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  50 cents a ride. #yourmum Stan and I are a great team. He ploughs along the roads like a little two-wheeled tank, coping with all the potholes and cobbled streets, surging forth with minimal wobbliness. I take him everywhere and buy him nice things like a brand new lime-green bike light. He’s enough of a squat little beast that no-one in their right mind would steal him. I know he will be there tethered up at the end of the day, right where I left him.  On Saturday I chained up my bike Stan outside Kaisers next to the...

  For weeks and weeks and what feels like muthafrickin’ YEARS, I have been working on putting together a big map of New York City for us to give out for free in the city as part of our marketing. It has gone through a thousand iterations, none of which has yet been good enough to send to print. The more I have chiseled away at this not-so-masterful-masterpiece, the more I have grown to loathe the city. The street names are so very boring, labelled with numbers and letters like some rudimentary textbook circuitboard from the 1980s; the subway system...

So young. So full of dreams. Recently, I suffered a tragedy. I was sitting on my sofa after lunch one Sunday, idly browsing on my laptop with the bright late-summer sun streaming through my fourth-floor windows. Here, up high like this, I get the sunshine in big dazzling floods right from the dawn chorus. It was a beautiful day. Suddenly and without warning an enormous gale-force gust of wind ripped through the air and whisked my windowbox off the windowsill and all the way down to smash on the tarmac below. I leapt to the window with a forlorn wail....

Gritty urban living. It’s been a strange, shapeless time. This week I had my 25th birthday, but I also reached the end of my energy stores; I had a miniature birthday knees-up, dragged my carcass into the gym as best I could but by the time Thursday rolled around I was certain that my brain had been removed and replaced with polyester teddybear stuffing. As I finished up my work that evening, vaguely tearful with tiredness and no longer coherent, I decided that I wasn’t going to go on holiday for my long birthday weekend; I would stay home and...

Insert passé meme reference here. I was going to write this post about the various stages of massivefaceitis from which I have now (mostly) recovered as an epilogue to the previous two posts about my horrible tooth pulling ‘adventure’. I was, for example, going to tell you about how my cheeks grew so enormous that a guy on the street called me ‘pokemon face’. I was going to describe the big blooming bruise on my right cheek which prompted a passer-by to ask if my boyfriend had been hitting me, right as I was taking the above photo in fact....

Buddy, you look how I feel. I spend the days leading up to my surgery trying frantically to reduce the amount of sweet-mother-of-Lucifer stress that this impending sick leave is going to cause for my work. I also make sure to eat as much crunchy stuff as I possibly can before I would be reduced to a purée-only diet. When I tell our company chairman that I will be taking medical leave for the surgery he replies, ‘Well, that’s your fault for having such a small head.’ I try to get as much as I can done and then it’s...

No matter what your topic is, there will always be a wall in Neukoelln to match. A few weeks ago, the excrement began to hit the air conditioning to a whole new level in the Anonymous Tourism Company for which I work. People went on extended sick leave, customers started flaming us online, hostels caught fire; I was working weekends, late shifts, answering the phone at all hours, putting up shower curtains and buying zany sunglasses and falling off my bike (but that’s another story) all over the city. My to-do list had turned into a to-do möbius strip. And...

  I was all ready with a new snarky blog post about Berliner locals today, but this jaw-dropping sky made me want to write something different. As we wade deeper and deeper into the tourism high season, the work behind the scenes is growing more and more dense and frantic, like a gathering shoal of pirahnas snapping at your bare knees as you try to cross a forest river. An event as joyous as Germany winning the World Cup can drop-kick your day into a new world of madness as you try to keep the traveler’s eye away from the...

Gherkin ashtrays are this season’s must-have item. After you graduate, generally you tend to do some jobs. The majority of them will be dull and/or not really what you anticipated doing as a freshly baked genius hot off the coals of university. Then, at some point, one of those jobs will come with a salary that is perhaps fifty pence – maybe even a pound or more! – above the minimum wage. Congratulations! You’ve done it! This is the taste of real success! You start to marvel at a state of affairs where each month you spend what seems like...

Thank god, a newspaper without football all over the front cover. Better still, it’s not actually a newspaper, it’s a menu. Cake, please. A few evenings ago I was returning home from a very long and painful day at work, carrying in my arms a large cardboard box full of groceries and also one pair of very cool luminescent socks (thank you, Lidl). But when I arrived at my apartment block, and approached the large gateway through to the back section where I live, I could not get any further, because it was the apocalypse. Or at least something like...