Guten Morgen Berlin!

I am not a fiction writer. Believe me, I have tried; I have sat in cafes on Sunday afternoons, filling notebooks with pages of dross which I have later looked on and cringed hard enough to call it an abs workout. This is very distressing, as I dream of being the kind of person with a head full of wonderful novels, bursting with quirky and original characters and surprising plotlines. I would even settle for having a knack for short stories – heck, even erotic fanfic – but alas, it is not my gift. Which makes it especially hard to...

A 40-minute cycle northwards via Pankow, in the rain, and then a sharp right turn and a brief meander through a U-shaped courtyard. I stop outside a building which looks like a garage, with piles of scrap metal and a workbench with a huge vice attached outside. Also outside are a small clan of men, eyeing me with amused expressions on their faces. Two of them (I’m not joking) are wearing leather jackets and have greased-back hair, while the other two are (again, not joking) wearing lumberjack shirts and snapbacks while sporting solid beards. One of them looks like the...

The White Mountains; the shire-iest part of New Hampshire. As you begin to head north into the forest, the trees begin to glow brighter and brighter, improbable shades of lava orange and lemon yellow and neon pink. The road curves through the woods gracefully, like the stroke of a pen. Every so often you near a sign proclaiming “SCENIC VIEW” and you are forced to stop and marvel at yet another majestic natural diorama of exhaustingly intense colour. And after a while of rolling past the soft carpeted mounds of the presidential mountains, you turn a corner, and a vast...

This week the city has been devoted to commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall exactly 30 years ago. Every time there is a big milestone like this, Berlin is packed with events and celebrations and people go a bit nuts for it. For the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Wall, the city erected a line of eerie glowing white orbs along the entirety of the length of the wall from east to west. Every so often, as you travelled around the place, you would catch a glimpse of a stretch of this illuminated barrier; simply being there,...

The healthcare system in Berlin is, I feel, a little like the Wild West. Just as in the Wild West, there are certainly social and bureaucratic structures in place; everyone has a set role to fulfil, everyone knows their place and the whole macrocosm has a consistent rhythm. But also as in the Wild West, everything is a bit disorganised, generally everyone is a bit lawless, people’s cattle occasionally go missing, and you can’t stop groups of people from spontaneously launching into a bar brawl or a hoedown. Walking into a doctor’s practice is identical to the ‘walking into the...

Well we kindof saw it coming I suppose. We knew it could only get worse; the only point of uncertainty was knowing exactly in which way it would get worse. But then Teresa May stepped down and we saw the blond, feathery tussock of hair cresting over the horizon and suddenly we realised we knew this was the next thing to happen. We had known it from the start. This man, who pushed fiercely for Brexit and then resigned like a cowardly little invertebrate when he got what he wanted. This man, a man who has repeatedly made racist, sexist...

I have a little note on my phone where I list noteworthy or recommended films I have been meaning to see, so that on a vegging-out evening I can go straight into Netflix and decisively click something from my list rather than scroll through thousands of Adam Sandler comedies not knowing what to cram into my tired eyes. This is how I ended up watching Ex Machina. It has incredible review scores, has won Oscars, has a very tasteful Netflix thumbnail and most importantly contains all the things I hope for from a film: robots, futuristic techy stuff, lush panoramas...

So Brexit Day came and went, and nothing concrete has occurred. Your country is still thrashing in the water, drowning in the most famous and most large-scale embarrassment in human history. Your colleagues occasionally mention it at the coffee machine, waggishly raising an eyebrow. You engage standard protocol: a dramatic and practised roll of the eyes, a sigh, and that eminently British chuckle that signals amusement, self-consciousness and resignation all at once. None of your European friends are able to make exactly this noise in quite the way you can; it is your birth right and one of the few...

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