Dispatches from Berlin IV

Snippets from my iPhone’s notes app with some 35mm photos I took on Kosmo ISO 100, a surprise hit from a German 35mm subscription service I tried out.

19/11
I pull an emergency all-nighter to reset my sleeping pattern, which still hasn’t recovered from the deathly-slow election. I plough hazily through the following day; I finish a book for my book club, browse photography, read everything in my to-be-read folders, watch an art history lecture, do a coding lesson. I fall at the final hurdle (by falling asleep at 4pm).

20/11
All of Berlin’s dogs wear light up collars as the sun sets at 4 and street lighting is non existent. When I walk the canal after dark I watch these disembodied neon halos bobbing towards me with their accompanying ghostly phone-lit face. A swan floats along alone lit only by spilled light reflections from the flats on either side, with the unhurried air of a teenager sidling home as slowly as possible.

21/11
A friend and I buy mulled wines from a packed canal-side booth offering both the red and the white variety (disgusting). We’re served by a brusque woman with a pixie cut and dark lipstick, dealing with what must be an utterly overwhelming job to do alone with that classic Berlin customer service of utter disdain and total disassociation. A gay flag flaps in a surprisingly bitter November breeze and a small dog with a human face snuffles around for waffle crumbs. 

22/11
I make two visits to an English bookshop in Freidrichschain selling expensive books with beautiful covers and the best fleur de sel cookies I’ve ever eaten. I find the only colour photo automat I’ve ever seen in the city, after one round the corner eats €3.20 of carefully saved small change. I haven’t washed my hair and I don’t look at the right part of the screen, but I’ll come back another day.

23/11
I am fined on the U-Bahn on the one occasion I have forgotten to activate my ticket. The others fined with me are outwardly frustrated, and judging by their sideways glances at disapproving law-abiding passengers, they’re also deeply ashamed. I make a very half-hearted effort to argue my cause but I know the outcome and I’d rather get it over with. And while it’s painful being frogmarched to the ATM to pay my penalty fare, no fine will ever be as traumatic as getting stopped two stations from my mum’s house after a morning travelling back from Birmingham having broken up with my long-term partner. Humiliating does not even cover crying hysterically in front of a packed carriage while trying to convince a ticket inspector it’s not the fine that’s making me cry, it’s a sleepless night and the loss of the love of my life. (They all say that, I could see him thinking.)

25/11
My flatmate and I have been avoiding each other as he is permanently poised to rush to Poland to see his wife and child. My only interaction with his presence is the oily smell of frying potatoes that seeps around my doorframe from the kitchen opposite, inspiring a potent combination of disgust and hunger. 

27/11
I have one of those mornings where everything is a struggle and the city feels against me. A lack of sleep has contributed to that exhausted hangover-like nausea that haunted my university days, and the temperature has finally hit freezing. Berlin is grey and full of bad smells and disheveled men yelling on the U-Bahn, and a haze of anxiety simmers over everything for reasons I can’t quite explain; every time someone gets on with a backpack or a shifty expression or a last minute slide through the doors my heart races like it did in 2006 in London (and in 2016 in Brussels, and in 2015 in Paris). My hands feel like alien objects rendered blunt by tiredness and numbing cold, my vision constantly slipping out of focus and my glasses fogging above my mask. A wild-eyed woman with bare ankles growls at me on Karl Marx Allee for following her and I end up spending more time than usual in my favourite book shop in the hope that she has moved on before I emerge. (She has not.)

30/11
It’s one of the first properly cold days and my fingers are so numb that it takes me 90 seconds to open one of the plastic vegetable bags at the supermarket. A man in front of me at the check-out queue with a long ponytail is buying 3 packs of butter, 2 bottles of whisky, a bottle of coke and 2 bottles of bleach. The cashier scans it all through wordlessly and I wonder what the order might have to be to warrant asking someone if they’re doing OK.

02/12
I stroll around my neighborhood with a friend after dark, powered by Glühwein from the Indian restaurant on the corner - every cafe in the area has produced a barrel of fragrant wine on its doorstep. The clouds from our cups and the smoke from her cigarette and the steam of our breath whirl around us in the biting air and the amaretto shots insulate us from the December wind. Glowing stars and fairy lights hang across balconies above us and the golden glow of windows lit from within make my heart ache with something that might be homesickness for another city, or for this one that I am soon to leave.