Fighting fascism with Bionade and almost-Quorn

Imagine this looking even more decrepit and you’re on the money. This blog has grown legs in a way I never expected it would. When I started this little project, I decided to begin with the assumption that no-one would read it except for the occasional leant-on-the-mouse-while-searching-on-Google accident. I wrote every entry for the audience of me, imagining myself as some kind of rogue Charlie Brooker-type character who had the multitudes of urbane and sophisticated readers inside my head nodding with approval, in order to make it seem like less of a waste of human energy.  Yet in a dramatic...

The Usborne Kid’s Guide to Advanced German

Why do they even need to learn the word ‘Jacket’ at the age of three anyway? There are two sides to teaching English to very small children, and both of them are rather disarming once you actually begin to consider them any further than ‘whatever pays the rent’. One thing you become aware of is that in teaching them the specific syllabus with which you have been provided, someone has made the conscious decision of what they feel are the most important and appropriate words to form the foundations of a language for a very small child; the other is...

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Honey, I’m…home?

No, it’s not tidy. Feast your eyes on real, gritty Berlin life. At least, I bloody hope this mean I’m home. Over the last few months I have been in seven different domiciles, both in the UK and in Germany – let’s break it down: 1. My UK home. Where I grew up and spent the largest part of my conscious existence. A beautiful old huge house with cavernous, airy, freezing-cold rooms and an ever-changing variety of problems to be repaired at great expense. 2. The hostel in which I stayed when I started my time here. I haven’t really had...

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They all come craaaaawling back…

Fig. 1: A cat demonstrating the exact position in which I slept on my first night back in Berlin. Well, where do I begin, really. It’s been a long time without the internet, and as with every typical millisecond of my existence, practically every day has thrown up something eminently blog-about-able which has unfortunately had long enough to stew in the limbo of non-anecdotehood that it is now unlikely ever to be told. Schade, as the Deutsche would say. Suffice it to say, these last few weeks have indeed been memorable and intense and have felt simultaneously brief and endless....

Come back to me…

Hi, Internet. I miss you too. I know, honestly I do, but I can’t do anything about it. They cut the internet cable in the wall apparently. You know I think about you all the time.  Yes, I do! Of course I’m not just saying that! I know I haven’t written anything on my blog in a while. I know, I know. Yes, you’re right. Well ok, let me think. I guess I could write a quick one about what’s been happening since we last saw each other? Yeah? Ok. It’s now six days before I finally go back to...

Now comes with visual interest! Available in stores.

Grandma, what cool things did you do when you lived in Berlin? Cardcraft. This is a picture of a mask I made for my first ever German ‘Motto’ party – being a fancy-dress party based on some kind of motto (stop me if I get too technical) – where the motto was ‘Traum’ (dream). Now, although I am an eager dresser-upper to say the least, I am always reluctant these days to spend much time or money on good costumes anymore after being sick and tired of being the zombie bride in the ‘Mean Girls’ situation; that is to say,...

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And so begins the mental hibernation process

This post will have a corresponding photo tomorrow after I am once again able to swap my woefully slow internet stick for the merely laughably slow stick; in the meantime please imagine an image of lots of people standing in the snow at a remote train station in the middle of nowhere, all of them looking disappointed. It snowed in Berlin at the beginning of this week, which was an utter surprise as every Winter in Germany is accompanied by tropical heat, a gentle cheek-tickling breeze and the migration of thousands of lime-green parakeets into the city centre. Oh wait...

This blog post was brought to you by…a decent cup of tea

The kind of marvellous tourist attraction I offer my guests Two posts in two days! Good lord, what is going on here? Well, I suppose I’d better get on with it then. This weekend I had my first visitor from the UK, my mother, come to see my new little kingdom in my new Heimat. Being a right little mummy’s girl (possibly to a forehead-slappingly embarrassing extent) I was boiling with anticipation of her arrival, and having spent the whole weekend with her doing little more than lingering over the kind of hearty brunch that makes your cheeks pink and...

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ApoCOLDlypse

Before I begin, I would like to pay tribute to a beautiful dog who very recently died after being the most gorgeous and famously sweet-tempered pet I have ever encountered. He belonged to a good friend of mine and while I knew him, he was a constant source of fun and comfort and love, and if any of his family should read this, I would like them to know how sorry I am for their loss. RIP Pickles; you were a treasure and one of a kind. ******************************************************************************** A few days ago, my mother came to visit me here and...

Adventures in the wilderness

If you asked me to take you to a place in Germany that is the opposite of Berlin in every single way (except for temperature), I would immediately take you to the Ostsee. If you asked me to take you somewhere that was the definition of Freud’s ‘uncanny’ (thank you, useless literary theory paper) I would take you to the Ostsee without hesitating. If you asked me to show you what Henley town centre would look like with a huge terrifying voodoo swamp replacing the river – well, you’d probably stop asking me to take you places because the lack...

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