So just in case you’ve forgotten since you became a busy, working adult, here’s a quick reminder of how to wash your hands, courtesy of the brilliantly-named Medical and Psychosocial Interventions Service:

Jaume I of Aragó was one of Barcelona’s many notable figures. Descended from French and Byzantine nobility, his exotic origins were matched by an illustrious childhood spent in the thick of the Occitan struggles.

The thirteenth was the century in Europe that instigated the beginnings of a consolidation of power from which Jaume would personally profit and which in the long term would synthesise many of the nation states we know today.

During his reign however, Jaume strived hard for independence. His county of Barcelona, for example, which had been endowed four centuries earlier by Charlemagne, he divested properly and finally from France.

He also invaded the Balearics, wresting control from the Moorish taifas, and established a close relationship between the islands and the mainland that endures today. Power gains over the Moors characterised the remainder of Jaume’s reign as he pushed them ever further into Andalusia.

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Barcelona

The Catalonian capital is full of quirks: a city that's noisy, bright and always in a hurry to be somewhere.

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History piled on top of history

Step out of the metro station that carries his name, slip into the streets nearby and perhaps you can imagine how Jaume’s Barcelona appeared…

The tall Roman city walls cast long shadows over the rooftops of markets, workshops and houses jumbled together and scored by narrow alleyways.

There might be the distant chant of Jewish prayer. A synogogue stands taller, its additional height permitted by Jaume. Those who come here are sometimes persecuted yet generally tolerated, though not for much longer.

Meanwhile the masons are working on the lower walls of the new cathedral. As their mallets hammer out time, they’ll be finished – two hundred years hence – right when the Catholic Kings ride into Granada and Columbus discovers the New World.

Every building screens off or builds on some already forgotten landmark. History piled on top of history. Daylight gets in between the cracks for only an hour or two each day, but at least the suffering heat does not.

Eccentrics welcome

Barcelona has had its fair share of eccentrics.

Picasso and Miró were lauded, Dalí was banned and Gaudí lambasted.

And whilst the artists all died famous and respected, the architect went almost unrecognised, run over by a tram before the city suddenly appreciated his genius.

It’s not difficult to understand Barcelona’s earlier allergic reactions. Not only did Gaudí present something completely unprecedented, he often freely mixed it with architectural styles more rigidly defined by time and example.

Sagrada Família perfectly embodies this fervent eclecticism. Still under construction today and planned rather optimistically for completion in 2026 (the centenary of Gaudi’s death), the church remains enigmatically bizarre even to modern tastes. It is nevertheless the very symbol of this city now, released from the strictures of Franco and a degraded regional economy, a time in which aesthetically anything goes.

Knowing me, knowing you

This visit did not reveal the cosy, colourful Barcelona of my imagination. That was the Barcelona of my student years, a kind of Pot Luck meets Together, open and accessible at the other end of a rainbow, by a flight I could never seem to afford – if only because the destination never existed.

Everything there was incense sticks and painted furniture. A quick-tempered latina with whom to fall in and out of love by the hours on a clock. Orwell and Hemingway smoking cigars in an empty lobby. Gossiping starlings and morning laundry, the feverish, silent repose of hot afternoons and all-night festas in a barri I could call my own.

That’s not Barcelona. That studenty, too-good-to-be-true idyll, you break up with it and of course it gets on perfectly fine without you.

The clock strikes midday on your affair with the tempestuous latina of your post-pubescent imagination. And you wake up in the thick heat with a headache and that maddening truth, the one that never comes out right: it’s not you, it’s me…

Opponents of the European Union are fond of pointing out what they see as the three grand negatives: democratic deficit, lack of transparency and unwieldy bureaucracy.

Brussels certainly doesn’t do itself any favours with the famously poor quality of its communications, particularly when it makes the occasional, but always highly visible foot-in-mouth blunder.

Take the banner above, seen recently on the Charlemagne Building next to Rue de la Loi-Wetstraat. Announcing the EU’s Sustainable Energy Week, it looks inocuous enough from a distance, but these are the people who brought us Entropa.

