As you may already know, I am on the campaign team for the Volksentscheid Fahrrad, a campaign to have a public referendum about massive improvements to our cycle infrastructure here in Berlin. We had a few manic months of signature collecting and media junket whoring, but at the moment we’re on a kind of autumn hiatus, waiting to see what the new city government will do about us and Berlin’s streets.
Nonetheless, biking is always one of the big things on my mind. Half the time I am gleeful about just how much fun it is, especially since I discovered hundreds of exciting bike adventures on my favourite new app Komoot – who knew that there are so many wonderful cycle routes out there both in and around Berlin, just waiting for me to fall over on them?? The other half of the time, I am agonised by the stressful, manic life of a cyclist in this city. Everything needs to be improved: the cycle paths are lumpy, lethally pothole-ridden, or usually just non-existent; the cobbled streets are so rutted and broken as to make it a roulette whether you will reach the end of each road without your brain being jiggled into a rich smoothie; and the crossings are a confusing noodle-heap of road markings and random plastic roadwork barriers which guarantee that no-one ever knows what the heck is going on.
I am convinced that until we have major works done on the streets in this city, the current traffic rules simply do not allow for the flexibility you need to navigate this place either as a cyclist, pedestrian or automobilist (I say I say) without dying a gory death. I think we need to bring in a set of holistic, compassionate new traffic rules that allow us all to flow through Berlin with the organic fluidity of shoals through a coral reef. So how about this:
One of the sad things about freelancing is that you always have to curry favour. You never know which of your clients might recommend you to their mate, dad or boyfriend, if you stay on their good side. Which usually means that I’m reluctant to write about my clients – even the craziest ones – out of paranoia that they will read this and be offended. And this is a tragedy, because there are so many excellent stories I could tell you, friends.
But last week I had a project so deliciously funny that I cannot stand to keep it to myself.
I was given the job of proofreading a social media strategy document for a well-known and reputable car manufacturer. And boy, what a read. These strategies were the sublime, Platonically perfect pinnacle of social media wank – pardon my French. An intense culmination of what happens when people in their late twenties get together, hoover up a few lines off the glass conference table and brainstorm ways to ‘go viral’. To create ‘snackable content’ which will ‘resonate emotionally’ on those most emotionally pallid platforms like Snapchat and Twitter.
As you know, in my home country (the UK) we recently had a vote. And it went drastically wrong, making our country a chaotic laughing-stock and drop-kicking our economy into the trashcan.
Well, now you’re in the same position as we were. You’re standing in front of a very scary precipice, my friends, and the scariest thing of all is that you might not get the choice of whether to jump off; you are likely to be pushed.
Pushed by a horde of people who fail to see the precipice in the first place.
So let me share with you some lessons learned from our enormous f***-up, in the hope that this will help you prevent your big and important country from doing the same thing our small and foppish country did just a few weeks ago.
Get off the internet.
Seriously. No amount of anti-Trump Facebook statuses, hilarious Trump hair memes and pro-Clinton Buzzfeed articles are going to make even one sub-atomic particle’s worth of difference. Same goes for the enlightened comedy stylings of Trevor Noah, Stephen Colbert and Samantha Bee, by the way.
The internet you are on is an echo chamber.
All these Facebook statuses and blog posts and shared videos are simply talking to each other, popping up via algorithms onto the screens of other people who are writing the same statuses, reading the same blog posts, watching the same videos. You are not reaching the people whose minds you need to change. Go out and talk to people.
July is turning out to be a bit of a cruddy one this year. The sky looks permanently like a huge blanket of grey felt has been spread over it, and the rain fluctuates between ‘gentle drizzle’ and ‘downpour so intense that you’d be drier submerged in the sea’. But that doesn’t mean you have to have a lame summer! Here are my top tips for making the most of your 2016 summer months even when skies are dreary!
Once again, I am in an airport, waiting for a flight back to Berlin. Usually I am excited, calmed, relieved to be going back. But this time I am embarrassed. I have to go back to wonderful Germany and become another unwilling representative of what my home country has done over the last week and a bit. I have to join the ranks of British expats living in Berlin, palms superglued to their faces as they try to digest the constantly spiralling idiocy that is taking place.
What happened as a result of the referendum was a calamity. Hearing the news, and watching it unfold day by day, has been like a person watching their middle-aged father make a series of ill-advised and insane decisions as the result of a sudden mid-life crisis. Dad has quit his job to try to set up a ska band with his friends. Now he has spent much of his savings on an autographed Stratocaster. Now he has left Mum to shack up with a 39-year-old groupie who runs a cattery. Oh god. What will we say to him at Christmas?
Groundhog oil makes your skin smooth and tells you whether it’s going to be a long winter
For those of you who don’t live in the UK, this is what it’s like going to the doctors’ there:
You: Hello, I’m here to see Dr Frimbly.
Receptionist: Great, take a seat and she’ll call you through shortly.
For those of you who don’t live in Germany, this is what it’s like going to the doctors’ here:
You: Hello, I’m here to see Dr Schlampitz.
Receptionist: OK, and what is wrong with you?
