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One time I came to work and this was spraypainted on my desk.  I‘ve just been promoted. Rather, I’ve received a new job title which, in the words of my boss, is little more than simply ‘calling a spade a spade’. My new title is ‘Head Office Manager and Design Co-ordinator’, the second part referring to how I co-ordinate words and pictures on a page and then co-ordinate those pages with a printer, much like a designer but not – I repeat, not – a designer, merely a co-ordinator. Co-ordinating. The first part of my new title means a lot...

Always hang up your bees to dry in a cool, well-ventilated area. In true ‘Berliner pensioner’ fashion, Sunday mornings have now become my regular gardening session; I like to wander down and potter about after breakfast while the young’uns are still in bed nursing their hangovers. There’s pretty much only one job to be done each week: weed eradication. Well, not so much eradication as a distressed flailing while they erupt all over the bed so vigorously you can practically hear it. Today I also thinned out the golden beetroot seedlings and replanted the extras – and then a little...

Whenever I see droplets on my plants, I say a little prayer that it isn’t dog pee. Out of all the personal achievements I most prize from my time in Berlin so far, the greatest is this: I am finally in possession of my very own garden. Admittedly it’s about the area of a large dining table and it’s surrounded by dozens of other people’s tiny gardens which seem to be doing their level best to froth over and infest mine, but mine it is, five square metres of land. It wasn’t easy to get; dedicated readers might remember the...

I just know that someone is going to set fire to these, or poop on them, or let their chihuahua dig them up. Welcome back! I say that to myself, of course, since I can only assume that during that epic hiatus of non-blogging all of my three regular readers have since packed up and gone back to Buzzfeed where they belong. These last few weeks, in between the infinite crises at work, dragging my unwilling corpse to the gym, fulfilling possibly unwise promises, cultivating my garden and trying to beat back the wild, encroaching mess in my flat with...

Dude, you look like I feel… On Sunday night, I caught a plane back to Berlin and touched down in the late afternoon. I pottered home, dumped my bag, had a cup of tea, and mooched off to the supermarket to grab a few bits and pieces for an improv dinner. I returned to the flat, put away the groceries, and lazed around for a little while. Slowly, I began to realise that something wasn’t quite right. And then, more suddenly, I was catapulted by a sudden urge into the bathroom where I would then spend the next eight hours...

‘Right then, Steve, I’ll meet you at the bottom for a Long Island Iced Tea.’ It is time, friends, for us to take a holiday from Berlin life; from the dogs, the shouting squatters and the early-morning beer drinkers. For a quiet moment let us leave this strange and alien world and retire to the Alps, a rural existence in the white, snowy peaks. Let us dump our baggage in a cosy hotel room and free our minds. And then, let us strap large, sharp planks to our legs and go outside and slide around on the mountainside. No culture...

Something very sad is happening in Berlin. It all started with something that wasn’t at all sad, not even a little bit. You see, a long time ago, there were some horrible people in Germany that wanted to do do vile stuff to most other people including each other, and hideously vile stuff to the rest of the people, depending on whether or not they belonged to certain groups. These horrible people, much like normal people, also liked flying from place to place and found it quite useful for getting things done, so they put together a huge airport which...

I don’t remember Morris dancers ever having nipple tassles before, but at least they weren’t twerking… Mere days before the gentle rain and playful wintry breezes caused the entire transport system in the UK to implode catastrophically, I managed to get on a plane and come back to my home country for Christmas. It would be the first time coming home in almost eight months. More importantly, it would be my first decent cup of tea in what has felt like an interminable chasm of time. Three days of work in the London office of my (very important and internationally...

See that woman with the red trousers? See her face? That, my friend, is patented Berlin Contempt™ First, a little bit of backstory. I have long hair. A lot of very long hair. So much thick, long hair that it swirls around my neck and shoulders like a ravenous deadly octopus, threatening to consume my upper torso. In order to dry it, brush it and shape it into something resembling a civilised hairstyle I would have to wake up at least 45 minutes earlier every morning. So instead I tend to let it dry naturally on the walk to the...

“Oh my god, someone took all my stuff!! Oh wait – I don’t have any stuff…“ Something strange happened on the train today. I was standing next to a man with a beard and a beanie, who was with his two young, groomed and bright-looking friends (well, one of them had a distractingly small woolly hat on, but I didn’t hold it against him). The beardy man had a very posh, fancy camera, and he was looking through the photos on it with his mates, flicking through them with the odd snort of laughter. So far, so boring. But then...