Among the German's early engagements, on July 16, will be a visit to Hiroshima, one of the few places on the planet to have been laid waste by an atomic bomb.

Bach's excursion will no doubt be choreographed to the nth degree, the messages transmitted curated with utmost care.

So I thought there might be some value in recounting my own visit to the city where the most terrible and important single event of the 20th century took place.

I found the experience far more unsettling than I had expected.

Like Bach, my visit coincided with a sports mega-event, although in my case the event in question - the 2002 FIFA World Cup - was in full flow; I had recently watched England crash out of the tournament in Shizuoka, 350 miles east of Hiroshima, undone by that Ronaldinho free-kick.

It occurs to me that it was the abruptness of the contrast, between the glorious escapism I had been wallowing in and this, what remains of the grimmest of realities, which lay at the root of my discomfort.

Consulting my notebook from that period, I see that my jottings begin in red ink - "Bomb called 'Little Boy'. Survivors called the A-Bomb 'Pika-don'" - but soon switch to black.

I suppose it should come as no surprise that my pen ran out in a place where so much else, beginning with any last vestige of human innocence, was broken.

I started at the museum.

Nearly two decades have rushed by and much may have changed, but I found that, for all the graphic images of hibakusha, A-bomb survivors, with radiation sickness, and victims with melting skin in the wreckage of their city, it was the accumulation of detail, set out in flat, unsparing prose, which most overwhelmed me.

Here are two contrasting examples which caught my eye and have since haunted my emotions.

1. "The memorial mound houses urns holding the ashes of about 70,000 victims. The names of 841 of these are known."

2. "The white mushroom cloud moved like a sea slug."

My attention was also captured by United States President Harry Truman announcing "a harnessing of the basic power of the universe".

Then there was a photo-montage from October 1945 showing a 360-degree panorama of utter destruction in which people appeared, nevertheless, to be waiting for a tram. 

Not quite everything was broken by Little Boy: the emblem of the Chiyoda Life Insurance Company, in what I took to be pinkish granite, located 130 metres from the hypocentre, looked almost unscathed; the Bank of Japan's Hiroshima branch, a further 250m away, sustained no structural damage.

Lost in my thoughts, I then walked through the peace park towards the preserved dome, a symbol which has become one of the most widely-recognised ruins on the face of the earth.

The five-storey building by the river bank was smaller than I had expected, but the skeleton of that dome was as forbidding as a barbed-wire climbing-frame.

I sat for some time near a black fence watching sparrows socialising in the clover-rich grass around the dome, like sparrows in any other city. 

Across the river, youths played guitar/harmonica music, while dotted around in the vicinity of the ruin were monuments and memorials, often decked with flowers, both real blooms and bright origami simulacra.

Some of the latter hung in long garlands which reminded me of football scarves.

As an enormous heron flapped its way steadily along the skyline, two children passed, playing at walking along a low wall next to the path.

As I watched, the man accompanying them stopped and carefully picked up four small pieces of litter I was sure had nothing to do with him, prior to depositing them in a bin bearing a sign of a cheery cartoon raccoon wielding a broom.

Such small manifestations of well-ordered civic normality might have been reassuring, but whenever I saw someone elderly, I found myself wondering.

I found myself particularly wondering about an old woman seated on a bench near the dome writing.

Towards the top of her right shoulder, partly obscured by her billowing blue dress, was what appeared to be an extremely large piece of sticking-plaster.

By evening, I must admit, I was glad to have my frivolous, unthreatening football tournament to scuttle back to.

There are some things sport cannot fix.