The commercialisation of German stadium names, on the other hand, is a nefarious trend that old timers like me tend to ignore. The Waldstadion will always be the Waldstadion (just as the HSN Nordbank Arena will always be the Volksparkstadion and the Signal Iduna Park will always be the Westfalenstadion), even if it now has a fancy roof and all kinds of corporate amenities.

And given the current state of the banking sector in Germany and beyond, it isn’t entirely clear how long the corporate names will in fact last. Anyone familiar with North American sports will have noticed the correlation between firms paying over the odds for naming rights and then going bust (just think of all of those cast iron Enron logos in the seats at the baseball stadium in Houston).

I have to admit, until I heard about Pippi Longstocking on Deutsche Welle, I do not know anything about it. Or maybe again, it has to do with when the books and the TV adaptation came out. I actually checked it on Wikipedia. Considering what I had always considered Sweden’s best exports (in random order) – the musical group ABBA, furniture company IKEA (they have a few branches here) and um, Swedish meatballs.

All the more I have a father who is not afraid of saying that he likes listening to ABBA in his teenage years (though it is more towards his later teenage years when ABBA first became famous through the Eurovision song contest). Considering I actually first grew up listening to songs from my parents’ younger days, apart from what I listen on the radio, I also ended up listening to ABBA as well.