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Homemade soup? Gingham? Bare wood? I’m sorry, I think this picture has grossly overstepped the EU certified coziness limits. The season of mists and mellow fruitfulness is over, folks. Now that December’s kicked in, we’re looking into nothing but the season of damp and mother-schmucking-freezingness. The first frost rolled over us last week, and from now on it’s going to be a series of long dark nights, wearing a minimum of five layers of clothes and constant intravenous mainlining of hot tea. Hurray! Though the winter makes life a lot harder in several respects – the beginning of a period...

No successful company should be without a broken beer fridge, a selection of abandoned bicycle parts and a safe to which no-one knows the combination. In these penny-pinching times, all companies are being forced to cut corners and make compromises in order to scrape their way out of this devastating financial crisis. Sorry about that first sentence, but it is apparently the law that every article ever written about industry or society or, indeed, anything should now begin with a hackneyed lament about the financial crisis beginning with the phrase, “In these (insert word related to thrift or poverty) times…”....

What do you do when the one thing you want to blog about is the one thing you definitely shouldn’t blog about? When the one thing that is always on your mind and consuming your thoughts is far too dangerous to spill all about on the big, gusty internet? Well, I guess you just write a strange patchwork of unrelated ideas and flotsam and jetsam instead. Why did this poster happen? 1. Women at the gym. Don’t be lulled into thinking your leggings aren’t translucent. They are. And really, wearing a thong to the gym? So many of you? Are...

If you think this is a mess, you should see the state of my hair these last few days… Sometimes all it takes is the teeniest, weeniest snag to throw your entire existence off its orbit. For me, it was the tap. It all started when I noticed that there were lines of residue coming down from my kitchen tap into the sink. Then I noticed a little stream of water coming from the bottom of the tap. Then, out of curiosity, I put the plug in to see how fast this interesting little waterfall was running. The sink rapidly...

This flower is as beautiful as Monty Don’s soul. Shortly after my recent move, I had a birthday. Well, one day after my recent move, I had a birthday. It was not ideal timing for enjoying oneself, and I spent my actual birthday at work on a rainy day with the remnants of an old bag of sweets to count as my cake. My colleagues (I am smitten) bought me a chili plant and a beautiful orange teapot, plus I was also taken for a ‘business coffee’, so it wasn’t all bad, but it wasn’t much of a shebang. So...

Ominous. This cannot end well. You might have noticed a certain anticipatory silence settle over GMBerlin in the last few days. I haven’t had the time or mind-space to write anything. This is because I have been preparing to move, for the first time, into a Flat Of My Very Own. No Zwischenmiete, no WG, no flatmates, no nothing – and no furniture. With a 9-6 job (in which leaving the office at 6pm is an occurance about as rare as seeing a phoenix fly past the window) there hasn’t been much time to get things ready before D-Day and...

All of these tomatoes are unacceptable in the eyes of society and the law and must be destroyed. I’ve been at my gym for three months now, but today, for the first time, one of the trainers muscled over to the cross-trainer where I was whirring away, signalled for me to remove my earphones, and said: “Where is your towel?” Resisting the urge to make a Hitchhiker’s Guide reference (the guy doesn’t look like he reads much; he clearly spends the majority of his time plucking his eyebrows into razor-fine darts), I casually mentioned that I didn’t have one, and...

There’s no appropriate photo for this post. Here are some radishes. Yesterday night, I was going to write a post about my upcoming new flat. I thought I’d take a quick look at the contract, before realising that my folder of important documents was at work. Eh, thought I, I’ll write the post tomorrow; besides, it was late, and hot, and time to sleep in order to prepare for whatever enormous pile of random tasks awaited me the following day. The air outside was fresh from the rain, so I opened the window and got into bed. About half an...