We cross the Rhine as we trundle into Köln on the train. It’s not unlike clunking across the Thames into Charing Cross. The Rhine is roughly the same width as the Thames, but the banks are steeper. The side we’re heading to has the bulk of the spires and big buildings. There’s a London-Eye-like merry-go round and an ugly music venue.

But you can’t really talk about Köln without talking about the Dom. You walk out of the station and it’s right there. Huge. Surprisingly huge. Scary. Stunning. Shocking. It DOM-inates.

The architecture is so elaborate and strange – it really does feel like an alien craft from a Ridley Scott film. The black-brown discolouration of the stone makes it look like it’s been scorched on entry into Earth’s atmosphere. The two massive main towers lower over the city. Any moment now you expect an invisible door to open or a ray of green light to stream out. Aliens will emerge with their ultimatum for the puny humans.

It evokes so many emotions, but I land at anger. How is it allowed to be here? It bullies everyone and everything around it. It is beyond good or bad taste. It makes its own rules. Everything else has to work around it. It is a horror. A sublime horror.

It houses, by the way, one of the oldest surviving wooden crosses in Christendom. And also the bones and robes of the Three Wise Men, closed up in a massively over-decorated gold box. I didn’t even know that the Three Wise Men were real people.

It is for us the perfect opportunity for one of our fantasy art heists. It’s quite a tricky one this, given the box is raised above the main altar and is sealed in a perspex box. And the altar feels like it’s a mile away from the front door. I saw no security guards but plenty of guys in red cassocks who looked like they might get tasty if you tried to deprive them of their shrine. I bought a guide leaflet for one euro – it at least gives us a floor plan and the details of every entrance and exit.

I went inside the Dom chiefly to see the Max Richter stained glass window, a random arrangement of coloured squares that give the impression of a set of saints pixelated, as if they had not given permission to have their photo taken as they left a nightclub. I prefer Richter when he sticks to black and white.

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The rest of my stay in Köln was fairly non-descript. I wandered through the many  shopping centres and retail streets (Primark, Body Shop, Claires Accessories), and dropped into more old churches, some more scarred by WW2 than others. The city reminded me of nothing as much as Croydon – but with more bomb damage, and modern architecture applied like bandages.

I read in the Central Library for a while – a good place to go to see the real citizens: old men reading papers, students copying stuff out of study aids, mothers trying to engage their hyperactive toddlers in picture books. Outside there sit the homeless and the drunk. Again it feels like home.

The local man I shared a table with at dinner in a small gasthaus in a side street told me that it was natural for me to feel at home in Köln. In his estimation, he had more in common with us Englanders than with some of his fellow-Germans in the East. I tell him I am heading for Leipzig and then Dresden. “They are old Germans,” he says. “The real Germans. They have no time for us people over here. I don’t think they even think we are Germans.”

My dinner companion is heading for Spain to collect a car and drive it all the way to Naples. He’s then staying on the Amalfi Coast where he says he once saved the life of a Mafia boss’s grandson. He shows me a business card that he claims he was given by the mafia boss. “He told me I can call it any time I am in trouble, wherever I am in the world, and he will sort things out for me”. The card gives the name and number of a doctor of gynaecology.

I get on the train to Leipzig this morning with a certain amount of trepidation. What will the ‘old’ Germans be like?  I’m also anxious and angry at myself – I managed to drop one of my credit cards somewhere yesterday. It’s safely cancelled, but I am now relying on the one debit card to see me through. And it reminds me of what an old dunderhead I am becoming. What else will I lose on this trip?