Berlin Part 6: Our last auf wiedersehen …

A late healthy breakfast at Hilde’s where we meet Matthew’s friend, the lovely Anita. Anita is an ex-Mancunian resident and a delight so we decide to fall in love with her over croissants and fruit and Geordie’s fragrant peppermint tea which is simply fistfuls of shredded mint leaves in piping hot water and which smells of HEALTH. Delish. Anita hasn’t been in Berlin long but she already has a fascinating job working for this talented lady. Jealous.

The sun is blazing down. I have to donate my hat to Matthew. It’s a parks and ice-cream day for sure. I have pistachio and one other flavour which runs down to my elbow in the heat and makes me feel about eight. Mauerpark is our destination. It runs along the site of the old wall (‘mauer’) and the deathly no man’s land that lay there. Today it’s a bustling park with performance spaces, wild undergrowth, and best of all a huge flea market where you can and must buy everything from knives and forks and dresses to ice cold beer and records. Matthew tries on a lovely lavender panama hat with some sort of floral print on it and the couple running the stall fall about laughing.

After a nice lazy wander and some beers we retire to a bar across the road for Mai Tais in the shade. Our good intentions of visiting the gay museum fall apart as the cocktails work their magic. It’s simply too hot and too hilarious to do anything but sit and smoke and laugh like drains. Stomachs begin to rumble so we head out for Vietnamese food in the slowly cooling streets of Prenzlberg.

Soon it’s time to say goodbye to Anita. The boys and I begin to amble home. Soon the sky bruises and my skin starts to prickle. We’re not very far from the flat when the first ice-white flash of lightning booms its way across the sky. It’s the beginning of the biggest, loudest thunderstorm I’ve ever seen in my life. This was our view of it from our balcony (careful, it’s pretty loud…)

After watching in the hot rain and drinking some or other amazing wine with the lightning coming from all directions round the Fernsehturm I am filled with a weird kind of energy. It needs to be danced off. I leave the boys at home and go to meet Craig for nocturnal revelry. I don’t know if I have a reputation for getting lost or something but this is what is placed inside my wallet before I head out …

Pork at Fechen 3000 is exactly as upmarket and glamorous as it sounds. Tonnes of beary boys and fit art gays pinballing around the place to a mush of indie and dance and electro guff. The lovely Joel Gibb from The Hidden Cameras is DJing when we arrive and lets me take over the decks for a bit. The ‘decks’ being someone’s woefully undernourished iTunes from which I salvage some Ladytron or something. It’s all severely hazy by this point. I’m seriously entertaining missing my flight on purpose but the administrative nightmare of this threatens to sober me up (fat chance) and there’s still plenty of time to party yet.

There is more than one area in this nightclub establishment. I lose my brand new jackplug necklace in the other area of this nightclub establishment. That’s all I have to say about that.

I am limping for a cab home at 8 am. Every single item of my clothing is drenched with beer. The get-me-home Polaroid proves itself priceless. I still have it with me now. Everywhere I go.

Berlin Part 3 …

Back at the flat, Geordie reads me the opening chapter of Max Schaefer’s Children Of The Sun. It’s a magnificent piece of writing. The novel explores the history of connections between gay men and right-wing skinhead culture in Britain. Folsom is on the week we are there and over the next few days I see gay men wearing fetish gear that very occasionally borders on Gestapo style. The thin line frightens me, it might frighten me even more were I Jewish, as Larry Mass points out in Confessions of a Jewish Wagnerite. But these men are free to do as they wish. They are at least free.

I’m starving. Schwarzwaldstuben is a cute bar/restaurant where I consume the largest goat’s cheese salad on the continent followed by some kind of fried pasta arrangement and Rothaus beer which is the nicest thing I drink on the whole trip apart from the lovely wine which I will never remember the name of. The waiter is a 9 out of 10. We see lots of these. Really, it’s not worth calling anything less than an 8. Especially in a city with trams, it’s just dangerous.

My friend Kostya was in Berlin the week before us and has concealed a postcard of Marlene Dietrich behind one of the litter bins on a corner near the restaurant in an act of psychogeographical treasure hunting. Alas it is nowhere to be found. I expect it was sluiced away by the rains. Oh well.

Next it’s off to the Philharmonie where Marek Janowksi conducts the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester through two Brahms followed by Busoni’s Piano Concerto. There is a mixed choir followed by an all male choir. Any kind of vocal harmonising floors me at the best of times so I’m damp about the eyes when the first note hits.

'What can you do with it? It's like a lot of yaks jumping about,' said Sir Thomas Beecham on Beethoven's Seventh. This kind of applies to the Busoni, which at times, I kid you not, is like Rachmaninoff meets John Williams. But it's so vibrant and unruly it eventually endears itself to you.

I have gone a pretty full arc of emotion by the time we leave, which of course means only one thing, that a drink is in order. In fact we have very nearly made it to the front door of the apartment when I hear music and see a shaft of red light spill onto the kerb from a bar with no name so we dive in on impulse. At the back of the room is a crucifix emblazoned with the legend ‘CLOSER TO GOD IN HEELS’. There is no beer and due to a linguistic breakdown with the bar tender Geordie emerges from a fug of cigarette smoke carrying €44 worth of spirits instead. Oh well, we are on holiday. Chin chin.