IN April it was Paris and Toulouse. Today, it is Berlin. I am engaged in what I can only describe as a "smart" event for a British Foreign Secretary -- accompanying Her Majesty the Queen on a State Visit.

This one is to Germany. Taking part in such visits is a duty for Foreign Ministers around the world, to go with their Heads of State, monarchs or Presidents.

But I doubt whether it can be quite such a pleasure as for anyone in my shoes. The Queen is the ultimate professional. She has been doing this "job" for a lot longer than most people around the world have been alive -- 52 years -- and is astonishingly good at it.

She is also, as a constitutional monarch, able to rise well above any partisan disputed irritants between the UK and the country she is visiting -- to get on to the deeper issues of common history, common concerns and common interests. So with Germany.

The common history is remarkable. The terrible division and bloodshed between us in the first half of the last century tends to obscure how much we have shared, going back centuries.

When we slip easily from speaking of being "English" to being "Anglo-Saxon" it is worth pausing to remember that the Saxons were German (and still are).

In the late 17th century when Parliament decided to remove the Stuarts from the throne it looked to royalty of German origin to take the throne -- first William of Orange, later the Hanoverians.

The Queen is a direct line. And for most of the 18th and 19th centuries we were in alliance with states which now make up Germany rather than the reverse.

Of course, in the post war period it is the war which has inevitably been a profound factor in Germany's relationship not just with the United Kingdom but with all its international partners.

The war has dominated Germany itself still more. There has been no air-brush here. None whatsoever. How could there be?

Here in Berlin, I write this article overlooking the great columns of the Brandenburg Gate. But I'm in the east. Until 1989 -- just 15 short years ago -- I'd have been (if I'd been here at all) on the "wrong" side of the city, cut in two by a horrible wall, a direct consequence of the immediate post-war division of power.

In remembering the appalling suffering of war on both sides, we recognise how precious is the peace we have built in Europe since 1945.

We owe it to those who built that partnership to continue the process into the 21st century: to learn from history not be obsessed by it; to look beyond simplistic stereotypes and to realise how often we share the same outlook.

We have to get away from the last vestiges of the "stereotypes" fanned, I'm afraid to say, by one or two of our national newspapers, but to diminishing effect.

For these stereotypes have no connection to the truth of the relationship between our countries today. Take East Lancashire. There are many, many firms providing good jobs in our area who depend on trade with Germany, who may be owned by German firms, or work for German firms themselves. We are natural partners of Germany.

There is still a day to go of this visit, but I'm certain that it will be hailed as a success, for Germany, the UK and our relationship. It should mark when we confine the old stereotypes to the past.