Guten Morgen Berlin!

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...

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...