diary

The Station

/ Dan Hackett / 2 Comments

Hey,

I’ve not been writing much recently due to some reasonably large changes in my life. I got fired, I got hired, my girlfriend and I broke up, almost got back together, then broke up again, and I went on a lonely two week trip around Europe booked on a heartbroken whim. What on earth possessed me to book to go alone to Paris immediately after a break up, we will never know. March has been tough month. The word ‘tumultuous’ springs to mind. As does ‘shit’. The following article is probably the most honest I’ve ever written; I wrote the first draft a week ago and have been staring at it ever since, not daring to post it. Every writer out there waxes endlessly about the need for absolute honesty in writing, but in reality, it’s scary.  I don’t want to be judged unfairly, or laughed at. But we’re not on this earth to be timid, so here it is. Continue reading →

The Berlin Diaries – Disenchantment at the Brandenburg Gate

/ Dan Hackett / 7 Comments

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(From the 6th of Feb. My opinions have changed somewhat since writing this; the city and I have made friends again, but what I’ve written here was true once, and so it stays.)

It’s Monday morning and I’m feeling wretched, and so the only time I can write this is right now, as my wretchedness may well be due to chemical deficiencies that will have righted themselves tomorrow. But perhaps not. Continue reading →

The Berlin Diaries – Gonzo Part II

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Some more nefarious deeds have been done down in the gloomy frozen backalleys of Berlin, and I’m going to let you in on them. Walk with me a while, let’s talk. But, just like last time around, my cast of characters are real people with real lives who don’t necessarily want me to bounce their stories around the stratosphere. So we’re going to need disguises. We all know who they are really, but let’s play make believe for a few minutes. So, meet Jack and Sal. This time I think the narrator will be, oh I don’t know, Levi. Yeah, Levi is good.

So, as a warning to the reader, I would like to paraphrase and bastardise the title of the Oscar winning Daniel Day Lewis film: There Will Be Drugs.

Further to this, I would like to evoke a young Eazy E: Don’t quote me boy, cause I ain’t said shit. Continue reading →

The Berlin Diaries – The Wizard’s Lair

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Thursday I braved the snow and lashing winds and headed down to the Bürgeramt in Wedding. ‘What is the Bürgeramt, Dan?’ I hear you plead. The Bürgeramt, my friend, is a frightfully dull bureaucratic building, an official government site where you have to sort out all your throat-slittingly boring paperwork, registrations, documentation, whatever. After three months living in the city, I have finally moved into a flat where I am able to register – which is a crucial part of moving here, as it allows me to get a bank account, get health insurance, get paid, you name it. The German word for this kind of registration is Anmeldung, a term which now boils my blood every time I hear it. Continue reading →

A List of Shit I’m Going to Do This Year Unless the World Ends, Which It Probably Will, Because Donald Trump is a Moron

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Yo yo, no pissing away time with introductory paragraphs on this blog. Nah, here we go, a straight up list written in an impassioned frenzy while listening to Thin Lizzy.

