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The finest pub in Berlin

2008-08-27T00:13:01+00:00

Sophieneck, Grosse-Hamburger-Strasse

I’m so, so angry and frustrated that I can’t show you the pictures I took of this place, because it’s my favourite pub in Berlin. You find it in the Scheunenviertel, the streets north of Alexanderplatz and Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse, just a few minutes east off Oranienburgerstrasse (which I know I keep going on about). Sophieneck (nothing to do with a neck - it should arguably be written Sophie'n Eck) means Sophie or Sophie's corner, and it’s on the corner where Sophienstrasse meets Grosse Hamburger Strasse, where you’ll struggle to …

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Hallo. Grüss dich… Stopp!

2008-08-26T23:39:00+00:00

I've been dodging the whores on Oranienburgerstrasse these last couple of nights; if you come here you'll find out that they hang out - and that really is the phrase, they trail across the street, I suppose because they can't decide whether cars or pedestrians are the most likely customers. Last night a bottle blonde in a basque and ludicrous platform thigh-boots (pretty much the normal clobber for die Girls of Oranienburgerstrasse) said those very words,

Hallo. Grüss dich... Stopp!

getting desperate at the end, as you can tell, as she tried to interest me in business. I ploughed on …

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Berlin Blogspot

2008-08-26T23:20:00+00:00

I thought you'd like to see from the horse's mouth, as it were, where these Berlin posts are being produced. That was part of my reasoning; the other part is that my bloody camera seems to have bloody packed up on me, the bloody thing, so this is the last photo of mine I can share with you. Infuriating - truly infuriating - because of the brilliant pictures I took at the Sopieneck pub last night, which I wanted you to see.

Damn. Unless the bloody thing recovers after a good night's sleep I guess …

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Historied out

2008-08-26T18:26:00+00:00

I feel a bit like that today, having been to the Holocaust Memorial just south of the Brandenburg Gate and then two exhibitions about the GDR: the Stasi exhibition on Französischerstrasse and the DDR-Museum on the banks of the Spree. I wasn't hugely impressed by the Holocaust Memorial, I have to say. Of course it's impossible to say how on earth you can memorialise the murder of millions, and a load of stark blocks of stone are as good as anything I suppose, but it doesn't really make you think. I wish the lines …

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Mensa life and Eintopf

2008-08-26T18:00:00+00:00

I love things that are spartan and utilitarian, as well as being incredibly mean and naturally short of funds, so one of my budget Berlin ideas is to use my local student canteen or Mensa. I've been using thes eplaces for ages actually, from the days when my ancient "ex" Naomi and I would gaze into each others' eyes over Eintopf in Bonn, where she was for a year, through to when the very nice Verena took me to the one in Heidelberg a couple of years ago, though there was less gazing with her …

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Stations of History

2008-08-26T10:04:02+00:00

Thoughts on arrival in Berlin

Berlin’s stations are something else. I love a good station: I recommend Limoges. Berlin’s principal stations, though, have a nostalgic, mid-20th century feel of dust and double-breasted suits that I’ve found nowhere else. Friedrichstrasse is the best: the first time I was here must have been on that first visit with the saucy Marie and the others, but the first time I remember Friedrichsstrasse was two years later when I arrived in East Berlin with the then femme de ma vie, Naomi. We’d decided to spend three weeks in the …

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Willkommen in Berlin

2008-08-25T22:20:00+00:00

Blogging the German capital

It's too long since I was in Berlin. That was my thought as I landed at Schönefeld airport this morning on the Ryanair extreme budget redeye. I first came here in the old days: before the Wende, I mean, when the city was still divided. Back in 1987 it was inconceivable that you might one day be able to walk down Unter den Linden all the way to the Brandenburg Gate - and through it. If by some miracle you'd managed to evade the Volksarmee guards to that point (highly …

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A boring appointment

2008-08-24T22:49:00+00:00

Barack Obama/CreativeCommons

Okay, okay, so Joe Biden is a senior senator with serious foreign policy credentials, having served twice as chair of the foreign relations committee. I think the appointment is a mistake. I thought Obama would appoint a woman, and I still think he'd have been better to do so. Surely Obama needs to play to his strengths in this election, not trim or compromise as a defensive move against McCain. Naming Biden seems an obvious move to neutralise accusations that Obama is too left-wing, too idealistic and too …

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Neither free nor fair

2008-08-15T17:49:00+00:00

China is chasing the wrong kind of dream

kenyee/CreativeCommons

I'm not a great fan of the Olympics generally (I wish they weren't coming to London, and can't understand why anyone wants them), and of the Beijing Olympics I am very much an unfan. What's there to like? The people of China may be enthusiastic about the games, but the truth is, we can't really know what they think. I sat next to a Chinese student in Cambridge at a dinner last year - she was young, about 25 I think, and studying …

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Poti and Poland

2008-08-15T17:20:00+00:00

Irakli Gedenidze/GFDL

I wrote yesterday that it wasn't clear to what extent Russia was pulling back from Georgia. But it's quite clear now that they are not doing so, but are making sure they destroy as much as possible of Georgia's miliatry capability, for example its navy's equipment at the port of Poti. The Americans are right to demand that Russia pulls out of Georgia immediately - and to condemn Russian bullying.

