My parents’ home has three garages. There’s one for the car, of course, one for the kit and kaboodle and all other kinds of stuff such as fertilisers for every sort of rhododendron and azalea, the lawnmover and terracotta pots of various sizes, and one for the garden furniture – the latter we call the orangerie. Pure irony, of course, we’re quite ironic a family, but as the years went by, the irony got lost somehow, and now, we all think of this garage as of our orangerie. How very absurd that is came to my mind just this Sunday, when visiting the New Orangerie at the Royal Parks in Potsdam, built under the reign of Friedrich Wilhelm IV, I laughed out loud, as its left wing alone could easily house half of Wyoming, I understand, Wyoming is not very crowded, and I can’t come up with any other references. Anyway, the New Orangerie, an example of the revival of Italian Renaissance, a style popular in the 1850s among the royal and famous, doesn’t house that many people any longer anyway, the opulent guest chamber in malachite is currently only visited by tourists, but all those beautiful and well cared palm trees, oleanders and lemon trees that adorn the gardens and parks in summer, and as there are such a lot of them, the size of that building is really not that exaggerated. Prussian kings were obviously quite modest. Just ask Voltaire, he’ll tell you.