My daughter returned last night from a school trip to Berlin. A week earlier she celebrated her 18th birthday. She was only away for three nights, but it felt like longer. She had a cold the weekend before she left, and I have had one for the last few days, but had recovered enough to play 5-a-side football last night.

Throughout the last few days I have been remembering my own time in Berlin, two trips in the 1980s to attend the Berlin Film Festival. I have not been back since.

The Film Festival takes place in February and my first visit, in February 1986, was the coldest week of my life. Temperatures dropped to -20 Celsius. I have very few memories of the films I saw that week apart from Derek Jarman’s “Caravaggio”, which was being premiered at the Festival and attracting a lot of interest.

I had met Jarman the previous year when he came to speak at the Festival I worked for. Filming was about to begin on “Caravaggio”, and he spoke enthusiastically about working with Tilda Swinton. She was in the year above me at university and although I had friends who acted with her I don’t know for sure whether I saw any of her student productions. Now, six months later, I was having lunch in Berlin and he was at the next table.

A Spanish journalist came up to him and told him how much he was looking forward to the film and would it be possible to have an interview now? Jarman was rather curt with him, telling him that he had been doing non-stop interviews since he arrived, and he just wanted 15 minutes to eat his lunch uninterrupted. I let a few minutes go by and reintroduced myself to him, as we were literally sat side-by-side. I said that I didn’t want to interrupt his lunch, but we had met the previous summer, and I was looking forward to seeing the film the next day. I didn’t expect much in response but he spoke to me for the next 10 minutes about what a whirlwind it had been since he arrived in the city.

I didn’t see much of Berlin, apart from the taxi rides to and from the hotel. The distance from my hotel to the main Festival building was short and I didn’t venture further afield. I had no interest in taking time out to cross the border to East Berlin for an afternoon. Some of the people I knew had done so. If the weather had been better I might have too, but I kept to my increasingly familiar routes in West Berlin.

The following year I ventured further afield. My journey to the city did not go as planned. I developed an ear infection a few days before leaving. I could say, “My doctor advised me not to fly” but it wasn’t like that. After he had prescribed my antibiotics and ear-drops I asked if I would be able to take my scheduled flight in a few days’ time.

“Fly if you want,” he said, “But if your eardrum bursts don’t come looking to me for sympathy”.

“So, I shouldn’t fly to Germany, then?”

“Do what you want,” he told me. Brusque, you know.

I travelled by train and boat instead. My flight was booked for Saturday but on Friday evening, after work, I took the train from Liverpool Street to Harwich, then an overnight ferry to the Hook of Holland. I shared a cabin with three strangers, lads from Essex who were off to Amsterdam for the weekend. They were bringing their own dope into the city. One of them explained, “Everyone else goes to Amsterdam to smoke weed, but we bring our own”. They skinned up and passed the joint around. Having never smoked anything, then or since, I passed on their kind offer to join in and went straight to my bunk. I lay on my side, pressing my good ear into the tiny pillow, and didn’t hear much for the rest of the night.

The following morning I took the train through the Netherlands and East Germany. When we crossed the border, the atmosphere changed. There were fewer people on the train. The guards wore military uniforms and carried guns. I looked out at the snow-covered landscape at one point, and saw what appeared to be a sentry-box in the middle of nowhere, with a lone soldier standing to attention. I was relieved when we crossed over into West Berlin. From the station I went to my hotel and straight to bed.

The previous year I had known very few people who were attending the Festival. This time round I knew several people from Ireland involved with film one way or another. I had met them in Cannes the previous spring, and had visited the Festivals in Dublin and Cork the previous autumn. They introduced me to people who lived in the city, including a film-maker and a radio journalist. I spent evenings socializing with people in their homes, and went to an Irish Bar in continental Europe for the first time. I was off the beer for the first few nights, but when the course of antibiotics was finished I was able to sample the local brew, and Guinness at the Irish bar.

Unlike the previous year, I took public transport in Berlin and met more film-makers than I had previously. The most memorable film screening was “Diary for my Lovers”, directed by the Hungarian Márta Mészáros. It was the follow-up to her “Diary for my Children”, which I had seen a few years earlier. I was looking forward to it. The film was in Hungarian, with German subtitles. There was near-simultaneous translation available through headphones. I switched between English and French, partly to help me to stay awake. I went to the screening with someone who I had become friends with the previous year, a Film Festival organizer from Ireland who was also keen to see the film.

Within the first hour my eyes were heavy and I was in danger of dozing off, not for the first time at a Festival screening. The combination of the following made it hard to stay awake: an unfamiliar spoken language, subtitles in a language I only had rudimentary knowledge of (O Level German, from many years earlier) and translation through headphones that was a line or two behind the action. I did doze off, not for long as far as I could tell. The sound of snoring from my friend from Ireland woke me up. Over the next 20 minutes or more he remained asleep, head back, mouth open, snoring like a jack-hammer. I found it rather amusing, and it certainly kept me awake for the rest of the film. Two women in the row in front turned round repeatedly, tutted, shushed, spoke loudly in German, but none of it disturbed his slumber. They moved away. Other people around us changed seats before the end.

When the credits rolled and the lights came back up the two of us discussed the film. I asked whether he had missed any of the action. “I think I drifted off for a few seconds,” he said. “Twenty minutes,” I told him, “Probably more”. He was surprised. I realized that I too must have missed large chunks of foreign-language films when I thought that I had just drifted off for a few seconds.

Later in the week I attended a gig in a club featuring harmonica-player Toots Thielemans. I had never heard of him but one of the Irish ex-pats was a big fan and his enthusiasm persuaded me to come along. From a quick search checking how to spell “Thielemans” I have just learnt that he recorded the soundtrack for “Midnight Cowboy”.

Once again I chose not to set aside an afternoon to visit Checkpoint Charlie and East Berlin. I assumed that there would be other opportunities to do so, if I really wanted to. There was no sign of the Wall coming down, or of German reunification, any time soon.

By the end of my week in Berlin my ear infection was gone and I was able to take my return flight home, no repeat of the 24-hour train and boat journey that had got me there.

Within three years the Berlin Wall was down and the country was on the way to reunification. The city that my daughter has just returned from has not been divided for 30 years. She visited places that I did not see (the Reichstag, and Sachsenhausen concentration camp for example), and places that were not there in the 1980s, like the Holocaust Memorial. Or, to give it its full title: “The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe”.

Earlier this month I re-read Christopher Isherwood’s “Mr Norris Changes Trains”. I last read it when I was 17, younger than my daughter is now, and 45 years after it was published. Nearly 45 years have passed since then. I offered the book to her, as background material ahead of her trip. She didn’t have time to read it in the few days before travelling: way too much Maths homework to do instead. It wouldn’t have made much difference. Neither Isherwood’s depiction of 1930s Berlin nor my memories from the 1980s have much in common with my daughter’s experiences of the city in 2024.