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Today in Berlin I found a hand-blown wine bottle so beautiful I had to pick it up to carry home. I saw an elder descending the stairs from a sushi bar painfully and slowly. He crossed the pavement, leaning on his stick. To my surprise he came up to a bicycle and dropped his satchel […]

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I went to a new physiotherapist today for my injured hand, and experienced all the Germanness. Me and the therapist, who is 23, have to call each other Mrs So and So, Mrs So. Her first name is not vouchsafed on her nametag and the surname was very German and unfamiliar to me. I thought […]

I’ve joined a Facebook group which posts pictures of people’s dogs. The rules are long and repetitive: only dog pics and pics of dogs being doggish and cute: no lost dog posts, no questions about dog food… just hounds. In the last week this group has taught me all kinds of new vocabulary. Boop is […]

My parents have a spare room which they have been eager to put to use as Dad’s medical expenses mount, so I offered to manage it for them as an Airbnb listing. Airbnb has been so problematic in rapidly gentrifying areas of Berlin that it’s actually been outlawed: developers were buying up whole buildings and […]

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I just acquired the most beautiful new German word. We are discussing privilege and a new acquaintance says he has to do something ehrenamtlich – oh, how divine, can ‘ehrenamtlich’ mean ‘voluntary’? An ‘Amt’ is a bureau, government department or office. But ‘Ehre’ means honour. Germany is overrun with Amts. Ordinarily they sound faintly menacing: […]

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The film poster that has Godzilla tearing up great chunks of the city and eating alive New York City should have been a giant Pacman, I think. For technology has eaten New York. And not only New York: Copenhagen, Madrid, Berlin: these are cities where I have witnessed this carnage, sinister and almost silent. We […]

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A man in front of me got up from his bench and ambled towards the train. He was huge and had that loping, awkward walk of a boy who’s been called too big all of his life. I’d say 6’5″ or 6″. As we both sat down on opposite benches he pulled out a book […]

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Someone was asking for songwriting ideas and I came up with these. Ideas are easy, it’s the completion that stings. Pushing your bicycle past a house where a particular song is playing. Seeing a cloud in the shape of something you love, or fear. A leaf falls in front of your feet and it makes […]

Woodford. What I forgot is that it is less of a festival, more of a place. Wherever you go and whomever you see, the valley grounds hold everyone up to the sky and in the natural amphitheatre right up back the venerable trees stand watch. It must be ten years since I was there, the […]

I was uncomfortable at Woodford to hear the Tibetan monks who had been hired to chant the festival’s “Dawn Ceremony”, alongside the thrilling singing of Tenzin Choegyal, being largely ignored or at best treated as background muzak while many people chatted and caught up, hugged loudly and with much syrupy performance, anointed one another with […]

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To me facebook is like a cocktail party, a clubhouse, a series of treehouses strung out among browsing forested hills. It resembles a cache, a sparkling wet beach, a web. It feels like the old bone fires built on hilltop after hilltop where signals could be carried by the night itself, all along the coast […]

Went out to a bar with a new friend who is musical, Tuesday nights is quiet night in Berlin so we walked and walked, trampling snow that had reached that pearly soiled colour that is not grey nor is it brown… so beautiful, it’s my new favourite colour, most of the restaurants were closed and […]

This cafe has changed its muserly, miserly, whispery music for Neil Young. He owns the business. His voice is quiet but sure and it penetrates. People gain confidence in such good musical hands, or seem to, and soon the hushed conversation level has risen like water roaring and the blond baby sitting on his mamma’s […]