I woke up to my first hangover of 2025 (not counting the weird fraudulent hangovers I get from 0% beer for reasons which continue to elude me) and sat up in bed and said hello to Vic who was awake in a separate bed parallel to mine like Ernie and/or Bert. We got ready and went outside to begin our day.

We decided that Friday would be our nostalgia day: a chance to walk around the city and reminisce. In the bright morning sun we set off and I smoked a roll-up that made me feel sick and eventually we came to Kotbusser Tor in Kreuzberg, which I’ve always considered the centre of the city despite it not actually being because it’s the first place I lived when I moved there in 2016 (eight thousand years ago). For breakfast we bought a slice each of pizza, too scared to try and speak German in any place more formal than a takeaway. I had a tuna slice of pizza with red onion but I took all the red onion off after two mouthfuls because I remembered it comes out in your sweat and it was a hot day and I didn’t want to smell like an onion.

We carried on walking through Gorlitzer Park and we passed the place I used to volunteer every Wednesday teaching maths to all the local weed dealers, and at Schlesisches Tor I drank a Club Mate and it made my bowels twist threateningly in the same way it always did. We went to Vic’s old apartment by the river Spree and stood outside it, talking about our friend Klara, Vic’s old flatmate from Australia, and how she’s married with a kid now. Back in the day, every Friday night the Universal building on the opposite riverbank used to hold a weekly firework display for roughly ten minutes, reflecting in the Spree, for reasons we never learned. Vic’s balcony sat above the river and faced it directly, and on those first chilly November evenings I could never believe our luck – how good it felt to be foreigners alone together, unravelling the mysteries of another culture like film noir detectives working on a case; Vic and Dave and I, any given evening we’d meet in a bar or gallery and one of us would come thundering in late and flustered, filled with new information and discoveries – we’d tell stories of the strange sights we’d seen and dissect them in turn, piecing together a janky working knowledge of a wholly new culture that was as fascinating and deep as it was alluring and even dangerous.

I thought, as I have often done over the years, of the contradictions in perception that come from being an expat. Why do I sigh at the thought of going to the cornershop in England, when in Berlin even the most basic  Spati run always gave me a miniature kick of adrenaline? Why do English towns invariably bore me, when the sight of a jolie French commune sends me into a tizz of joy? It’s the same for foreign friends living here, be they Americans, Italians, whoever; while I look at London and see a place that is overwhelming and often draining, they find the city insanely vibrant and uplifting, and when they first move here they spend their first two years sprinting around trying everything, splashing about in the culture like golden retrievers rolling in muddy puddles. 

I think it’s to do with schemas: groups of recognisable qualities that equal a specific thing. We build them as children, and as children they help us to understand the world and not be totally bewildered by it constantly. Four legs and a wagging tail – dog. Four wheels and big and shiny – car. We walk through a supermarket and we know the fruits by name and what dishes they work with, we know the brands and which ones are evil, like Nestle, we know the queuing system and the paying system and we know what will happen if someone spills milk on the floor: that is, somebody comes and puts a cone down and then cleans the milk with a mop. The first time you witness any of this, of course, it’s a total frenetic blur of colour and noise, delightful and intense (and largely not remembered because you’d have been a baby at the time). But as the years pass it becomes acceptable, then normal, then humdrum – and finally, if you’re like me and are shit at mindfulness – downright depressing. Who wants to wake up in the morning and go outside knowing that everything you’ll see and do that day will be things you’ve seen and done a thousand times before?

The intoxicating thing about moving abroad is that so many of those schemas are blown out of the water. Yes, a house is still a house and a cloud is still a cloud, but beyond that, it’s an almost total instance of relearning. People look different, dress differently, wear their hair differently; they speak with different words, they obey different laws, they think differently. Nevermind the unknown brands and foodstuffs – if someone spills milk on the floor in a supermarket in rural India, who the fuck knows what will happen? Maybe someone mops it up – maybe a row breaks out – maybe a fit of laughter – maybe a dog runs in and drinks it all and the owner has to fight it off with a mop. As an expat, it’s like your slate is wiped clean, and every moment of every day is an opportunity for childlike wonder and joy and learning, even in the most ostensibly mundane of moments.

I know this isn’t the whole truth, of course – I know I’m blinkered by illusions. I could probably yoga my way out of this funk; learn to see my home country with free eyes again, wave away the smoke of familiarity and instead look more objectively at things – the quaint strangeness in the way English people queue, the sweetness in the fact we call one another ‘mate’, our twee brands, red buses, gentle weather chatter and funny swear words – I could find joy in my Lidl shop, I’m sure, if I just tried harder; but that’s it, you have to try, actively, consciously, a lot, to get there – and when I’m already worried about money and bills and getting older and the general existential what-the-fuckness of it all, I’m usually just too damn tired to bother trying to go ‘wooow’ at the sight of a packet of Hobnobs. But when you go live abroad — all of that comes easier than breathing.

*****

We headed to Treptower Park and got a photo outside Chalet on the way (the club where we first met, aged 23, sitting spangled around the fire out the back, the same evening I got hit in the face by a wooden door and my forehead swelled up like Quasifuckingmodo). We bought ice creams in the park and all around us Berliners sat in various states of undress; my eyes flicked from one stylish line-drawing tattoo to the next as we talked. We drank a 0% beer on this sunny little island you can find at the bottom of the park, then in the early afternoon headed back to the hotel so I could dose myself up on hayfever medicine because I could feel my lips and throat beginning to tingle which meant I would soon be choking and crying on all fours like a cat coughing up a hairball.

