The Internet Personified: Notes from a heatwave II

Trash days, children in public and Indian food in Berlin

There was a paper flyer stuck to the front door of our building a few days ago announcing BSR Tag. The BSR are the recycling guys here in Berlin—pause while I give you a quick lecture on Germany and garbage. They are absolutely ANAL about separating—yes, we can make the joke quietly inside our heads—so every household has four garbage bins, ours all live under our sink. These are Paper, Recycling (plastic packaging etc), Compost and Stuff That Can’t Be Recycled (Rest). You’ll notice this doesn’t include glass, correct, that’s because you dispose of your bottles in three ways. One, you take your brown glass to the brown glass bin, your green glass to your green glass bin and your clear glass to the clear glass bin. Two, your bottle has a deposit on in, beer yes, wine no, and you turn it into the supermarket for a voucher you can use against your shopping. Three, you’re drinking on the streets of Berlin like a vagabond so you politely prop up your empty deposit bottle against a garbage bin for another vagabond to pick up and return for the deposit. Some people make a living from this. Now in all this, there’s obviously garbage that doesn’t go into the bins, like electronics for instance or large broken bits of furniture. That’s when you call the Spermüll guys, this selfsame BSR who will come and collect your mattress, your lamp etc for a fee. So there’s a lot of people who can’t be bothered and leave their junk outside “as a gift” and some of this junk is great and I use it in my own house, but some is obviously bad and broken and should really be recycled. Today however, as a great treat, the BSR fellows have set up a sort of mela down the road from us where you can take all your things and drop them off for free, which is exactly what we are doing with a broken microwave, toaster and mirror.

That was Saturday. We wheeled our broken items down the street, an old woman stopped us by the organic store. She was missing a front tooth. “Are you giving those away?” she asked, stretching out a hand towards the toaster I was holding with both arms like a baby. I smiled, as I always do when faced with German, giving my mind a few seconds to come up with a response, but our neighbour, walking beside me was quicker. “Kaput,” she said definitively, and the woman fell back disappointed. The whole walk, normally just a quick block, but with the heat, feeling five times longer, we passed people coming back with wagons full of things. I strained to look into their carts. “We’re missing everything!” I hissed at K.

But we hadn’t. Once we reached, we joined a line leading to a large truck which was smashing everything up inside with a powerful trash compactor. I watched metal and furniture just being eaten up and compressed casually by this thing, like a large ogre. K tossed in the mirror, I handed the microwave and toaster to the guy sorting the electronics.

And then! Behind, on the square where usually there’s a couple of ping pong players, the BSR had set up a collection of things people thought were too nice to be trash compacted. I went through a dumpster pile of clothes (nothing nice despite the size of the pile), but K found a standing desk that goes up and down, something he’s been wanting for a while, and on our way out, I found a planter shelf which I’d been wanting for a while so I can tidy up my indoor garden a bit, and we also got an ottoman with storage inside and a National Geographic camera bag which is not the most beautiful bag but which is so nicely padded with so many pockets that I think it’ll be great for picnics and such. And as we walked home, people loudly commented on our things, and we smiled and waved and felt at One with our Community which was a nice thing these recycling guys did, I think, branding it like a festival just for our neighbourhood.

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"Untitled (Figure on Rickshaw)" by Tyeb Mehta

I’ve titled this post “notes from a heatwave 2” because on searching my archives I already have a notes from a heatwave post from back in 2022 when I was sitting in Delhi waiting for my visa. You can read that here. I guess all titles eventually come back into fashion like everything else. (There’s a novel mentioned in that post which I have since set aside while I figure out the ending but I am deep within the third draft of my set-in-Berlin novel which I’m aiming to finish by September and then send off to see if it’ll sell.)

And if you like this sort of post or any of my other writing, please feel free (FEEL VERY FREE) to buy me a book so I can read things and write about them as well. I do regular reading recaps and an end of the year best books post which you can find in the archives all FREE 4 U.

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I was thinking of children the other day. One of my best friends has just had a baby very far away from me and she sends me photos occasionally and I am interested and delighted in both the child and this whole new experience. It struck me that while being in your forties might be a bit of a mismatch with this new person you’ve created, a forty year age gap is quite a lot when you’re trying to relate, it might also be the perfect time to be a parent because all your peers have also slowed down and it’s nice to have nights in with babies instead of when you were in your twenties and everyone’s still going to clubs and drinking too much and you’re having nights in with your baby. I know some people who had children young and now they’re in their forties they’re done with child rearing but, you know, everyone’s so tired all the time now. So not much partying and carrying on.

I was also thinking about children because yesterday was Fete de la Musique which is usually this pretty cool event always held on the summer solstice. Our neighbourhood is traditionally punk and anarchic so that’s the kind of music we get, along with some indie rock and electronic. But yesterday! Firstly it had rained all morning so people were still indoors. Secondly, all the coolest venues only had kids events on! We walked by a bar that prides itself on its live music events and there was a woman with a guitar singing about being a ZOOKEEPER. Good lord. Children everywhere. I wish the neighbourhood had chosen to have a dedicated Kid Zone, because nice for them also to be outside, poor little things, instead of ruining the vibe everywhere else. I felt like I was at a birthday party for toddlers.