Russia's foreign and security policy at the moment, as well as unattractive, reckless and lethal, is simply incoherent.
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My bard’s better than yours

2008-08-15T16:59:00+00:00

Burn's love poems are full of sentiment but not sentimental, in the current usage of the word. John Anderson My Jo is one of my favourite ever love poems. Perhaps Paxman got his Scottish poets mixed up, hinkie pinkie, and confused Burns with McGonagall. Or then again maybe Paxman was using the word sentimental to mean a poet who mixes feelings with thoughts. But there's no elevating doggerel – unless you are McGonagall. Anyway, whatever anybody thinks of To a Haggis or To a Louse or To A Mouse or Tam O'Shanter, Burns's poetry has survived because it's …

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War, war in Georgia

2008-08-14T17:36:00+00:00

Gleb Garanich/GDFL

This is one of those conflicts in which you only feel like offering opinions tentatively. Are you simply swallowing a biased Georgian and media line if you side with Georgia and complain about Russian brutality and aggression? What about the South Ossetian civilians who have undoubtedly been killed by Georgian forces? Perhaps there's some truth in Russian complaints that what happened to them has been ignored. On the other hand, is even having such thoughts a sign of having been successfully got at by Russian propaganda, which would paint Georgia …

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Grand, damp city

2008-08-12T15:47:00+00:00

I'm in Glasgow for a few days, staying at my friend Kate's place in the West End. I first came here a couple of years ago, hardly ever having been to Scotland (incredible!) and never having been to Glasgow (shame!), but I really liked the city as soon as I landed - which is why I'm back.

Glasgow's one of those underestimated cities people are surprised to hear you're visiting: Liverpool, Lyon and Hamburg are another three I'd put on the list. The reason? It's exactly the same psychology that makes people dislike the Glasgow, Liverpool and …

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Denying Dawkins

2008-08-08T14:32:00+00:00

...in this programme, we got a tired professor whose intellectual courage went as far as challenging a bunch of 15-year-olds, and even then he still didn't manage to persuade them. What makes this a shame is that there clearly is a need for an accurate and evidence-based portrayal of evolutionary theory. I'm an evangelical Christian, but I have no difficulties in believing that evolution is the best scientific account we have for the diversity of life on our planet. I would welcome a clear and accurate demonstration of why we should all accept it, not least because it might help …

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Hopelessly wrong-headed

2008-08-06T22:51:00+00:00

What on earth are they up to on stamp duty?

Anyhoo/CreativeCommons

The current uncertainty about stamp duty is ridiculous. If Alistair Darling is going to suspend stamp duty or defer its payment so as to boost the housing market, then he needs to do so right now; otherwise he should have dampened all speculation with a firm denial he was even thinking about it. And Treasury officials should have been instructed to give those same firm denials. To float the idea as something that may happen in a few months, …

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Is this a dagger?

2008-08-02T16:47:00+00:00

A drama of Shakespearean proportions. So much has already been written about the crisis surrounding the British premier that the public might feel like extras in a political soap opera. Shadows, sabotage, trap-setters and would-be regicides are all around – a situation made for a TV story, unfolding as one episode follows another. But appearances deceive. This is neither soap opera nor reality TV, neither docudrama nor second-rate theatre. It’s a profound crisis in one of Europe’s most important governments, and you have to wonder with some concern when British politics will stabilise enough to restore clarity of purpose at …

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Bonkers backbenchers

2008-07-31T14:50:00+00:00

Demos/CreativeCommons

What on earth do Geraldine Smith and Bob Marshall-Andrews think they're up to, calling for Gordon Brown to sack David Miliband for disloyalty and duplicity? What Brown loyalists need to do if they're to shore up their man is to urge him to use Miliband's article and the feelings it's stirred to relaunch himself and his party with a new agenda that offers the change people though they were going to get a year ago. Miliband was not signalling a coup; he was putting down a marker for the next …

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Miliband stakes his claim

2008-07-30T16:26:01+00:00

Every member of the Labour party carries with them a simple guiding mission on the membership card: to put power, wealth and opportunity in the hands of the many, not the few. When debating public service reform, tax policies or constitutional changes, we apply those values to the latest challenges.

What is on Cameron's party card? What is his vision for Britain? He doesn't have one. His project is "decontaminating the Tory party", not changing the country. He is stuck, reconciling himself to New Labour Mark I at just the time when the times demand a radical new phase.

Thoughts on recent political weather

2008-07-29T13:25:00+00:00

Flood, deluge and the gathering storm

ztephen/CreativeCommons

I... propose to bring to your notice a series of... phenomena, which, so far as I can weigh existing evidence, are peculiar to our own times; yet which have not hitherto received any special notice or description from meteorologists.

This was how John Ruskin opened his first lecture in London in 1884 on "The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century", asserting a radical change in what he called "weather aspect", comparable to the one we've been experiencing in 2007-8.

It's not just my imagination, …

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Obama’s Berlin Speech

2008-07-25T22:18:00+00:00

Barack Obama/Creative Commons

He said it beautifully, as usual. And Barack Obama's appearance in Berlin was astonishing. For its audicity, in emulating Kennedy so obviously, for its cheek, in upstaging John McCain so dramatically, and beacuse of the rock-star welcome he received. Obamania is going global, and is a political phenomenon that has to be seriously compared with Beatlemania. His final words, "Thank you Berlin", closed what was in truth a political concert. And just like in the world of music, the fans had come not so much to hear what …

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