It’s been a 20-year break
THE last time I was at the Frankfurt Motor Show, I vowed that I would never return. It was too big; the main halls were temples to German metal; while the treatment of Japanese companies bordered on the contemptuous. That was 20 years ago.
And yet.
And yet, here I am back again. It is an important motor show, and there is so much going on within the industry that it was difficult to ignore.
But disaster struck almost immediately. I left my reading glasses on the airplane. An elementary mistake. And it took the best part of two hours to track down the correct phone number to be given the correct course of action in the hope that they might return at some stage into my possession. Fingers crossed then.
It meant that the copy I had to file was delayed. It would have to wait until post dinner. I went with Mark Bursa, who edits our sister title Business Van Manager, and Julian Rendell, a Brit news writer we had bumped into that writes industry stories for Autocar.
At Mark’s suggestion, we went to the Adolf Wagner. It’s a splendid old place and serves, essentially, pork and apple wine (quite a sour alcoholic drink, but well suited). We had the frankfurter platte – which consisted of most things associated with pork. And a splendid evening was had by all – as you can probably see in the hopeless picture I took.