Twenty years and more ago, a Pakistani schoolfriend told me he had stolen a bottle of Tipp-ex from a market stall (shoplifting was his family’s custom) and later, at his university library an unknown student turned to him and asked if he had any Tipp-ex. He lent his stolen goods like a true English gent.

Later, he ruminated gruefully: “Uh, and I thought, uh, like, uh, maybe that was, like, the only reason I was born, that like uh like this guy needed Tipp-ex. So like now like I’ve done what I was like born to do, and stuff and like something really bad will happen.”

I’ll be leaving my little Bavarian suburb this autumn. Last night I went to do my laundry in the building’s subterranean washroom and found a young German nervously talking to someone over the stair rail. As I came closer he said something that I couldn’t understand, then pointed down to a frisky black dog staring up at him from the stairs below. He said, in German, that he was scared of dogs and could I go with him because he couldn’t otherwise get out of the building. I accompanied him down and the dog ran happily about, the German scarpering as soon as he reached the ground floor. (As far as I could tell, the dog was just wandering about my apartment block on its own: I live in that kind of building).

And last year, in a rainstorm, I passed a drunk or crazy man on a bicycle outside a fastfood joint, he was simultaneously trying to light a cigarette (in the rain) and stuff an aluminium-foiled Döner into his jacket pocket, and get a foot into a pedal. He called to me, in barely-comprehensible Bavarian, asking me to help. I was unsure how, exactly, to help a man in such complexly awkward straits but walked bravely over, in the rain.

It turned out he could manage the cigarette and pedal on his own, but couldn’t jam the Döner into his jacket pocket, so I thrust it in and he grunted his thanks and rode waveringly off, into the night.

I have, I feel, accomplished that which I was born to do.