Back from Berlin.

Maybe I was in the wrong place on the night, but there seemed to be a remarkable number of road-blocks near the Brandenburg Gates to keep the public well back from the assembled global VIPs.

By which I mean hundreds of yards away. A curious and depressingly telling way to celebrate the Wall’s fall.

One of the worst things about blogging is that one’s beloved former work is as lost as old newspaper copy. Yet sometimes readers hit upon something I wrote a long time back, such as this famous piece about the UK’s doomed attempts to teach Russians how to fish (and farm):

Moscow had not had fresh milk in any quantities since the Revolution. Behold, it started to come into supermarkets in 1995. Why?

In part because of McDonald’s.

The then biggest McDonald’s hamburger outlet in the world had opened not far from Red Square. Russians queued en masse to sample the food – and the glamour. But to run an operation on this scale required milk shakes and meat, ie cows. And importing meat/milk to meet Russia’s surging demand was not sustainable.

So McDonald’s set up their own farm in Russia. And it worked.

Thus a magnificent case study in failure of development assistance.

On the one hand, an intelligent well-designed and expensive socialist model farm which never produced a single sausage as far as I know. Launched with such a fanfare it quietly crawled away to die in a KHF cupboard. I still wonder what it all cost.

A reader finds this piece and writes:

Excellently written post, if only all bloggers offered the same content as you, the internet would be a much better place. Please keep it up!

For once I am not minded to argue.