Guten Morgen Berlin!

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...