For a week Berlin’s been covered in ice. It’s an inch thick on the roads and the bike lanes and the pavements, and it’s been there so long it’s black and mottled and hard like a mineral deposit. They don’t grit or salt here. There’s a dispute about who should do the gritting and the salting, between the city and the Ordnungsamt and the street cleaners they contract. Verdicts differ by jurisdiction so some neighbourhoods are slippier than others. Halfway along a bridge over the Spree there’s a border between two districts and sure enough there’s a crisp line where the sheet ice stops and the gritted slurry starts.

The canals froze over. First they collected the usual experimental strewing of cobblestones and car tyres. There are animal tracks crossing the water. Over the weekend, the city collectively decided that the ice was thick enough and crowds of woollen figures gingerly stepped out onto it. The dark ice is safest, they say. Somebody fell into the Landwehrkanal in our neighbourhood, another into the Krumme Lanke.

Last night, Sarah cut her finger trying to prise apart slices of frozen bread with a paring knife and we went to the emergency room to wait around for a few hours for stitches. I counted four people with foot injuries. Usually they had one shoe off and the leg propped up on their partner’s lap. One older Turkish lady had a bruise on her forehead; she’d fallen twice.

It’s 1°C right now, the first time it’s tipped over zero in a long time. There was a thick freezing fog stuck to the ground this morning when I tentatively tiptoed to the train station to the office. The ice is melting and now it’s even worse, a slick sheen on top of the smooth accretion of ice that’s slowly, slowly melting away.