The Diary: AN Wilson - FT.com The scribbler's life is never done. My kind publishers, Toby Mundy and Margaret Stead of Atlantic Books, have commissioned me to write the life of Queen Victoria. So it's off to Coburg, where there is a vast archive of that monarch's German letters, mostly written to Prince Albert's brother and his wife. How grateful I am to my Germanophile mother, who, on her deathbed seven years ago, persuaded me that it was a "pity" not to know the language. She gave me her few remaining German books and ever since I've had a weekly lesson with a native speaker. Reading about Queen Victoria has been a passion of mine since, as a child, I came across Laurence Housman's play Happy and Glorious, with its Ernest Shepard illustrations. It seems astonishing to be paid for indulging in pure pleasure. For me to go to Coburg is rather as if a trainspotter was sent for a few weeks to Swindon or a chocoholic asked on holiday by Green and Black. Coburg is a staggeringly beautiful medieval town and the palaces built and inhabited by Albert and Victoria's forebears are variously impressive - the mighty Veste, a medieval fortress dominating the town, where Luther stayed for six months; the great baroque Schloss Ehrenberg, with its Hall of Giants where the widowed Victoria met the Austrian emperor Franz Josef; and, outside the town, the Schloss Rosenau, which must be one of the most beautiful houses ever built by human hand. No wonder Albert felt everlastingly homesick for Coburg. Even after a short research trip, I felt sad to be leaving - all the people I met were so kind, so clever, so polite. I shall be back! As the train glides punctually towards Cologne, I read in Der Spiegel the distressing story of Meow, a cat in Santa Fe who has been taken into the care of veterinary surgeon Jennifer Steketee. Beautiful, slim Dr Steketee can barely hold Meow, an inflated sea-lion-sized moggy weighing in at an astounding 18kg. Like many of the pets in Sante Fe, Meow shared her owner's diet of hot-dogs. Steketeen stepped in too late. Meow choked to death, aged less than two years, shortly after the grotesque photograph in the magazine was taken. Reading the story, in a clean train, surrounded by the gentle murmur of what Queen Victoria called the "dear German language," I feel deep gratitude for old Europe, its Latin poetry, Gothic architecture and its sensible-sized stray cats padding over the bridges of Venice or diving down Parisian alleyways. But, hello, there's the great Rhine, and soon the majestic old city of Cologne comes into view. Here the train stops and everything is different. The quiet murmur of German conversation is broken by the barks of Chicago and Cincinnati. Huge-buttocked tourists, their bare arms trembling like blancmange, wander bewildered into the carriage, trundling vast suitcases on wheels. Probably these waist-high Brobdingnagian items of luggage are simply their lunch-boxes. I try to tell myself that these noisy travellers are human beings like us Europeans, down beneath the blubber; but I fail to convince myself. The Atlantic is ever-widening, the gulf between America and ourselves imaginatively uncrossable. The Americans on the train with me perhaps came to Europe to study northern Gothic or paint in watercolours but I doubt it. Might they not, like Republican candidate Mitt Romney, believe in the Book of Mormon, or, like what I take to be the majority of their compatriots, want to nuke the antiquities of Isfahan? By the time the train has reached Aachen and we are gazing through the window at the cathedral containing the tomb of Charlemagne, the beautiful German toilets are blocked and out of action. How strange that so many of my own compatriots, the supposed Conservatives, apparently cherish a "special relationship" with these waddling fanatics more than our shared historic roots with European culture. I suppose the disturbing thing about my sojourn in Germany was the palpable sense that its inhabitants still regard as "normal" what for us is a rarity. Life there seems to follow the well-ordered pattern dictated by the chiming of old clocks - as it used to do for us. British people over the age of 45 can still remember that, while politicians blundered, some things still worked - you could easily get an appointment with your doctor, for example. The staggering levels of inefficiency in Britain today are something we now take for granted. In Germany a person in a bank can actually tell you how much money you have in your account, and seems not to fall into panic at the prospect of customers wishing to transact business. Even the weather was "normal" for the time of year - bright sun shone on roses unbattered by cold storms. On my first morning back in England, the young woman from the Met Office on Radio Four announced that there would be "outbreaks of drivel" throughout the next 24 hours. A fairly safe forecast in the Britain of Cameron, Miliband, Clegg and friends. She then rather charmingly corrected herself and said that she meant there would be drizzle. My first mother-in-law, the 17th-century scholar Elsie Duncan-Jones, once went round all morning puzzling over the conundrum - how did the Met Office know that the day would bring funny smells? Until the arrival of sunny spells. On the day that "outbreaks of drivel" had been heralded, we joined other "first nighters" at the Coliseum for the English National Opera production of Dr Dee , the creation of Rufus Norris - a fine director - and Damon Albarn of Blur. What drew me? Fascination with the Elizabethan mathematician/clergyman/mage. And the length of the piece was in its favour - all over within two hours, including the interval, so, even if it was a dud, we'd not have to suffer long. In the event, it felt far longer than the entire Ring cycle. The tedium was all but unendurable. It was difficult to follow what was being said and there were no supertitles to help you. Blur singer Damon Albarn sat in a gallery at the back of the stage singing dreary ditties into a mike. He had not created any good singing roles - surely a sine qua non of a successful opera. Neither Dr Dee nor his wife nor his daughter had anything of interest to sing about, and the tall man on stilts with a glass eye turned out - I discovered, after frantic perusal of the programme during the interval - to be Sir Francis Walsingham. It does not matter whether an opera is historically accurate - we all know that the real Don Carlos was locked up because he was mad and not because, as in the Schiller/Verdi version, he was a leftwing anti-Catholic pining for liberation in the Low Countries while being in love with his stepmother. If Verdi had been helping Albarn, Queen Elizabeth - who in the Blur version was played by a doll suspended from the ceiling on strings - would have given us an absolutely heart-stopping aria about her frustrated love for Dr Dee, while a chorus of armada sailors, belting out a desire for liberation from the Pope, would have implanted a melody in our heads and hearts which would have lasted all week. As it was, the best players of the evening were, I thought, two real ravens, who'd been trained to fly on and off the stage.