After the hotel we took the U2 to Prenzlauer Berg to meet for drinks with Bruna, an old colleague of Vic’s from Brazil. I’d met Bruna several times before, back in 2017, but I never got to know her well – and in fact when we sat down all together she was so friendly and warm that I found myself wondering how it was that we never became better friends. I was happy sitting with them both but I couldn’t stay long; I had to go and meet up with two old colleagues of mine, Michael and Zoe, in Neukolln. Michael was my old boss and Zoe was a fellow writer, and the times I spent working with them were some of the happiest and most fulfilling of my career to date.

I left the girls and hurried away through Prenzlauer Berg, through a sunny park with children playing on swings and then another sunny park with adults lying around drinking beer, and then I jumped onto the U7 to meet Michael at Hermannplatz. Slim and towering over me, he looked exactly as I remembered him.

“You look so stylish!” I told him after we’d hugged and said hello.

“I don’t appreciate the shock in your voice,” said Michael.

We sat on the steps at Rathaus Neukolln with all the old Turkish men and drank a beer, and I needed a wee and had to run away into a nearby government building and sprint down approximately six hundred metres of linoleum corridor to find a toilet. Soon after we met with Zoe and several of her friends near Klunkerkranich, and we hugged and I told Zoe she hadn’t aged a day which made her very happy. She apologised for being slightly drunk (I said it was fine) because she’d been out all day in the sun, and she seemed genuinely elated to see me and kept telling her friends how great I was, which of course I found very sweet.

We went back to someone’s apartment in Neukolln for drinks. It was funny to be in a Berlin apartment again; I’d forgotten how sexy they all are. The only time I see naked bodies when I’m at home is in either pornography or a racy scene in a movie. In Berlin the hipsters decorate their houses with tits and bottoms and cocks – flaccid or otherwise – and when people arrive they just breeze through without seeming to notice. I wanted to ask about it – all the busty soft-focus bush-out ladies staring at me from magazine spreads – but I decided that to mention it, even in passing, would give away my present-day lack of familiarity with such chic and casual sexuality and thus single me out as a square.

On the balcony we caught up on the intervening years and I learned that Zoe has had a tremendously rough time of it for the past twelve months or so (I won’t go into detail) and Michael had a hard time last year finding a writing job, and this reassured me somewhat because I’ve also had a very a strange career journey since Berlin and I’ve always quietly harboured the thought that this is down to me being a moron. But Zoe and Michael are definitely not morons, they’re very clever, and it seems it’s the same thing for writers everywhere these days – which, while obviously still bleak, gives some degree of comfort as well. I’m not alone.

I spoke to people from France, Germany, Poland and Spain, and the conversations were good and people were both open with me about their lives and interested in what I had to say about mine. After several drinks I found myself giving a pep talk to a French girl who wanted to begin publishing her writing but was afraid.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I want it to be perfect and it’s never good enough. But you make me think that I should try. Maybe I’ll speak to my therapist about it and see how I feel.”

“Just make shit art!” I blurted out, a little drunk. It made a girl across the circle laugh.

“I mean it,” I said. “It doesn’t matter if other people think it’s good or not, fuck them, just make things you love and put them out there. Who cares?”

I could have been more eloquent but I think I made my point.

It occurred to me then that I could have counted these people, had I moved back to Berlin, as new friends – six, seven, eight new friends in one day, plus Bruna and the people I’d met at Tempelhof the evening before with Dave. A year and a half of living in London and trying – really, actively trying to meet people, going to art class, improv class, salsa class, libraries, cafes, bars, hiking clubs, house parties, the climbing gym, constantly straining to build connections with people and seeing them fizzle out almost instantly – and I’d met, like, two new people I could theoretically text to hang out.

It was oddly validating to feel this, because in the seven years since I left Berlin I’ve never made friends as effortlessly, anywhere, and I think the city set the bar insanely high very early in my life. As the years have passed and I’ve failed to make new friends in Bristol and London and beyond, I’ve often thought back to how easy it was in Berlin – I met Annie at a radio show, I met Kate in a bar, I met Vic in a smoking area, I met Dave in a hostel living room – and wondered whether it was just because I was younger and more open-minded and energetic; that is, that the change is a permanent one, and the portion of my life in which I knew a lot of people is simply over. But no – this trip showed me it’s not that at all; it’s just the culture of the city. In most other places around the world if you text a friend to hang out and they’re busy having drinks with their flatmates or colleagues, that’s that – they say ‘sorry I’m not free tonight’ and you reply with a Whatsapp sticker of a puppy crying or whatever. In Berlin, they just invite you right along – the more the merrier, hugs all round, talk like old friends.

It made me seriously consider moving back – the simple joys of sitting on springtime balconies with new faces, smiling and talking about things and laughing. But every thought has an equal and opposite counterthought: do I need more friends? What’s wrong with the friends I have now? Am I not being a bit… greedy? Blinkered? How many friends would I need before I said ‘this is enough’? Ten? Fifty? A thousand?

As I walked home that night – after long hugs and glowing goodbyes – I thought about it: how I am so often immobilised by the contradiction between being motivated to improve my life (with aspiration being lauded as a positive and enviable trait by most) and the seemingly incompatible stoic mindset that what I have now is enough and contentedness is all a matter of perspective. Well – which is it, you bastards?