Wie bitte?

Summer

If you ever decide to up sticks and seek your own Canaan, take a page from Exodus and avoid doing it in the winter. Otherwise you’ll spend the next four months in thermal underwear and wearing more layers than an exceedingly bulbous onion, whilst being regaled with stories about Berlin’s splendid summers. Everyone you meet gushes about the warm season and gets all misty-eyed about the picnics in a way that only someone who has to defrost their fireplace can. It doesn’t help, of course, that our move coincided with the coldest winter in twenty years, as everybody so kindly reminded us. Our balcony, which we got at the urging of our relocation agent in anticipation of those now almost mythical balmy evenings, remained unseen for the next three months, covered in two feet of snow.

We arrived in the German Hauptstadt  the 31st of October, and by the end of February my world had been bleached and I had become a rather embittered Miss Smilla whose feeling for snow had turned into exasperation. Summer had now attained legendary proportions and I awaited its arrival like a Kreuzberg information architect looks forward to an Apple product launch. Could it live up to the hype? Perhaps all this expectation had turned summer into the new iPad. At this point it had to contain rainbows and unicorns, I hope Apple are taking notes here. 

The promised season eventually arrived, it always does, unless you live in England of course. In fact, I’m typing this in a flat with every window thrown wide open, including the doors to my now snowless balcony. Nobody tells you that roof flats do a very good impersonation of an oven whenever the sun decides to grace us with its presence. And looking like a limp lettuce is rather hampering my attempts to morph into a cosmopolitan siren. There’s only one possible solution: turn to drink (chocolate melts in this heat) and Berlin offers many a leafy Biergarten where you can indulge in a bit of fermented grain.

Now that the sun has finally arrived, you won’t see a Berliner indoors for the next four months. Like other northern tribes acquainted with thermal underwear, the fair burghers of this city welcome Helios like only somebody well acquainted with thermal underwear can. Berlin turns overnight into one huge barbecue and people flock eagerly to parks to worship the Daystar and show their appreciation by guzzling down Olympian amounts of beer. (Although they also do this during winter now that I think of it.)

Because they are forced to hibernate, Septentrional people will insist in performing any imaginable activity out in the green during summertime, regardless of meteorological conditions, and Berliners are no exception. In southern latitudes only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun. In Berlin, it seems, only misanthropic albinos and rabies sufferers hide from it. Insist on eating inside and people, including the waiter, might think you are the carrier of some deadly contagious disease. 

Sunshine does not necessarily translate into warm temperatures either, as any skier can testify, although this doesn’t seem to deter Northern Europeans from their alfresco frolicking. They plough on regardless and are not bothered by such petty little details. The equation is simple, sunshine = ice cream. Each Magnum eaten is a blow struck against winter, each sausage grilled is a victory against Jack Frost. Remember this when you’re back in your thermal underwear and let’s raise (another) glass for summer.

My local snow-covered cementery

The internet needs more snow photos and you know it

Of Cold Weather

Today I acquired a winter coat. Not just a coat, you see, but a winter coat. These are a rare sight in London, partly because the capital is afflicted by a random amalgamation of meteorological phenomena, but lacks weather in the cyclical sense. Seasons in southern England are more of a cultural hallucination, a collective barometrical longing, than an actual physical manifestation. It also doesn’t help that English people have a penchant for wearing sandals in the face of - let’s face it - entirely inappropriate weather conditions. Maybe they haven’t got the hang of the whole Fahrenheit-Celsius conversion yet. Well, if they’re not careful, they might soon become accidental metric martyrs . In Denmark, where I spent part of my formative years, this just doesn’t happen. The weather is far less forgiving there. So you’re worried about hat hair? Well, leave the beanie behind at your own risk, and you’ll soon have no head attached to your neck, let alone hair. Frostbite can be so inconvenient. Besides, winter clothing can be beautiful too, as illustrated by my lovely blutsgeschwister coat

Well, do you think Shackleton went to the Arctic in a pair of Havainas?

Pocket detail

‘Have you seen the woman in the Moon?’ German legend inside the hood. Could it be a reference to Fritz Lang’s science fiction classic ‘Frau im Mond’?