Because I’m an idiot and have no money I booked a cheap flight out of London to Berlin which required me to wake up at one in the morning on a Thursday and take a taxi into central London and then a bus from central London to Stansted Airport with the whole thing taking two point five hours and costing me half the price again of the actual flight which of course I was thrilled about.

On the bus on the motorway I thought about Berlin and who I used to be when I was there. I thought about everything that has happened to me and the world since I moved out of the city and I wondered whether moving out of the city was really the best choice, or whether I ought to have been more patient or more brave and stuck it out. I thought about how, if I’d done that, I would have a lot more friends than I have now, and a lot more money, and probably my own apartment and furniture and a nice little pension growing, and I wouldn’t be in this weird mire where I don’t really know why I’m in London or why I’m an English teacher or what the hell I’m doing with my life in general.

In the airport I watched a plane take off and thought about my options and the places I could move to. Maybe New Zealand would be good, I thought – maybe I could do a few more years of farm work and spend all my time outdoors, which makes me very happy. But then what after? I’d be flying home aged 35 in the same situation: poor and not qualified to do anything applicable back home. Maybe Australia was the move: my friends Will and Robin flew out there a couple of years ago so Will could learn carpentry on a special visa, and now he has a trade that can never be automated plus they live near a beach and not in a big urban crush. But I’ve never done carpentry in my life, and I was bad at it in school, and doesn’t that feel like a sort of insane leap?

Maybe Japan: I could teach English in a school there, and it would doubtless be amazing to learn a new culture and language and maybe I’d gain new ways of thinking and I could consider it the next chapter of my life, the eastern chapter, and there’d be lots of wondrous discoveries and philosophies to embrace, and new crazy best friends and adventures and who knew where all that might lead? But thinking all of that at once wore me out, and if only thinking of the idea was tiring, did I really have energy enough to do all of that again? To leave everyone and everything – after having already done that, what, six times? seven times? – and fly alone to the other side of the world, aged thirty-one, to start a new career with a new apartment, and not one friendly face, not one familiar molecule for 10,000 miles in every direction? Did I have the courage for that anymore?

There was always Berlin. It was not the reason for my trip – Vic just invited me along and it was the only chance we’d had to revisit the city together in a decade, so I found a cheap flight (6am fucking hell) and said yes okay I can’t really afford it but yes – however the trip had come at a good time emotionally. This indecision about where to go – having no clue at all but being certain that London is not it – was eating me up night and day, every waking moment, even in the times when I was not actively thinking about it; sitting in my brain like a distant low hum, spiking into a throb every time I had to wincingly tap my bank card to pay for something I could maybe do without, like a block of cheese or a punnet of tomatoes or a sandwich (Am I being wasteful? Am I living within my means?), only to glance into a shop window twenty metres down the road and see the city-suited slick-haired corporate man at the till spending £3000 on a new belt or whatever the fuck.

I landed in Germany after a quiet flight and I saw the Fernsehturm from the plane and it made me feel warm. I got the jitters in the airport (lovely new airport,  very clean and big) like I always do when arriving in a new country, even after eleven years of regular solo roaming. I dunno – I just get scared that everyone knows I’m foreign and hates me for it; I get scared of offending people with my inability to speak their language; I get scared of getting on the wrong train and being whisked away to Bavaria.

And this feeling span me out a bit because I do belong – or at least, I did. Berlin has long been my happy place, the place I run to mentally when London’s general plastickyness bums me out. When I’m agitated I console myself with the simple fact that it exists, that I’m not crazy for fantasising about a different way of doing things – because I’ve seen it, lived it, even if talking about it too much makes me sound nuts. It was strange to arrive in a city that holds a semi-mythical place in my memory and find myself fearful, rather than elated. I suppose a part of me was worried because I’d always held Berlin in my heart as a back-up plan; a runaway safe place to which I could flee if I couldn’t hack London or wherever else. If I explored the city and found I no longer liked it – or it no longer liked me – then what would I do?

I took the S Bahn into the city and looked out of the window as flitting green trees turned gradually to apartment blocks, and I listened to a group of rowdy stag-do English blokes and remembered the smugness I used to feel watching similar laddish groups and knowing they would be admitted into exactly zero clubs, if they could even find them, and that wherever they went the doors to the city’s deepest wonders would remain closed to their football-chanting, polo-shirted group. The rest of the world may be the stomping ground of the hollering, lager-breathed bloke, but Berlin exists as a singular outcropped bastion of defiance: a haven for spooky kids in fishnet and faux-fur, the black-sheep oddballs of a hundred-thousand scattered towns converging to make a city where they’re in charge.

I always liked how the city would defend itself, closing up like a venus fly trap, against all who would dilute its bizarre culture. I’ve always quietly enjoyed hearing how many people visit the city and hate it, because it means that, even if the secret has gotten out, the place remains a highly acquired taste – to fit in one must be comfortable with psychedelic debauchery, with Kafkaesque bureaucracy, with recklessness and ghoulish junkyard exhibitions that are punk and spunky in the most literal sense – and that’s a good thing, because most people aren’t, and that means they come visit and go ‘ew jesus christ eww no ewwwww’ and leave and never return, and the little island of weirdness in the middle of Europe can remain forever unchanged. The only downside to this spiritedness is that the city might one day just as easily freeze out me, if ever I became too old and ‘good grief!’ and milquetoast – and maybe, I worried, that had already happened.

