I will tell you what Berlin is like in the summer. As I cycle home from a far-distant errand I cross over an overgrown field. Near the hangars, part of the largest manmade structure outside the Great Wall of China, a thicket of neatly rowed white demountable houses has bicycles parked and pot plants blooming. […]
The little cat puts her hand possessively on my arm. After a moment’s thought her other hand creeps up to join it and I remember the day I finally found her again, after she had been lost for a lifetime, five months at large in the laneways of inner Melbourne, and a man rang in […]
In New York we had dinner with two New Yorker friends, one from Chicago, who are both broadcast journalists, and a Southern boy one of our friends had picked up in the street and they had bonded. Southern boy had on a Hallowe’en pumpkin shirt over an American flag t shirt. My German companion made […]
It’s 3am now in New York but when we landed in Berlin, it was 7 o’clock on a sunny Sunday morning. It is colder. I am tired. My first time arriving in Berlin from the States and the subway, the U Bahn, seems immediately different. People are different and I can’t put my finger on […]
Brisbane screams and Berlin roars. Can that be what it is. I ask what do you notice and he says, It’s noisy. Brisbane is noisy and Berlin is loud. My anxiety for formulations. Can there be two towns more unlike. We can hear the freight trains on the opposite hill, buildings are no barrier. Everything […]
The last time I was at the airport I watched a band of six merry hipsters in beards (boys) and ballet flats (girls) and narrow cuffed jeans stop at the boarding gate to take a picture of themselves. One volunteered to be not in the picture and the rest fell instantly into a Tommy Hilfiger […]