days earlier we had purchased the album, but hadn’t been able to listen to it. So I put it on the turntable and, with bated breath, switched on the amp. And there it was. I thought it was such a beautiful, optimistic, moving song.

It still is. In a few days, my first grandchild will be born. And when she arrives I will play it then too. Strange how music reaches the places that other media cannot reach.