A lot of noise round the house today as the Hausmeister – Deutschland brims with masters – has called a gang of workmen in to saw back the thorny bushes round the huddle of bins. Our bin system is complex because everything gets recycled – everything but, puzzlingly, aluminium and steel. The thorny bushes make […]
Walked into a Turkish convenience store late on Friday night, they sold water pipes as well as a dazzling array of alcohols and sundry sweet snackettes… behind the counter stood a very untall & wizened woman wearing a scarf, her hands on the counter at chest height in front of her, and beside her a […]
Walking home down rainy streets my last night in this house. Tomorrow unnest, budge myself, nudge, shift. Winter has landed with its big wings. Now the warmth of the indoors folds us in, the subway’s roaring throat, we all descend, we bring our dogs and biscuits. I saw two small boys fighting in the subway […]
Like a little eggshell in the sky. I have moved into my final Berlin sublet, just 3 weeks, and barely dare breathe. Everything is white down to the phone, painted roughly with house paint but still black on the inside when you pick up the receiver. In the little white bathroom a toilet with no […]
I’m alone in the house and my heart feels filled with love. It’s a feeling like glass-slippered waves coming in over your feet on the sparkling, rough sand, so shallow you barely get wet but the softness of the water is inexpressible. Like water from stars, I mean light, I mean starlight, the salt water […]
The place I’ve sublet has a shelf of Joanna Trollope novels and I’ve just reread two of them. It’s so interesting learning all the signs she uses to indicate class. In the gentry, rudeness indicates an unwillingness to pander to form, it is authenticity. In factory workers, rudeness betrays a lack of breeding. Horsey women […]