Flickr: 96dpi

A long motorway journey with children in the backseat of the car is, by most people’s definition, about the closest you can get to hell on earth. The train, at the very least, offers a restaurant car with essentially unlimited supplies of cold beer by way of escape from pint-sized hooligans; your own set of wheels is, at very best, home to a dwindling reserve of warm lime cordial - and perhaps valium, if you’re lucky.

That was my way of thinking, anyway; that is until, after years of studiously avoiding such a situation, I found myself on an Autobahn journey with children in the back seat. As a non-German, I had previously understood children and motorways to be nothing more than a recipe for hectic scansions of “Are we there yet?” and violent, vengeful rounds of “red car” (for those not familiar with the rules: the children punch each other in the arm every time one of them spots a red car).

Yet whilst children in Germany on motorways do play games with one another, these games are of the far more genteel, civilised variety. Is this, I hear you ask, because I give them some of the lime cordial and valium I had up front? Well, only in part. The other reason is that children on German motorways have a wide range of visual stimuli that function as an excellent basis for back-seat games: car number plates.

This is because, rather than being a boring series of numbers based on year of sale like in Britain, car registration plates in Germany are done by location: the licence plate tells you where the owner of the car lives. All very well and good, says you, but why is one arbitrary way of registering boring motor vehicles more interesting for children than another? Well, because the system is complex, clever, and capable of surprising even experienced motorists.

You see, all the registration areas have initials, between 1 and 3 letters long: i.e. just because a vehicle comes from Hamburg, it doesn’t mean that it will have “Hamburg” written on in. It doesn’t have “H” either (that’s Hanover), nor “HA” (that would be Hagen), nor even “HAM” (which is Hamm in Westphalia). No, it has, cryptically enough, “HH”. But why?

After all, it is usually the bigger, more important cities that get first pick of the simple, elegant one-letter registrations – Berlin takes B, not Bremen; Düsseldorf pips Dortmund to the D by virtue of being a state-capital; Munich gets M, etc. So why, if Hamburg is bigger than Hanover, Hamm and Hagen put together, does it have to take HH? Well, the reason is that Hamburg is a Hanseatic city; none of the others are, so they would have all had to have found other ways of differentiating themselves. Neat, right?

The system has enough such twists, turns and cul-de-sacs to keep kiddies speculating for hours – and teaching them the odd thing or two while they’re about it. For adults, though, it is frequently just pointless and confusing i.e. if you move between catchment areas, you have to re-register your car. Sometimes, moving just a couple of miles can put you in a new administrative district, despite the fact that you are essentially living in the same place. In and around Hamburg, a move from Langehorn westwards to Norderstedt – a matter of 500 yards, puts you from “HH” into “SE” (Kreis Segeberg). Brave souls who then venture another mile or so out West towards Hasloh will end up in the “PI” (Kreis Pinneberg).

Pimp my ride

Nevertheless, adults too can have fun with registrations – as long as they’re not standing in a two-hour queue at the registration office because they moved a few hundred feet down the street. Indeed, for the princely sum of about €12.60, they can go and reserve personalised licence plates – as long as their suggestion begins with their district initials. There seem to be no other limitations, as this photo-montage of cars from northern Germany demonstrates: it would furthermore appear that KI (Kiel) and PI (Kreis Pinneberg) are the two areas with the most inventive inhabitants; or perhaps just those with the best initials. After all, it’s pretty difficult to do a good joke beginning with HH.

Now, there’s something about the whole customising-your-car-licence plate-thing that is very reminiscent of gangsta rap; so once the kids have dropped off in the back seat, you can have fun listening to CDs with explicit lyrics and trying to top the “PIMP” licence-plate from Pinneberg. My tips for initials rich in potential are “F” (Frankfurt – gives “FAT” and “FIT”), as well as “B” for Berlin (“BIG”, “BAD”, “BOY”) and the slightly more recherché “DO” (Dortmund), with “DOGG” and “DOLL”.