Had to get the train to the Hauptbahnhof

This year, 42 years after my first Frankfurt, Aevitas's rights assistant Gus Brown attended his first. I gather he had a ball.

In 1982 we had Eurocheques, border police, deutschmarks, landlines, daguerreotypes, horse-drawn landaus, antimacassars on lounge chairs at the Frankfurter Hof, periwigs and bustles, absinthe, Thomas Mann in the corner chatting to James Baldwin.

It was an adventure just getting to the Fair. I didn't fly until the late 1980s. We would load the car with dummies and all the paraphernalia to decorate the stand, cross the channel on the ferry, and drive to the Aachen border post, where we were stopped and checked for contraband by men with machine guns and huge dogs straining at the leash. Once through, on to the autobahn for the no-speed-limit drive via Cologne to Frankfurt am Main.

By my first visit Frankfurt was well on its way to becoming the banking centre of Germany. It had been levelled in the war, literally levelled to rubble, and there were still bomb sites near the Messe.