Detractors who perceive the European process as expensive, bureaucratic and agonisingly slow need simply take a closer look:

Twist the words of this strapline and you have all the ammunition you need!

When Charlemagne died in early 814, he left behind him the strongest empire known to Western Europe since that of the Romans. Barely a generation later, it had been dissolved.

The wholesale division of territories among the royal issue led to weakness and fragmentation. In the case of the Carolingian empire, the sum of the whole had been greater than the parts.

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Dutch Limburg

Part of a day trip that included the medieval town of Valkenburg and Maastricht, the birthplace of the European Union.

Nevertheless, this carving up of land gave us a prototype of modern Europe. The transition from tribes to feudal kingdoms to nation states had begun.

Valkenberg

Where the plains of Flanders spread east towards the Rhine, the land rises in sudden bursts in a series of wooded valleys. As we saw in Geraardsbergen, hills in this part of the world are prized assets. In Valkenburg, the ruined castle sits atop one such steep incline above the houses, cafes and shops.

With a long and painful history of sieges, the latest of which is being mounted by determined tourists, the town has settled into a quieter pace of life after centuries as a major city of Dutch Limburg.

Maastricht

This fine city, cleaved by the great river Maas (to francophone Belgians, it’s the Meuse), was no easier to navigate in the car despite the fact that J passed through here on her Grand Tour in 1996.

No matter, for we eventually managed to park and headed into the streets on a hot summer’s afternoon. In the Vrijthof, there appeared to be a boules tournament in progress. We later learned that this is a major international event, as far as the game of boules goes, anyway.

As we paced around, J’s memory occasionally sputtered into life like a knackered engine. She would remember the minutest detail while the general topography mysteriously eluded her.

We lunched at Brasserie Britannique, not because we were missing Britain, but because I had spied a rather natty looking croque madame and, less importantly, it brought back memories of the UK’s rather naff diplomacy in ’92.

For no Briton over the age of, say, 20 (except perhaps J with her memory being what it is) will hear the name Maastricht without remembering something about the Treaty of the European Union signed there, whose rubric included the foundation of the Euro.

That was also the beginning of a slow, ugly decline for the Conservative Party, the resuscitation of which may be complete in 2009 when Britain will vote to rid itself of the cretinous Gordon Brown and cronies.

Aachen

It may be somewhat unfair to suggest that, apart from its marvellous Carolingian heritage site, there isn’t much else going for Aachen, or Aix-La-Chapelle as it has also sometimes been known. That’s just how it seemed to J and I as we arrived from Maastricht during the late afternoon.

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Aachen

Once the seat of Charlemagne's empire, Germany's westernmost city still boasts his stunning cathedral his rather more modest throne.

Charlemagne liked the hot springs so much that he stayed and ruled his empire from here every winter from 768, living late into his 60s. It is strangely edifying to imagine perhaps the greatest leader of the Middle Ages gingerly dipping his toes into the 70-plus degree waters.

Subsequent kings of the Holy Roman Empire were crowned in Aachen throughout the course of the next half-millennium at the world-famous cathedral he founded, about which more in a moment.

Indeed, the city’s history is long, distinguished and notably cosmopolitan. It sits on Germany’s border with Belgium and the Netherlands. In modern times, it is twinned with two other heavyweight cathedral cities, Toledo and Reims. More dubiously, it is also twinned with Halifax, West Yorkshire.

Aachen Cathedral

The great kaiserdom was one of the earliest, and one would expect one of the more easily acknowledged, proposals for UNESCO World Heritage status. Stepping inside, we began our fourth visit to a UNESCO site this year.

Built in 792, this is the oldest cathedral in Northern Europe. With a richly diverse mix of architectural styles and decoration, it is certainly one of the most beautiful.

The beautiful interior dazzles visitors, in contrast to the simple, rather sober, marble throne on which Charlemagne sat in one of the upper galleries.

The lofty, domed Palatine Chapel dominates the overall plan. The chapel was Charlemagne’s own chapel and it appears to have been modelled to some extent on the basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna, a building the well-travelled King probably knew well.