In case it’s not clear, there is a key difference between the two scenarios. In Germany, the receptionist expects you to DESCRIBE YOUR HEALTH ISSUE IN PUBLIC. Yes. In front of the waiting room full of annoyed grannies and pregnant ladies, who have been waiting for a while and have nothing better to do than to eavesdrop, your not-medically-qualified receptionist requires you to describe your raging hemorrhoids/sixth bout of chlamydia/gout-related halitosis.
The first time this happened, I could scarcely believe my ears. It’s not like my reason for going to the doctor’s was particularly embarrassing, but I wasn’t in the mood to share it with this roomful of strangers. Things got worse when I first had to go to the ‘Frauenarzt’ (for a blood test – because evidently female blood is different to male blood) and the receptionist wanted me to declare the last time I had had my period. I half expected her to also ask what I’d had for lunch and what colour my knickers were.
Today, as I quite often do on a Sunday, I went for a jog. Once a week I like to do something exercise-y that doesn’t involve being in the grey, technopop confines of the gym – but for a very long time I was too anxious to go running or do any exercise outdoors. I was too ashamed and worried about what people would do and say to me as a female runner out in public; particularly as one who was neither athletic-looking nor adult-looking at all.
These days I just don’t care as much about what people might think of me, which frees me up for the unspeakable luxury of running outdoors, but my fears and anxieties were far from unfounded. Running outdoors while being female seems to arouse impulsive, uncontrollable behaviours from onlookers and passers-by. Behaviours which, as my experience today proved, are exacerbated manyfold when you are running while being female in the snow. Now, it may not be untrue to say that anyone who runs in the snow is a maniac to begin with, but the anthropological fallout of this action is fascinating. Let’s take a look at some of the main experiences you can enjoy if you too would like to have a go at Running While Female.
To my shock, I have started 2016 with over 1000 followers on my Facebook page. Granted, the majority of those will be bots and fake accounts ‘like’-ing everything indiscriminately, from personal blogs to violent pornography to artisanal mustard. Nonetheless, I like looking at that number.
I’ve been thinking for a long time about what the point is of writing this blog anymore. When I started writing in 2010, it was to journal my year abroad as a gift for my future self, who would surely want to look back at the photos and stories from that manic year which made me the person I am now. Over time, it has become a repository for unsorted experiences, thoughts and outrages, as well as my one opportunity to write; because in truth, creating texts for websites doesn’t feel like writing so much as delivering a low-budget daytime infomercial though the medium of type.
Sadly it’s obvious that The Blog qua Blog is dying out. Understandably so. No-one wants to read rambling prose by a nobody about nothing. Especially not if it isn’t in listicle form – though for the record, I am a great supporter of listicles and my only complaint about them is that the portmanteau sounds less like a mashup of list + article and more like a mashup of listerine + testicle.
There are a few blog genres that will survive The Great Unfollowing. Cooking blogs are the obvious ones; people love to look at good photos of delicious-looking food, and it’s an instinct that won’t wear out anytime soon. Cooking blogs are not about cooking. They are about the pleasure and thrill of looking at gorgeous food in aspirational settings, in a time when we are all being told that what we eat, whatever we eat and in whatever quantity, is wrong. Also, they are about food porn, and about people’s high-octane health obsessions, and about looking at pleasing photographic art which does not presume to make existential statements.
Travel blogs will probably be fine for a while, because travel is a thing people do rarely, and when they do it, they want to do it right. No-one under the age of 40 really trusts printed travel guides anymore; it is like getting clubbing recommendations from your gran. It feels better to turn to bloggers, who are adventurous young travellers, never tourists, and who somehow manage to pay for their travel by writing about their travel to pay for their travel. Travel bloggers give you something by sharing the best side of a destination with you. And, although I am just guessing here, I suspect that travel bloggers all have admirable facial hair and never need a wingman in bars.
Mothering blogs will survive, because mums have a mafia-like grip on the internet which is acknowledged by no-one and felt by everyone. Health and exercise blogs will continue to thrive because there is no limit to how much people will read if they think they will find the definitive secret to getting bodacious thighs. And specialist blogs documenting things like steam locomotive trainspotting or exotic bird rearing will persist on a low hum for the time being thanks to their small but avid readerships of fellow trainspotters and bird fanciers who read and comment with the kind of heartfelt gusto every single blogger on the planet would kill for from their readers.
Formless blogs like this one just exist for themselves. Guten Morgen Berlin is just my online workbench where I can try things out, with a stack of disoranised papers in the corner, empty tea mugs dotted around the peripheries and a selection of wood shavings and bits of receipts scattered in between the things I am trying to cobble together.
2016 is going to be my year of trying things out. I’m going to try projects I have wanted to do for years and see if I can go further doing the things that I never thought I could do. I’m going to help the campaign for the Berlin bike safety government petition. I’m going to try writing a script and a series of books for kids. I’m going to build websites and create a new home for Guten Morgen Grammar with downloadable teaching resources to be used in schools. I’m going to learn to animate and finish figuring out what the hell MySQL is all about. I shall make things with silver, glass, wood and fabric. I shall see if anyone wants to pay me to write things. I will practise my guitar more. I will figure out what the deal is with vanishing points. I will grow back the fingertip which I sliced off earlier while making salad. I will go months at a time without falling off my bike.
And if I don’t manage any of that, at least I will have fun writing about it all here.
