Berlin FAQ Blog

One of the perils of contemporary urban life is the requirement for at least two annual trips to a certain Swedish retailer of attractively priced flat-pack furniture. In the Penguin household this is usually caused by Mrs. P saying something like "Darling, we appear to have run out of bookshelves again". And before Mr. P knows it, he is maneuvering several 220 cm tall units of shelf siding into the S-Bahn, which alas is not as impossible as it sounds, and soon the Penguin household reverberates to the squeak of those hexagonal screw things.

This year my resolve has held firm, partly due to an increasing shortage of wall space, partly because I have been able to escape to foreign climes for whole months at a time, which severely reduces Mrs. P's carrying capacity, and partly because I have introduced the concept of "getting rid of useless stuff", such as a complete collection of IKEA catalogues dating back to the end of the last century.

One day before Christmas Mrs. P came home excitedly and announced that there was some furniture by the bins and would I like to have a look at it. Well of course I did (that's what marriage does for you), and there standing next to the compost bins was a fully-assembled IKEA chest of drawers of a type which, oddly enough, was on the list of things Mrs. P would like to acquire at some point. It had no obvious faults or particularly disgusting stains, in fact it looked fairly new and even had the instructions in one of the drawers, and was quite obviously up for grabs, so we grabbed it and whisked it away up many flights of stairs.

More than sixty years after the end of World War 2, the United Kingdom has finally paid off the last of its War Debt. At long last the spectre of Austerity, hanging like a Sword of Damocles over this race of island people, has been banished; no longer need Britons fear recipies involving copious quantities of Reconstituted Dried Egg Powder; and finally Dame Vera Lynn can retire, safe in the knowledge that never again will the White Cliffs of Dover need be dreamt of.

Meanwhile, Germany still atones for its sins, as can be witnessed by a zap through the dozens of channels available via cable TV or DVB-T: at any given moment, at least one channel will be broadcasting some deadly serious documentary about that certain period between 1933 and 1945. This is why it is important not to Mention The War to Germans: they are sick and tired of hearing about it. Although, even in this nation of historical self-castigation things are changing: a comedy film about Adolf H., titled "Mein Führer - Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit über Adolf Hitler" by Dani Levy and starring Helge Schneider will be released in January. The film, if you excuse the very bad and untasteful pun, was shot in Berlin. (Link: official site, in German).

Well, a sort of dusting of white stuff. First I've seen this year anyway. Must pop down to the cellar and see if my Langlauf skis need waxing.

According to German folklore, London's primary meteorlogical characteristic is fogginess. The recent rash of chaos at my personal number one most hated airport, Heathrow, has got the popular press going again on what seems to be a very stubborn misconception about the capital of what Germans think the English call "Merry Old England".

To its great credit today's Berliner Zeitung says:

"...schließlich befindet sich London in der Vorstellung vieler Mitteleuropäer drei Viertel des Jahres unter einer dichten Nebeldecke. Meist stimmt dieses Klischee gar nicht"

I have never been unable to find a plausible explanation why London should have such a foggy reputation. Mind you I've never really tried, but having been to or passed through London many times (without having actually lived there as such) it has never struck me as being any foggier than anywhere else. Maybe this is a legacy of Dickensian literature, or Sherlock Holmes (not that I've ever read much of either), or possibly the odd film or two (I vaguely recall fog and London featuring in a, or possibly the, Mary Poppins film). I also have a vague recollection of being told about "pea soupers", thick smog which occasionally blanketed London up until the 1950s or so. (Contrary the popular notion that these were caused by the smoke from the coal-fired stoves the Londoners used to use to cook their pea soup with, the actual cause was apparently traced to a large eel pie factory in the East End).

Can anyone from London maybe cast some more light onto this issue?

I am a citizen (and since some point in the early 1980s no longer a subject) of Her Majesty's polonium-polluted kingdom (surely queendom?), a fact I keep forgetting until I have to deal with some sort of officialdom such as crossing a border or purchasing a mobile phone SIM card.

The latter sort of transaction, where my vital details have to be entered into some computer system, inevitably enters a phase where the enteree starts flicking wildly through my passport looking for some vital information which is not recorded on the page which contains the usual vital information (name, date of birth, passport number, membership in terrorist organisations etc.). At this point I find it speeds things up to ask "Sie suchen bestimmt den Ausstellungsort?" ("Ausstellungsort" being the place of issue). In my previous passports, big solid black documents with a lingering air of empire about them, there was always a big stamp with the words "Newport, Gwent" in there somewhere, but my mass-produced, mercilessly standardised eurodocument bears only the cryptic abbreviation "D".

"D" is for "Düsseldorf", a city generally not known for being part of Queen Liz's realm. This is a recipe for confusion ("Sie sind Brite, wollen aber Ihren Paß in Düsseldorf bekommen haben? Sie können mir was erzählen!"). But it is true. The British Embassy in Germany, for whatever reason, has (or had) its passport producing department in that fair city on the Rhine, from which location it keeps British residents of Germany supplied with travel documentation.

Fortunately that kind of situation doesn't happen too often, and has always resolved itself after a lengthy explanation of my residence situation and the vagaries of the British passport issuing system, although with one particularly pingelige lady from the post office I had to threaten to call the embassy right there on my händy before she believed me.