In a little Hungarian cafe I found a tourist map of Budapest. It very much resembles the summertime map of Berlin. All-night “party with a capital P” hotspots, hostels with wifi, a Sunday farmer’s market “to soothe your hangover soul.” When I got home, a trail of smashed-up pieces of coloured foil lay glittering among […]
Just walked past a cafe table where both parents had their phones out & were intent on… something, something elsewhere. Meantime the year-old child they had produced in an offline moment gazed at one and then at the other, seeing their faces round the back of a screen. When I next passed the mother was […]
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 […]
In Berlin people do all kinds of things out loud in public. You can buy drugs, smoke pot in the street and drink beers, you can walk with your dog into restaurants and boutiques. You can dance on street corners. One of the blisses of living here is that everyone is stranger and no one’s […]
I decided to stay home from the Writers Festival and read, all weekend, in the hammock. Yesterday I read three Mills and Boons, today I am reading a novel by Dave Eggers. The writing is so beautiful it’s almost a liquid. It is modest. It does not proclaim about itself. It’s blood temperature, so I […]
My comfort reading is romances and children’s literature from the 50s, 60s, and 70s. What I find comforting is that it describes a world I can recognise, whereas the world outside my door feels oftentimes too jarring to be borne. What’s disorienting about it is what’s sprouted and what has been lost. Today I read […]
When I walk downhill carrying my computer and the old man sitting underneath the tree nods when I say, marvelling, There’s a lovely butterfly clinging to the underside of that hedge, brown one, just hanging there, and he says, Yeah, they coming round, this time of year, I feel like there is sanity in the […]