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Be still my beating heart… Willkommen (wieder) in Deutschland I know, this entry is rather late in its arrival. Over the last two weeks I have been relishing my Oesterferien in England, seeing old friends, spending quality time with my family and getting burnt by the feeble rays of the British springtime sun. I vowed not to do a lick of work, and pretty much managed it; I vowed to give my voice a rest, and did not manage that in the slightest. Coming back home for a long enoguh time to take stock and meet people gave me a...

Berkshire, 5:30am; the cats awaken. It is the Osterferien, and while the children of Berlin frolic in their German spring breezes for the next two weeks I am at home in the UK reeling with a kind of post-term jetlag. Having been striding around the veins of a big pulsating concrete metropolis this could not be a better antidote; I am now plunged smack-bang in the middle of the British countryside, able to gaze out of my glorious panoramic bedroom window onto partridges and sheep instead of a rusting barbeque and the woman opposite’s kitchen rack. I am rediscovering all...

Another thing I will regret wearing when trying to tell off a child who is too busy gazing at my ears to pay attention… There are a million things I love about Berlin. My crazy jewellery course is one of them, and I will miss it dearly now that it’s over. Above you will see the final thing I spent three good hours swearing at, weeping over, bleeding onto and quietly muttering oaths about. You’ll recognise the strawberries from my Viking glass beads course and the hammer from my series of brutal bunny-boiler murders that I committed in one wild...

“Hey, fancy going for dinner, I know this great Italian food restaurant.” “Sounds good, what’s it called?” “*cough*…” Getting to grips with the culture of food and eating in Germany in comparison with that of England is strange and difficult. In the same two square metres you can find a restaurant selling such eye-wateringly delicious food that you can barely hold in your tongue and a shack peddling sweaty-looking Döner meat served by a man who uses the same cloth to wipe his kitchen knives and his armpits. And you can bet a lot of money that both of these...

Berlin has changed me in two specific ways which I very much hope are temporary symptoms of the city and the job rather than permanent dents in the chassis of my prior self. Number one: working with infants all day has smushed any broodiness or maternal instinct I might have ever felt into a fine gooey pulp, and Number two: I am no longer, at least for the foreseeable future, a Dog Person.  There was a time when any dog would reduce me to a simpering moron, squeeing at its cuteness or wufflyness or the particular quality of its fur...

This sure is one…well-endowed…monkey… Over the last couple of days in Germany the buzz is all about Karneval, or ‘Fasching’ depending on who or where you are. This is a sort of pre-Lent festival similar to Mardi Gras and making Pancake Day look about as exciting as a cup of tea (which, let us be frank, usually comes alongside the pancakes anyway). For adults it means dancing around the streets half-naked and completely drunk; last Sunday the Karneval parade took place down Kurfurstendamm street, with pasty and cold German dancing women dressed as if they were in Brazil throwing flowers...

                Far left: “Your baby is adorable! I’ll give you four euros.” Flea markets (Flohmärkte) are a bit of a huge deal here in Berlin. As I briefly and casually mention in a previous post, every Sunday this city suddenly becomes like an abandoned amusement park, full of hollowly empty streets, eerily swinging shop signs and rolling tumbleweed. Flea markets would seem to be Berlin’s response to this unbearable hiatus of human activity, as every Sunday every ‘Platz’ and park you come across is filled with rickety stalls with grimy-coated people selling Trödel...

About three days ago the city took a sudden and stomach-turning lunge back towards temperatures circling a painful -10 to -14 degrees C, which once again meant that being outdoors for any length of time is physically sore, that the sheer glimmer of a flake of snow in the air makes everyone pause with fright like the kids watching the rippling glass of water in Jurassic Park, and most importantly coincided with me losing my third pair of gloves (not including one hat). Nonetheless, I spent a miserable couple of days with my chipolatas ice-cold in my emergency skiing gloves...

And hey, when the hill looks like this you’re sure as hell going to enjoy the ride down. I am twenty-one years old, and closer to twenty-two these days, so usually when people find this out and have got over their initial jaw-droppage (I should explain: I look like I am about twelve, which is great for getting child discounts to things but not so good when I am trying to do an adult’s job and am approached by concerned parents who worry that their children have been put in the care of a pigtail-sucking schoolgirl) their eyes glaze over...

I may have already spoken about this briefly before, but kids in Germany have a really sweet deal when they’re little. The first photo in this post is just an example of the kind of fantastic playgrounds they have at their disposal in this city; yes, that is indeed a giant dragon made out of old bits of wooden pallets, and it’s no wonder that there is a grown woman about to clamber onto it herself at the precise second this photo was taken. Doesn’t the sight of it alone make your inner child want to go nuts all over...