I HAVE come tantalizingly close to owning a piece of world history during a short break in Berlin.

But before I tell you about that, here’s a sobering thought for those of us who are already concerned about how fast time goes by these days: the Berlin Wall has been down almost as long as it was up.

It was built in 1961 (the year of my birth) and finally toppled in 1989, yet it only seems like yesterday that we were watching it fall, live on TV.

If you visit Berlin (which I thoroughly recommend), you will find large chunks of the Wall still standing as monuments, although, surprisingly, other reminders of the existence of East Germany are harder to find.

We were there for two days before we realised our hotel was in what used to be East Berlin.

As if the Nazis’ unspeakable inhumanity, then a massive Allied bombardment and finally hosting one of the most desperate battles in the history of the world all weren’t enough misery for Berliners, they then had to put up with the tragic division of the city for all those years.

When the Wall came down I remember the time well because I had just started a new job – on this newspaper.

While the Adver was obviously focused on local events, like the rest of the world it also had an eye on what was happening in Berlin.

The paper’s news editor realised history was being made, so flew over and brought back a fragment of concrete that he had chipped off the Wall.

It was mounted and became the prize in a competition for readers, and hopefully the winner still has it on his mantelpiece or in a cabinet.

Not only is it an authentic piece of the Wall, but because it was chipped off within hours of it tumbling, it is doubly a genuine historic artefact.

These days, however, anybody can also be the proud owner of a piece of the Wall because you can find bits of it in every Berlin souvenir shop.

Invariably with one face of the fragment brightly coloured by the graffiti that was a feature of the Wall in its latter days, these souvenirs usually come mounted on a piece of plastic.

As somebody who has a craving for owning historic relics or quirky objects, and, above all, objects that are both historic and quirky, I was naturally tempted to have my own little piece of history. But even I could see drawbacks.

Unlike the piece brought back to the Adver newsroom in 1989, there is no way of verifying the authenticity of any bits of Wall sold in souvenir shops, and therefore it becomes pointless to own one.

If you aren’t completely sure you have history in your hands, it might as well be any old concrete out of a skip.

Besides, even if you could somehow authenticate it, some people would delight in telling you it is not so much a piece of history as a lump of concrete, which would rather spoil it.

Now that we have something that wasn’t around in 1989, namely eBay, you don’t even have to go to Berlin because you can buy supposed pieces of the Wall from the comfort of your own laptop, which makes the whole thing even dodgier.

They come with various claims about authenticity, some even saying the fragment they are selling is of exactly the same type of concrete used for the Wall, which, supposedly, was unique. Really?

As much as I would dearly love to own a chip off the old Eastern Bloc, I would expect the evidence to be a bit more… um… concrete.