recommendations

Moonrise Kingdom is Medicine

Oh Wes, the Fargo lady too? You are spoiling us… They say say that predictable is dull, unspontaneous, lifeless. But the trajectories and orbits of the planets are predictable, and we still find them hypnotic and beautiful.*  Wes Anderson’s films are, in many ways, endlessly predictable. You have a feeling you know what you’re letting yourself in for as you settle down in the cinema, and inevitably there it comes: the yellow type (and swathes of yellow costumes and set-pieces), the centre-focus shot, the steady pans across dolls-house sets…A tweaky, plunky soundtrack by Mark Mothersbaugh and/or Alexandre Desplat…deadpan conversations…and of...

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The Chef Not-So-Special: Kitchen Hacks

Come on. Admit it. You’ve never used those things on the grater either. There are more cooking sites on the internet than there are feckless youths like me to actually try out all the recipes. I am completely addicted to all of them. But it’s not the recipes that hook me, or the photos (food porn is exploitative and presents an unrealistic ideal of food to impressionable people), nor is it the bloggers’ jocular little anecdotes (incidentally, is it the law to get pregnant if you write a cooking blog?). No, it’s the weird little things you pick up, the...

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Doing the Deutsch

“Hi, can I get a Quorn Bratwurst in a quinoa tortilla please?” “Bugger off.” This is Bratman. (Dunnanunnanunnanunnanunnanunnanunnanunna…) He is the new Bratwurst seller on Cornmarket Street. The only Bratwurst seller on Cornmarket Street. I think probably the only one in the country. This is jarring to those of us who are used to seeing five or ten of these guys on every street corner even at 7am, filling the morning air with the warm, damp, porky mists of the morning Brat. I first encountered Bratman when I was meeting with my German tandem partner who immediately made a beeline...

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Look before you Leip

“I am Goethe! Look upon me and tremble, future German students!” On Wednesday morning of my last week in Germany I rose early, packed my bag, bought myself a breakfast pretzel and within an hour was on the train to Leipzig. I had the chance to visit the city because a few weeks earlier I had been at a concert and got to know a girl who just so  happened to be the girlfriend of a guy in the band (yeah, like I just am too cool fo’ skule). She was visiting from Leipzig where she lives in an opulent...

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Gute Nacht Berlin…

Today I woke up to a view of grey skies, crow-filled fields and a curled-up cat at the foot of my bed. A journey into town involved driving on the left side of the road, and I paid for my new socks in pounds rather than euros. I’m not in Berlin any more; I won’t be coming back for a long time.  This year abroad has been such an exhausting, exciting, intense series of events that there’s no point even trying to summarise or qualify it. It was what it was, I had a huge amount of fun but it...

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Pots-Damn, this place has a lot of castles

Also a lot of Tors, of which this is apparently the gateway to fine Italian dining You can’t really live in Berlin without being aware that Potsdam is hovering eagerly on the outskirts like the rich but lonely sidekick of the school jock. It lies on the very end of the purple line of the S-Bahn, and normal Berliners go about their days never considering the implications of simply riding that rail all the way down to that far away kingdom. Fortunately poor schmoes like myself and my colleague, whose codename in this article will be Eugene, are already used...

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The Further Adventures of Anonymous McBlogger

“Yo soy Señor Papier-Maché, gringo.” The thing about visiting Berlin as a tourist is that you are constantly treading the fine line between the two types of tourist that swarm around this city in their multitudes: the typical doughy, shorts-wearing people who take constant streams of photos and simply have to see anything that is to do with Berlin, Germany and (regrettably) the Holocaust, and the lithe, toothy young things who search out only the ‘realest’ and grittiest things Berlin has to offer. Thanks to these two groups the city is a whirlwind of awful baseball caps and neon colours,...

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The beginning of the beginning of the end

And it seems to me you’ve lived your life like a lampshade in the wind… My odyssey in Berlin is coming to a close, but I specifically booked two weeks after the end of my contract to have the time to do all the things one inevitably always says one must unbedingt machen but never actually finds the time or lust. The first of those days was utterly consumed by the sheer mesmeric euphoria of being in bed for hours and hours and hours without having to do anything or, most importantly, without having to see or interact with a...

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Free and easy in the big city

This is it. On Tuesday I set foot in my last school for the last time and gave my last lesson. On Wednesday I collected all my teaching materials together, resisted the urge to burn them and ceremoniously dumped them on the table at my office. I then spent the rest of my day disinfecting, de-clogging and emptying out my room until it once again began to resemble a domain where a human person might happily live. My sweet flatmate presented me with a celebratory big bunch of roses and my colleagues and I toasted our success with Club Mate,...

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Berlin: Where “rest” is nothing more than a type of rubbish

And what do you find when you go looking for peace and quiet? Men on sticks, of course. I’m a country lass, born and bred, as I believe you already know. Brought up surrounded by fields, farms and circling red kites, where the only traffic noise you could hear was the aggrieved squawk of a pheasant who had another pheasant standing in its way. It’s deadly dull when you’re little, of course, and you find yourself whiling away endless days making anything and everything out of sticks and rocks in order to pass the time, but once you’re older the...

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