Hello you.

I know, I know, it’s  a sad time here at World Hangover. ‘Tis true, The Berlin Diaries are, for now, over. Dry your tears, sweet reader, and keep your chin up, for there remain many bright days ahead. In the mean time, I have decided I will be writing regular articles on world famous adventurers whom I admire, which should hopefully be of interest to all three people who read this blog (Hi Mum!), but to be honest I just mostly want to write anything because I love writing.

THAT SAID

I realise that many of my ‘Berlin Diaries’ are without pictures. Yes, I refuse to patronise you by subsidising large blocks of text with images in a effort/reward format. It’s the same reason I don’t write ‘listicles’, and I don’t use bullet points. We’re all adults here. We all pay taxes, we all more or less understand where babies come from, and we can damn well spare the quantum of attention required to read an actual paragraph without fifteen GIFs and a musical interlude.

I believe that rewarding the reader with an image for finishing a paragraph demeans the art of writing in general. It is the literary equivalent of saying ‘finish your greens and you can have your pudding’. By using this tactic to spur a child on, all you are really doing is implying that greens are horrible and that you, as the parent/feeder, know this. It reaffirms to the child that it is fine and normal to hate greens and that they must suffer through them. It is, like such a depressingly enormous number of aspects of the society in which we live, dumbing ourselves down and treating symptoms instead of solving problems. Don’t trick your kids into eating greens. The second your back is turned, they’ll be channelling their Augustus Gloop and wading into a tub of Ben and Jerry’s. Teach them to enjoy vegetables, and they’ll eat them forever.

It is the same with adding pictures to blog posts. My writing is here to be read, not to be skimmed over in the hunt for easy to digest images. Overzealously adding imagery to a blog post immediately makes the text secondary. I want my words to be enjoyed. I put a lot of thought into them, from their ordering, to the sound and flow of the words when read aloud. If I crack open my copy and pour in a heap of grainy iPhone 4 images, all that effort is lost.

HOWEVER

As it is Christmas, and Christmas is the time when you can justify doing pretty much anything by making doe eyes and saying ‘but it’s Christmas’, I would like to present to you, true to the title of this blog post which I have thus far utterly ignored, a collection of photographs from my time in Berlin. Enjoy.

 

 

 

 

And there we have it, I have cherry picked some of my fave photos for you. Yes, my camera is shit, yes, my photography skills are lacking, yes, around 20% of these photos are of my own bleeding arms. But apart from that, they’re pretty cool, no?

Now, I’m struggling to find a good point to end this article. Usually I tell stories, which provide a nice narrative structure to the diary and give me a nice point at which to bid you farewell.

How the hell do you end photo collections?

Uh.

Bye?