Farewell to Ange

Saying goodbye is one of the major downsides of the transient lifestyle, without a doubt. The lovely Angela left this week on her way to a new life in Melbourne. She will be missed.

My own travels took me to Liverpool airport for the first ever time earlier in the week. Not only is it named after John Lennon, but the whole place is adorned with segments of lyrics by the wife-beating anti-Semite, including chunks from that beautiful and touching piece of whimsy ‘Imagine.’

Not a piece of cake

Proficiency at Deutsch continues to hover quite some distance out of my grasp. I would at least have hoped to be good at shop German by now, but even that is proving frustrating. This is largely because they have about 100 ways to ask if you want anything else, many of them longer and more complicated than would seem to be called for (‘Darf es sonst noch etwas sein?’ springs to mind).
Guessing is difficult since they seem to be fairly equally divided into phrases requiring a Ja or a Nein to answer in the negative, so the only way to be sure of not provoking a switch into English is to rush in with a ‘Das ist alles’ before they can throw a ‘Haben Sie sonst noch einen Wunsch?’ at you. This tends not to make bakery trips that relaxing, a factor I blame for coming out of one the other day clutching a cake with the unfortunate name of a Schweinsohr (pig’s ear).

I think that I might have a touch of Weltschmerz. I found out that a radio station a friend works for now calls its branches ‘profit centers,’ and I decided that capitalism has officially consumed all that is decent and worthy of hope in humanity. We’re all doomed.

Überraschungen

I had a weekend full of surprises, including a several-hours-long neighbourhood-wide power cut soon after I started to DJ (I knew I shouldn’t have agreed to Friday 13). Possibly one of the locals objected to early PIL or Cansei de Ser Sexy and took drastic action. I also met an Israeli man who talked exactly like Graham Norton and reckoned he knew Hilary Clinton, and suddenly started biting one of my friends.

Later, I decided to wash one of my airbeds in preparation for some upcoming visits, since it was starting to look a bit woebegone after accompanying me on several festival trips. Unfortunately I omitted to put the little plug in the hole before immersing it in my bathtub, so I have created a strange kind of water bed which seems unwilling to give up its inner contents, no matter how hard I shake it.

NB at Pukkelpop I saw someone with a Luftbett which when deflated resembled nothing so much as an empty bin bag – with a similar weight. My mission before next summer is to find and own one.

Newspeak

And talking of Mark Foley (the page wanking Congressman) - haven't we crossed some dystopian line when the Republican media decide that the way to deal with the scandal is simply to keep 'mistakenly' calling him a Democrat, realising that their brain wiped viewers and listeners will swallow this as they swallow all of their other poisonous untruths?

No really, I'm an alcoholic

Interesting how there seems to be a new trend of admitting to alcoholism and/or drug addiction in the hope of distracting attention away from something else. The singer from Keane was the first to try it, clearly aspiring to add some level of rock and roll cool to his geeky sacharine persona. Then the paedophile Republican Congressman in the States seemed to think that it would be a good idea to blame his habit of wanking over underage boys via instant message on his problems with drink. And now Justin Hawkins is offering alcoholism and cocaine addiction as the reason for quitting his failed group The Darkness, rather than the only too painful realisation that they were always a naff novelty act and shouldn't ever have got ideas above their station.

A whinge

English is everywhere in the life of this city: in brand names; on adverts; in shop windows and generally somewhere to be found in all forms of marketing. Where it isn’t of course is where it might be useful i.e. in notices, announcements and signs giving vital information about trains, buses and trams. In fairness to the Berlin transport authority though, it must be pointed out that the aforementioned helpful items don’t exist in any other language either, including German. Maps and plans are also kept to the barest minimum (how often in my first months here would I be on a platform and watch a train pull in and then pull out again before I could locate a map to see if it was going in my direction. My favourite was always the map on the wall obscured by the very train which might or might not be the one you wanted).

So, I had an appointment on Saturday with a new physio, and he lives up beyond Prenzlauerberg in Weissensee, in other words further north/east than I normally set foot. However, having consulted the BVG website, I felt myself equal to the task of getting there. An absolutely vital part of the journey was the tram I would get from Alexander Platz up to the lake, there being no other form of transport in that part of the city. And of course I arrived under the Fernsehturm to find every one of the tram lines being excavated by men with diggers, and no form of a clue offered as to where any replacement service might be located. I wandered around the whole of Alex’s soviet bemuralled concrete sprawl, gazing vacantly at the many disused tram stops (I won’t deny that there was an element of adverse effect from the previous two nights’ drinking which may not have seen me at the absolute peak of my mental powers) and asking locals who were just as confused as I was. And in the end, I gave up. I gave up and went home again. I have travelled in some of the most far flung corners of the globe, have managed to find myself a boat to take me down the Amazon river, have sped across Cambodia in a speedboat when the Khmer Rouge were still in the hills and it wasn’t safe to go overland. And yet I was ultimately defeated by the determination on behalf of the city of Berlin to withhold all vital information regarding its transport system from its users.

I’m not sure whether or not the authorities feel that a loud burst of Star Wars music precipitated by the U8 train pulling into Alex U-Bahn will somehow make up for this. In my case, it didn’t.