The alarm does not even go off but I stir anyway at 6.10 and realise I have 15 minutes to get out of the room and downstairs into the taxi. Time stretches.

In the taxi I'm barely functional - still too close to the sleep world - but as we wait at some traffic lights some way into the journey to Tegel ask about a building we are stopped near.

Is it a prison?

Yes. But for economic crime.. not murders and such.. I dont' know what you call it. White collar crime?

White collar crime.

Its the place they kept Erich Honecker and the last politicians of the GDR.

I nodd. Yeah. OK.

Then a minute later, a way along the road, I ask:

Are they all dead now, those guys?

Yes. I think so. He died in Chile, he asked for asylum there and died there.

OK. Yeah.

The next light we stop at the driver reaches for a card index box on the dashboard. Flips through it. I'm thinking that she probably checks her next job, or consults some personal info about a doctors appointment of something, thinking that this is a very bureaucratic taxi driver.

She looks up, slides the box back.1994 she says. He died in 94.

I'm pretty puzzled. I wait a moment and then I ask - What's the card index?

Thinking that it's very weird to have a card index in your taxi that contains this kind of information.

I write things down, she says. From the newspaper. Just facts and things. Things you dont find in the guide books. Sometimes I do guided tours. So I write down interesting things. Things people might want to know.

We drive in silence for a while. But the rest of the journey I'm thinking about this card index. The kinds of things it might or might not contain.