Berlin
2023-06-25
The church bells in this place, my god. They toll for 10 solid minutes every week night and for God knows how long on a Sunday morning. For a short time today there was a relentless tolling of the bells and a old timey horn honking at once. Chaos.
This sort of thing is charming and atmopheric out in the countyside where the sounds have space to drift from afar. They are apocalyptic in the city where people live next to, under, on, and indeed inside the belfry. We’re all heathens here anyway.
2023-06-13
When the sun came out in Berlin, people started climbing into the canals in their inflatable boats. When I rode my bike over Elsenbrücke, I even saw them floating along the Spree in their dinghies, with a bag of beers and a fishing hat. One evening, I saw a lone paddle boarder in the middle of that wide river.
2023-05-09
First, whimsy. I like it when people do something that could have been straightforward and to the point, but instead they inject a little bit of charming madness in there, the unpredictable human touch. Here is a band website that is old fashioned, simple, and yet deeply weird. Give it a minute. Here is a clock website that shows an excerpt from a book for every minute of the day, a bit like my favourite film installation, The Clock by Christian Marclay. Here is a hand-curated archive of fictional brands that appear in media. Here is a man who invented his own set of workouts based on wielding a nerfed sledgehammer, called the shovelglove.
2023-03-23
This morning I was sitting at my desk with my eyes half closed. I started to yawn and I stretched my arms out and back. Something in my chest, around my sternum, made a dull pop. I didn’t realise I had anything to pop in there.
The last couple of weeks have been full of great new things, and I’ve totally worn me out. We moved into our new, more permanent home in Berlin. We’ve had lots of help with the entire process, and we’ve thrown money at the appropriate parts to try and make things easier. I am still completely wiped.
