people

Spot the difference

Check it out, I went to the Ostsee!  Hang on, I think I have another photo from a different angle…oh yes, here it is. Ho, hold on…that can’t be right…here’s another photo: And another shot of those dreamy waters: Well, I don’t know what to tell you. The earth moves around the sun just 180 degrees and suddenly the beach has turned from the shore of the river Styx to the kind of thing you see in fake retro postcards they sell in hipster shops.Granted, it was beautiful and awesome to see the Ostsee coast in Winter and be fully...

  • Uncategorized

Driftin’

Flat#1, Residence#3, Home#5. I’m moving again. Not here in Berlin, of course; the very sight of WG Gesucht moves me to hysterical panic attacks. The horror….the horror…… No, I’m moving in the UK. One month after I return, one month from today, I and my family will be leaving our current house and moving to another modern little number in the suburbs where my parents will “grow” old together (you can see that I know they don’t read this) and where I will spend a good deal of the rest of my life. Life has never been so schizophrenic –...

  • Uncategorized

The Plague

“And ye shalt all be punished for your sins by damage of yon intestynes and kidneees!” You may or may not be aware, but Germany is in the middle of the biggest health scare since <insert irritating Bild article here>. Its name is EHEC, it’s a virus which might cause permanent damage to your kidneys or intestines, and if it’s feeling really racy that day it might even go the whole hog and kill you. Some newspapers are genuinely calling it a plague, while even the initial skeptics such as myself are starting to get a little uneasy about it...

  • Uncategorized

Berlin Stylin’

Case study: The Japanesey baby-doll on the far right. There were about twenty of those roaming the garden. One of the overwhelming senses one gets from this city is the tremendous feeling of freedom that seems to breeze through the people who live and work here. I don’t mean freedom of opinion or the freedom to marry any of a number of different genders or any of the other United-Nationsy freedoms which bore us on a daily basis with their endless bloody controversy; I simply mean a sense of pure personal freedom, the freedom to be exactly how we want...

  • Uncategorized

New from Nivea: Berlin style skin-thickening cream

You’re not so friendly yourself, sign-y boy… You’ve got to be darned tough to live in this city. It is by no means a place for dreamy romantics or vulnerable maidens; no, in this city, raised by Kraftwerk and Currywurst and G’s that sound like J’s, you must be an industrial terminator-type, a metropolitan-style SAS warrior. You have to be ready to shove your shoulder into wherever you want to stand or move and ready to walk through an open door even if it’s being held open by a struggling young mother holding groceries and two babies.  Well, not quite,...

  • Uncategorized

Lovable rascals

This is Berlin, I promise. Don’t look up too long or you’ll step in something… Allow me to paint you a picture with words and sounds. You are asleep in bed at 6am on a Sunday morning. You are comfortable, warm and happily drooling onto the pillow. You have not slept well during the night but now you are nestling blissful in the cocoon of slumber, the mellow breeze of the morning gently toying with the hairs on your forehead. Suddenly and without warning this song explodes through your window and into your subconscious at tremendous volume. You leap up...

  • Uncategorized

Pinch, punch…

You should see the size of the Jenga… It was the first of May yesterday, and in Berlin that can mean only one thing: time to take to the streets. May the first is traditionally a ‘worker’s day’, a day when employees in Germany have the day off; in olden days they used to do the appropriate thing and stick poles in the ground, ponce around with ribbon and give flowers to pretty young maidens, but since then the grand old customs have slightly changed to mean that people in worker’s unions protest in droves, swarming around cities claiming various...

  • Uncategorized

S41 flew over the cuckoo’s nest

It’s a metaphor. Good grief, the Berlin public transport system is a scary state of affairs. If you weren’t already troubled by the inexplicably furious bus drivers, the erratic arrival and departure times and the completely indecipherable tram system, the main thing which really poses as a threat to your safety and well-being is the inescapable fact that a public transport system is, well, public. You sit knee-to-knee (and sometimes other body parts are involved) with real Berliners, and while the majority of them are inoffensive or even pleasant, there is a universal rule which applies to at least every...

  • Uncategorized