Then I started thinking about how hating children is something that people say when they want to sound “edgy” and “different.” And how saying, “ugh, I hate all children” seems to still be okay. No one likes entitled parents, those folk are very annoying, but it’s hardly the kids fault. That parent would have found a way to be the worst no matter what, I promise you. If they hadn’t had kids, they’d be entitled dog owners. Or entitled shoppers. It’s lurking in them, ready to detonate like a bomb. Of course, parents who don’t correct their children’s bad behaviour lead to very bratty kids, but that’s the time to turn your ire on the parents. Kids can suck, but like any sort of classification of human beings, I don’t think it’s okay to say you “hate them all.”

Anyway, I don’t have many children in my day-to-day life, which is why I’m sometimes interested to hear what they have to say but as a childfree person, I don’t think I’m super patient with people, so I think I get annoyed a little faster with strangers, both big and small. (Friends’ kids are obviously just Mini Friends.)

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It’s hotter in Berlin than Delhi sometimes, but not really. I mean, there’s a lot of Indian influencers who make German content and they’re like, tell me why it feels hotter here than at home where it’s 42 degrees and the answer is: well, you’re outside. In the sun. On a summer’s day.

I love this weather because of its unexpectedness. Normally, a summer’s day here is like 25-27 degrees, pleasant but you still have to carry a jacket for the evening, and now it’s sandal weather, tiny dress weather, no need to carry a jacket weather, standing fan brought out of the basement, cold water in the fridge, iced coffee please, red radishes sliced thin with lemon, black salt and chilli powder, curtains drawn, walking on the shady side of the street, a layer of sweat on your face and arms, SMELLS everywhere, the jasmine scent of certain trees that aren’t jasmine, running cold water on your wrists in the drafty bathroom of a bar and returning to your cool drink with ice in it weather. Maybe even jump in a lake weather. Heat waves don’t last forever, so this might be the final week.

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Today I am wearing a cream linen dress with large satsuma shaped and coloured spots all over it. Yesterday I wore the same orange in a low cut tight knee-length dress and went into the world. Orange might be my favourite colour, my favourite coat is orange, the slippers I have on (stolen from a hotel on a memorable girl’s weekend to Thailand) are orange, even my bicycle is orangey-red. The BJP can’t ruin the colour for me.

But so silly to have a favourite colour when there’s the hunter green shade of my phone case and my Kindle cover, the dark green of my woolen beret and the shade of paint we covered the coffee table in, the brown of my desk and the skirt my friend gave me two birthdays ago, the black of easy not-thinking-about it dressing, the bright blue of the necklace I use to brighten things up, the cobalt of this water glass I’m drinking out of right now, the bright pink of a sleeveless sweater I discovered at the donation rail near the park when I went to drop off some things and then handwashed and stretched out so I could wear it. The very best colours make me want to taste them, at a party the other day, this girl was wearing wooden earrings shaped like cherries and I wanted to swirl them in my mouth, feel the red on my tongue and the satisfying clack of the wood against my teeth. Isn’t it odd how we always sort of know what things are going to taste like even if we’ve never tasted them before?

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We were going to a barbecue. It was very hot and I was going to make a salad to go with the sausages I was taking when suddenly we got inspired to do a huge pot of curd rice, like my grandmother used to make for picnics in Hyderabad. I even got a small pomegranate and put the seeds in there (but we forgot mustard seeds so it looked sweet even though it wasn’t.) I had to explain my curd rice over and over again to people, but what is curd? It’s yogurt, there’s yogurt and rice and flash fried garlic and it’s very nice on a hot day. There was too much meat for there to be a substantial dent in the curd rice so we took the leftovers home and ate it the next day—we still have more—and it was a very good batch of curd rice, but then I think of the Chicken Mango Curry and Paneer Jalfrezi that every Indian restaurant here serves and how odd it is that some food becomes popular and universal and others only exist in India and you know it if you’ve lived there or know someone—probably a South Indian—intimately, but otherwise it’s just one of those things that’s specific but not.

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I wanted to write these things down to remember them. We had the longest day of the year and so now, slowly but surely they’ll get shorter which is the nature of the world. I keep a scrapbook, did I ever tell you? I have this large book with blank pages in white, brown and black and I save bits of paper—tickets and receipts and coasters and stickers and I put them all in there, sometimes I write down what something means, and it’s already growing but not very fast because there are so few events these days where you get a paper souvenir. I like to flip through it each time I make a new page, look I did this and that and that, a physical reminder of some happy days. It’s a satisfying bulk and it makes me smile to turn over the pages. If I printed out all the archives of this newsletter going on for a little more than TEN YEARS now, I bet I’d have a satisfying bulk too.

speak soon

x

m

(For on-the-go updates to my obviously fascinating life, I’d suggest my Instagram. I do post a lot of stories on my main and my bookish account, we have fun.)