berlin

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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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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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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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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