I got off at Ostkreuz and bought a piece of bread to gnaw on using timid high-pitched German. Then I left the station and walked through Friedrichschain past a Spati where I once got drunk with Annie and Aisling and they started banging on the table and singing to embarrass me in front of the passing hipsters. I wasn’t sure what to do with my day; Vic wasn’t due to arrive for twelve hours. This hadn’t bothered me when I booked the flight – I had lots of people I could text – but it didn’t occur to me until I landed that they’d all be working. A weird false memory I’d assembled: that everyone here was simply free, always.

I took some money from a cash machine and bought some tobacco despite not having smoked properly in around a year. I tried to ask the cashier if she spoke English but she said no and so I was forced to order in whatever apologetic, broken German I could remember from eight years ago. I sat outside and put my coins in my pocket – haven’t held coins since I moved to London – and rolled a cigarette. I wasn’t sure why I was rolling a cigarette; something about being on holiday, having no rules, saying ‘fuck it’ to discipline for once after all the months and years of hard work – I don’t know. I smoked it and it made my body feel funny and I thought I hadn’t missed that feeling at all. I began to feel anxious, even though the weather was sunny, because I knew I was being naughty and the feeling was unfamiliar. I am so rarely naughty nowadays. I felt a little overwhelmed in the moment, unsure of where to put the emotion. Back in the old place, doing the old things. I suppose that’s why I bought the tobacco: I wanted to remember how I used to feel. But you can’t do that, can you? You can go to the same spots and do everything again, yes, but you can’t ignore the intervening memories that cast it all in a different light. You can try, but you’ll just end up feeling like I did on the table outside the Spati: weird, and rather forlorn, and a bit silly.

I walked slowly up to Warschauer Strasse and got a 2% beer to sit with by the river beside the East Side Gallery. Same thing as the cigs: first beer in months. I drank it suspiciously, half-afraid I’d go suddenly mad with lust and guzzle the whole thing in two seconds like Barney Gumble. Instead I just felt a little woozy, and I thought: okay. I passed twenty minutes in this spot, sitting awkwardly without a backrest, before I finally gave it up and mooched on up the river. I knew there had once been an abandoned tower block in the area – back in the day I’d climbed the fence with a leg-up from Dave, and had spent an hour sitting alone on the roof, eight stories up, looking out over the city like some decrepit post-apocalyptic king – but it seems it’d been demolished or refurbished. I passed Yaam – closed now, whether it’s permanent I know not – and got another drink and another piece of bread in Holzmarkt (scared to buy anything more substantial because poor). All together this slow mooch took something like four hours, and finally I was able to check into my hotel and pass the heck out (I’d had only three hours sleep).

I woke up to a reply from Dave, who I’d not seen since 2023. It said: want to meet at the feld? 5.15? And I said yes and then I peeled my dirty (already hungover and smoky) self from bed to transport myself over there. I got off the U8 a few stops early (Schonleinstrasse) to walk along slowly and watch people; it’s not a particularly scenic walk but I always enjoyed it back in the day because it was the walk between my old office and Annie’s flat, and consequently the whole road had a funky liminal quality where I transitioned from Semi-Serious Worker Bee to Fun-Time Idiot. I arrived at Tempelhofer Feld 15 minutes late but this was fine because Dave was 45 minutes late, obviously, and when he arrived he looked exactly the same except for a new substantial moustache which he did not explain and refused to answer questions about.

Dave told me about his life and I told him about mine, although I sensed he was only half-listening, preoccupied as he was with the female joggers and ping pong tables, which I was a bit annoyed about because I consider my life to be quite important. He showed me a few websites he’s made recently: one for long-distance runners and cyclists that tells you how many rivers you crossed that day and their names, one that is linked to a live camera feed from his apartment which converts the image into data to quantity how grey Berlin is at five-minute intervals, one that aims to build a community of adventure bikers to go cycling together in the mountains. I was impressed and found this endearing in a nostalgic sort of way. It juxtaposed quite jarringly with my London life these days; the hordes of commuters on the cramped silver money-trains into the city each day couldn’t dream of creating anything so pointlessly creative as a grey-quantifier – and if they could, they’d slap adverts all over it and charge a monthly subscription.

While we talked in the sunshine on the airfield, Saba walked past – the owner of Artistania, the bohemian puppet gallery I used to frequent with Dave and Vic. I thought of mentioning this to Dave – who was facing the wrong way – but decided against it because I knew Dave would immediately invite him over and I wasn’t in the mood for a surreal(er) conversation. In the end this didn’t make a difference: Dave spotted another group of friends sitting close to us and we merged groups. I talked to a German tree surgeon (ein BaumKontroller), a French sandwich maker who spoke for thirty minutes straight about bread, and a travelling Mexican artist who voiced to me his anger at having to make shitty Tik Toks to get galleries to pay attention to his work (I agreed – vehemently).

After a few hours we got food (burgers), then I left Dave to go meet Vic at last, back at Ostkreuz. We hugged and she told me she felt nervous, just as I had when I arrived 12 hours before, and I said it was okay and we sat and drank outside a bar back in Friedrichshain. We talked about our lives and our changes and the house Vic’s just bought with her boyfriend Rob, outside Bristol. We spoke about Dave and Annie and Berlin and the good old days and how different life is today and whether or not that’s a good thing. I thought a lot about spotting Saba on the feld; how small the city felt compared to London. I’ve lived in London twice as long as I ever lived in Berlin and that’s literally never happened to me. The place is like one great village.

Vic and I didn’t reach any conclusions about anything, obviously; we just sat in a smoky bar in comfy seats and candle wax all over the tables like we used to, and talked eventually about silly things, and pretended everything was the same as it always was. Which, I suppose, it pretty much was – just a little bit wiser, a little bit gentler, and a little bit earlier to bed. And that’s not so bad, really.