  • Join a gym, get fit again, develop buns of steel, abs of marble and guns of granite.
  • Join boxing classes in order to become DEADLY with my fists to the point where I need to get them registered as concealed weapons and obtain a permit to have them on me at any point.
  • (Assuming Donald Trump doesn’t accidentally-on-purpose destroy life as we know it) Buy a moped for whizzing around the city like a bat out of, uh, Leeds.
  • Visit 10 new countries, specifically including Morocco because I want to ride a camel drunk through the desert while scream-singing ‘Arabian Nights’ until everyone tells me to fuck off.
  • Visit every club in Berlin, because it’d be rude not to.
  • (If we are not incinerated in a nuclear holocaust courtesy of bumbling onion-hakwer Donald Trump) I will sort out the damned hole in my tooth that has been on/off hurting for about a year.
  • Convince my dad that Jeremy Corbyn isn’t the bastard he bizarrely thinks he is, and that Socialism is actually quite a good and pleasant idea.
  • Do not sit quietly and tolerate any more pro-capitalism arguments that are silly and nonsensical, including:
  1. Socialism is just leeching off rich people! (No it isn’t, but capitalism is leeching off poor people)
  2. It’s always been this way! (No it hasn’t)
  3. There will always be rich people and poor people! (No there won’t)
  4. Socialism will never work because of human nature! (Nope, humans are a product of their environment)
  5. But it’s my money! (Kim, there are people that are dying)
  • Stay angry, stay passionate, hold onto my ideals, and advocate positive change in the world.
  • Keep listening to the Clash.
  • Make a shitload of weird new friends.
  • Take up graffiti. Seems fun. I could write choice Clash lyrics. Or draw dicks!
  • Try out a new haircut (just kidding, I’m not going completely mental).
  • Make an arch rival, a nemesis, someone who I can occasionally do battle with, etc. I feel like it’d be a good motivator.
  • (If Donald Trump hasn’t already destroyed literature and held mass book burning rallies) I plan to read ridiculous amounts of books and get really smart and stuff.
  • Either buy a guitar or fly my own over from Blighty. Start a fucking great band and make songs about how shit everything is and do Joe Strummer proud.
  • Get more articles published – Vice and the Guardian are the two I’m aiming for, and they have thus far met my pitches with agonising silence. God dammit.
  • Keep in touch with my friends back home and don’t change into an arsehole just because I live in Berlin now.
  • (If there are any left that haven’t been hurled into camps) I will help refugees, help the homeless, volunteer and try to make things generally better.
  • Get involved in more political activity, maybe get arrested and shot for my beliefs after making an incendiary speech that echoes down the annals of history and eventually leads to the uprising that will free the poor and downtrodden from their shackles, something like that, idk.
  • Never pay that stupid rail fine even if it means I am slung into a gulag and forced to swing a pickaxe for the next 80 years. FUCK THE MAN.
  • Be a successful vegetarian. Learn to cook wicked veggie meals and get buff off of vegetables and prove everyone wrong that said I would fail miserably and look unhealthy and be all pale and skinny. I will eat no meat and I will be a bronzed Hercules.
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‘Look, it’s cold in here, okay?’

  • Pay off my overdraft and for the first time in five years have a bank balance that doesn’t start with a ‘minus’ sign.
  • (Assuming Donald Trump’s greasy fake-tanned finger hasn’t slithered all over the Big Red Button and turned all to ashes) I plan to become more attractive. To either sex. All attention is good.

And last but not least, the most noble of my aspirations for the coming twelve months: get laid in a Berlin nightclub. But, again, that’s not likely to happen, as we will probably have all been machine gunned to death by swooping drones because someone on Twitter called Donald Trump a bull-frog-throated cock ring with a voice like Porky Pig that looks like someone skinned the Honey Monster, then reanimated it’s swollen corpse using a brain taken from one of those small yapping dogs everyone hates.

Good grief, what a visual metaphor.

The Berlin Diaries – The Mystical Pool of Neukölln

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*It’s a dark, blustery evening. You lie in bed, but you cannot sleep. The only thing that will do, you decide, is a bedtime story from your favourite grandfather. You creep downstairs, your teddy grasped tight in your little palm. You enter my office timidly, and find me an old man, reclined in a rich leather armchair by a roaring fire, spectacles perched on the end of my nose. I am quietly perusing a large, ornate copy of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. I glance up with a start as you close the door behind you.*

Oh, hello my sweet grandchild! Didn’t hear you come in. It’s that time already, is it? Time for another story, ey? Well, you scamp, come hither and rest your arse upon my knee, and I will thrill you with tales of my youth in Berlin. Today’s story is set way back in 2017, on the 2nd of January. Continue reading →

The Berlin Diaries – New Year’s Eve

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After three weeks at home in Leeds for the Christmas holidays, I flew back to Berlin on the 31st of December at 4.45pm. My lovely grandad gave me a lift to the airport, and thanks to 17 years in the military his punctuality is such that it goes way past being sensible and gets rather ridiculous. Four hours early, then, I checked in and sat drinking Guinness and reading until my flight – the last flight out of the airport that day, as everyone who wasn’t a moron had already got their flights out of the way, not saved them for last thing on New Year’s Eve.

Continue reading →