warmth

The best thing about living in Berlin so long and getting better with my German again is I can really enjoy people. Quite often, Berliners are just sweethearts. Today I phoned the handmade brush and broom shop that stands not so far away, in a leafy street I covet and run by the man whose […]

Late night walk through the freezing fog. “Like Blade Runner.” We turn down all the opportunities in the park to buy pot. Here is a street where all the houses are Fifties, which must have been a firebomb hell in the 1940s. I stand there picturing it. Smoke curls up from the narrow tin chimneys […]

8

A homeless man was sleeping in the stairwell when I came home. Or, to put it in the terms which my instinctive body understood, a stranger, appearing unexpectedly, had barricaded my door; his body was coiled and his face hidden; I had to step round him to get in. Raised in Australia with its pleasant […]