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Last year and the year before that and four years ago too we went down on the train to West Germany, to a tiny village lying under the skirts of the old woods. This is where my sweetheart was born. His father was born in the same house and to me the village, the house, […]

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Young, scruffy, insouciant Indian boy is walking by the greasy canal with his parents. Evidently he’s been showing them Berlin. Lifting his shapeless hand in a vague gesture towards the old, carved terraces he says: If I were ever rich – the slight rush of his r’s making it clear he quite expects this to […]

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Today I had my hair cut and lost enough length to stuff a small teddy bear. Afterwards I crouched on the floor in the horseshoe swatch of paler wood worn on the black boards where the hairdresser stands every day in an arc that sweeps back and forth around each customer, and tamped up the […]

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I saw three Spanish boys doing parkour in the gardens. I have run out of money and am hungry: it’s temporary. To a Spaniard gardens means a large, bare, gravelled expanse with formally clipped hedges and dark, clotting trees. The smell of the cyprus is familiar from home. I sat on a bench under the […]

I went into the bottleshop and found the most approachable face. A guy from Canada. I told him, I only drink red. Ordinarily it’s cheap. But I want to spend maybe four dollars more and buy a wine that’s gonna make me go: That is why people spend money on wine. His eyes lit up. […]

I think mining is a really primitive way of making a living. You gouge it out of the earth and you ship it away. It can never be sustainable: unlike a forest, where you can say “Well, we plant two trees for every one cut and we leave behind the nests and the habitats, we […]

Whenever people ask, So do you make a living from your writing, I feel obscurely coal-hauled, if not outright keel-hauled. Does anyone ask this question of an architect, a dentist? It’s so personal and somehow lip-smackingly censorious. I hear behind it two subtext questions: 2: “So. Is your writing any good?” and 3: “And am […]

Something I dig about the guy I’m travelling with. We are staying with my folks and Mum, fielding a houseful of hungry guests, sent us down to the supermarket with her credit card, and her pin number written on my wrist. We did the shopping and then looked at one another. I said, “Hey! We’ve […]

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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 […]

Such a jolly lady in the village post office just now. She really made my day happier. Expertly popping up and then deconstructing one box after another until I could figure out which size I needed to buy, each with a hint of a flourish, like an auctioneer. “And here… we have the Number 3…. […]

Felt overcome by everything today & could not get out of my room until 4. So I went for a bike ride and found this basement cafe with a fireplace in the corner, right down the toe end of the sock on some higgledy-piggledy medieval street. O, comforting, o, deliciousness! But oh, no. Going up […]