Andrew Marr’s diary: Holidays after a stroke, and what the Germans really think of us

It’s been a strange summer. After a stroke, holidays are not what they used to be. We went to Juan-les-Pins for a week in a hotel. It seemed perfect because it had beaches for the family, and at nearby Antibes there is a great little Picasso museum for me to haunt. It has the best drawing of a goat ever made. My daughters and wife doggedly manhandled me across hot sand into and out of the water and I enjoyed that. But being surrounded by so many fit people running, cycling and swimming was a little dispiriting. Mind you, I’ve always been useless at holidays. I hate being too hot. I hate lying around on grit (rebranded as ‘sand’). I hate airports. I hate long car journeys. My idea of a good break involves a bracingly cold northern city and some good art galleries.

So when I went to Berlin to complete a film about Angela Merkel, I was a lot happier. Berlin, though it also was too hot, is one of my favourite cities. The political classes there speak better English than they do in London, the art is fabulous and the bits the RAF missed are pretty tidy, too. I was talking to one of Merkel’s aides and was struck by how nervous he was about a German economy that seems to our eyes so strong. Oh no, he said; we have no real leading internet brands, and we have a growing anti-scientific consensus — anti-nuclear, the Greens, GM crops, all that — which is cutting off Germany’s options for the future. Above all, he told me, you in Britain have the greatest city on earth. You only like Berlin because it’s so empty and quiet.

But any sense of self-satisfaction was punctured while I was up at the Edinburgh Festival.