Now that we are officially a mixed Irish-German family, we naturally want to keep up with events in Germany as well as here. How to do this? What better way than by watching TV, of course!

Except that, well, you can't actually get German TV here. Not on cable, anyway - so no Sky TV or ntl. But we can get German satellite TV on freeview. Well, we could if we had a satellite dish. I rang up a few months ago and found that the cost of having a satellite dish installed was about £300. Fine for the chance to watch crap TV in two languages instead of in one, I thought.

Then Susanne, who had gone to Lidl to do the shopping, reported back that they were selling cable TV packages for just £40. So I got the bus there and picked up an 80cm dish, and kit, and brought it home.

I figured if it worked we would have a very cheap satellite TV system. If not - we would have a very expensive bird bath.

Well, everything seems to be there and if I ever get around to fixing it to the wall and plugging it in, I'll find out.

I hope I can find some cheap bird seed, though ...

We've just got back from a weekend in Ipswich.

My recommendation: don't go to Ipswich.

It's actually quite a pleasant town, with a nice park with a museum and art gallery in it, it's small and inexpensive and the people are friendly.

Except in the evenings. I mean, the people are probably friendly in the evenings as well, but it's difficult to tell because the whole place shuts down at 5pm.

I went out at about 8 in the evening in search of a bottle of beer to go with my pizza and couldn't find one. Most of the pubs seemed to be open, but there was no offie to be found. Everywhere was shut, with the lights out. A few young people, dressed up as if to go out, were milling around the small town square, presumably with the intention of having a mug of cocoa and a hobnob before going to bed.

If it's a bit of art and an early night you're after, Ipswich has much to recommend it. For anyone else, I advise staying away.

So when we were in Rügen last week, we found some Clausthaler beer. There are two things you need to know about Clausthaler:

1. It's a non-alcoholic lager.

2. It actually tastes pretty good.

I know many people consider the two propositions to be mutually exclusive, but honestly, it's true. Susanne liked it enough to want to buy some bottles, but .... it's actually quite difficult to get hold of. According to the UK website, you can get it in Oddbins and Waitrose and Budgens.

However, there's no Waitrose or Budgens nearby and Oddbins denies all knowledge. I finally found it at Beers of Europe, so it looks as if mail order is the only option.

The next task is to find some Berliner Kindl Weisse, which is a light wheat beer very popular in Berlin and almost unknown anywhere else. The taste is not especially pleasant, so it's generally flavoured with raspberry or woodruff. On hot days, it's very pleasant and refreshing. I managed to find one company that used to do it, but no longer does. Finally we're hoping to get some from Bitter Virtue in Southampton. Well, you never know...

They say when you die, your past life flashes before you. (I'm not sure how they found that out - I mean, who would tell you? It's just as likely that, when you die, a clown dressed in green comes along and pushes his fingers up your nostrils. But that's just a guess, obviously).

The other time your past life flashes before you is when you tidy up your filing.

I've been chucking out old papers and archiving others. I've been revisiting the last century, specifically the years 1996-1999, when I gathered lots of bits of paper and filed them away. Now I have to look through them to make sure I'm not throwing away anything useful.

And resisting the urge to classify everything as useful...

I'm planning to abandon my original ISP, with whom life as it happens was originally hosted since June 1998. This means the archives will no longer be available.

I'm also thinking of deleting the files for the Blogspot blog, which I ran until a year ago.

However, the archives of life of it happens, suitably edited, will possibly become available in another form - on paper, perhaps. But I'd have to publish it myself.

I'll keep everything up there at least until the end of August, though.

Here we are in Rügen, earlier in the week. Philipp is pushing his cousin (and my new nephew) Richard around the flat in a box. Richard is almost unbelievably cute - he's got chubby cheeks and a little blond curl, big eyes and a winning smile that makes him look like a 1950s advert for baby food.

I managed to capture the image from my new video camera, which I bought because my still video camera broke down. It's a bit more complicated to do this, however, so it will be some time before I can post some pictures.

Well, here we are back in gray rainy London again. Except, it isn't. Through some mistake somewhere, we appear to be living in a tropical country.

We left Switzerland, with some regret, and headed to Berlin and then Rügen on the Baltic Coast, which was sunny. We had no TV and no internet access.

What was worse is that our TV packed in before we went away and there was no TV where we were staying in Switzerland either (even though Swiss TV is notoriously dull) - so we've been virtually TV-free for over three weeks.

For the past couple of days, looking for something to distract us from the heat, we've been reduced to looking plaintively in the corner where the TV normally is, and pretending it's there and it's on.

Usually it's a programme about clowns. It's not very original, but it's quite funny.

Better than the Swiss version, anyway.