Click ‘OK’ to restart your commuter

There is a sign on the vending machine on the left which says: “THE CHOCOLATE HAS MELTED. YOU ARE ADVISED NOT TO BUY.” Working in Berlin, I became a dynamite commuter. I worked in at least two different schools or Kindergärten per day, and they were perfectly geographically arranged to be at least an hour if not two away from each other. I learnt – after many long, hard days of getting it wrong – how to get the right trains and buses at the right time and in the right directions, which stretches were actually quicker on foot, which...

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Execudeutsch

This is for Berlin zoo’s last panda, who tragically died last month. I think he choked on a carrot. Where have I been? Why does the site look different? What is the point of anything? I can’t answer all your questions but the first two have the same explanation, which is that I have recently been rather overwhelmed with a single job application which – shock, horror and gaping disbelief – actually led to an email of reply, an interview and then a trip back to Oxford.I have refrained from blogging about the graduate job search thus far for two...

Juicy Culture

It’s sucking you in…you can’t resist…the vortex has you… Ok, so here’s the story. We book a family holiday abroad; the final holiday we’ll probably ever do together, since I am now technically an adult and my brother is now technically too cool. Then my father buys a new mobile phone, a process which apparently nowadays requires you to show your passport, because fraudulently buying a mobile phone is akin to the bootleg alcohol trade in the times of prohibition. He then ostensibly throws the passport into the wind or drops it into an eddying river or ties it to...

Meet the youngest spinster in Great Britain

This decor would certainly calm a llama down. (60% of my readers will get more out of that than the rest) So. Two things.Number one: it was my birthday this weekend, and for the first time (and in the wrong country) I celebrated it GERMAN-STYLE. In Germany, unlike in the UK where you have a big knees-up on the calendar date of your birth, you “party in” to your birthday, meaning you get violently drunk the evening before and just keep on going until that magic midnight bell, when songs are sung, presents given and someone probably brings out a...

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Whistle while you gherk

Possibly my proudest achievement of my life so far Ok, so perhaps my ‘heimatsickness’ for Germany is going a little too far these days, but when I was shopping in my local LIDL a few months ago I spied a little packet of gherkin seeds for a meagre 50p and just couldn’t resist it. Suddenly I had an opportunity to   combine two of my greatest loves: growing veg, and Gewürzgürken (pickled gherkins). The cute little things grew lovely, lime-green shoots by my kitchen windows, then perked up in the polytunnel to ridiculous spiny triffids which were soon completely festooned with...

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What to expect when you’re not expecting anything whatsoever

“Hmm…the cards seem to be suggesting an internship with KPMG…” Look, I know what you’re thinking. “Has she really just graduated, or has she been a crazy old craft-obsessed hermit this whole time and the student thing was just an elaborate front?” I know you’re expecting blog entries about the graduate job scene, about applications and interviews and the looming sense of dread, but what would be the point? Between newspapers wailing about the dearth of graduate employment, job sites publishing lists of the top ten positions new graduates aren’t qualified for or skills new graduates are expected to have...

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Native species of the Gymnasia highlands

Who goes to the gym in platform flip-flops? Ever since I was old enough to realise that my physique resembled a blancmange in high winds, I have been a regular visitor of my local gym. The humiliation of exercising publicly is too much for me; I don’t want old people on park benches regarding me with sardonic dismay, I would much rather seedily sweat away on a contraption among other light-shy cockroaches like myself. I am fond of my gym like one might be fond of an old but slightly smelly family dog. It’s the cheapest gym around, which means...

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Summer break over, resuming thrice-weekly updates y’all!

The new Batman series is dark. Really, really dark. Dark like a black hole. And, like a black hole, it sucks. I know what you’re thinking, but I’m still not going to write about the graduate job search. No, no, I know, but I refuse. Not yet, at least – there seems little point in reiterating what we all know from frantic Guardian articles and fretful comments from grandmothers. Instead I am going to write about The Dark Knight Rises, because someone needs to be the brave dark warrior and be honest about how genuinely disappointing this series is.  The...

Summer days in Pleasantville (population: mowers)

Apologies for the unseasonal photograph; just imagine it’s marshmallows, not snow. I grew up in a mansion. This is true. My first house in conscious memory was a poky little box on an infamously cat-pulverising road, but I was only there for a couple of years before we moved to my official childhood home. And yes, it was the building above. To clarify, we didn’t live in the whole building – we lived in the largest segment of it, the bit denoted by the glowing front door and all the windows to the right of the black dormers. (To clarify...

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Rhinestones on the soles of her shoes

Before After Hoo-wee! After hours and hours scratching away at my Wacom tablet, the illustrations are now finished and ready to teach whole cohorts of babies in Berlin. I can leave the desk and the hours of having Cookery School on in the background to keep me sane (it’s a new discovery, a brilliant cooking programme containing all my favourite things: absolutely droolworthy recipes, idiot people getting their cooking wrong, the girl-we-all-love-to-hate Gizzi Erskine and a professional chef who sounds exactly like Dylan Moran, meaning that when I’m not looking at the video I can pretend I’m listening to Bernard...

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