The wall’s fall was not spectacular. It was night and all you saw on television was a bunch of leather-jacketed Berliners attacking reinforced concrete – mostly with hammers, rather ineffectually. Nobody died. A lot of people got drunk and stoned – and laid, no doubt. The wall itself was not a striking structure, and not even very tall or especially forbidding; the real obstacle had always been the barren, sandy killing ground of mines, dog runs and razor wire behind it.

The vertical barrier was always more symbolic than anything else; a delineation, so the fact that none of the crowds of cheerful vandals scrabbling for a perch on it could do much to destroy it without access to heavy equipment was irrelevant; what mattered was that they were clambering all over this famously divisive, allegedly defensive symbol without getting machine-gunned. However, as the expression of a sudden outburst of hope and optimism and an embracing of change, one could ask for no more, I suppose. The al-Qaida attack on the USA – well, given that a nation was invaded and occupied using this as an excuse, and that this was done in the name of democracy, let’s be both nationalistic and democratic about it: the Saudi Arabian attack on the USA -could hardly have offered a greater contrast.

Slung between these two wide-reaching levellings, the intervening years held civilisation happily if ignorantly scooped, as in a hammock.

Sometime about the centre of that sweet trough, Mrs M and I became lost to each other. We met again, then parted again for the final time just before the third Fall, the fall of Wall Street and the City, the fall of the banks, the fall of the Markets, beginning on September 15th, 2008.