The Internet Personified: Notes from a rainy month

Monsoon season, Northern European style

• We watched Superman on Friday night. (A thing I can’t stop doing now once I said it for the first time is make the man part of their names like a surname. I mean instead of SuperMAN, I’m saying Superman. Batman. Spiderman. “Man” in this case sounding more like “mun.” I know. I really can’t stop.) I’m not a huge superhero film person, I thought, but I realise that’s not entirely true. I’m not a huge Marvel Cinematic Universe fan, it seems such a coy set of movies, all these knowing nods and winks, and you don’t understand what’s happening in movie three unless you’ve watched movie one and two and also the side adventure prequel. Ugh. I like films that establish plot early without also assuming you’re an idiot and/or a superfan. (Superfun.) Superman was good, a proper popcorn chewer, loads of action sequences, banter between the cast, a nice wholesome superhero ala Ted Lasso and also, very importantly, WELL LIT, so I didn’t have to squint at silhouettes in the dark.

  

  From the list 20 Examples of Superman Being A Jerk

  
  Plus there’s a dog. I’m not a huge fan of dogs in films unless they’re just being dogs, it’s the same way with kids, I’m not of the “if a child speaks, it’s a punchline because they’re so cute” school of humour. But if a child is just being a child, walking along, making funny faces, not PERFORMING some sort of adult idea of what a child should be, then it’s quite nice. Same with dogs. However, it turns out, in a superhero film, a CGI dog based on an actual dog, is a good dog. Superdog propels the plot and is also adorable.
  My first superhero movie was everyone my age’s first superhero film, the iconic Spiderman with Tobey McGuire and that upside down kiss, which forever shot Spiderman into my “favourite superhero” list. I also liked the X Men series that followed, because it was very “boarding school for misfits” which is the kind of genre I enjoy in films (not so much in books, I only read book one of the Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children series and then, more recently, TJ Klune’s House on the Cerulean Sea was so sweet it made my teeth ache). I liked the X Men movies so much, I even watched the stand alone Wolverine movie. Then, of course, the Dark Knight stuff, also good, and I’ve been going around recommending the Spiderverse films to anyone who loves multiple timeline plotlines as well as beautiful animation. So you see, not completely a novice. Superman isn’t actually up there with all these memorable films, I realise in retrospect. It’s fun, but it’s not something kids twenty years from now will discuss as their entryway into the world of mutant saviours. Maybe that’s the problem with these comic-to-book adaptations these days. They’re so focussed on being funny and ironic and clever, they forget to put any heart into their storylines, leaving them somewhat shell-like. However, if you’re bored on a rainy weekend night, it is a fun movie to watch in an actual cinema.

• Speaking of things I enjoyed watching, on my very own small screen this month, I watched both Ted Lasso and Department Q and they’re still lingering in my mind. (Okay, so I only finished watching them very recently, but still.) I’d seen seasons one and two of Ted Lasso before, but never season 3, so I decided to do a rewatch, and for K, it was the first time. What we liked most was the depictions of male friendships, so rare on screen. What we liked least was how the show turned schlocky every now and then, giving in to its basest impulses for sentiment. (The aforementioned Child Saying Things An Adult Writer Has Decided Is Cute is very strong in Ted Lasso too.) Department Q, however, was an unmitigated delight. It’s been a while since a Netflix show has caught my fancy, or that I’ve even finished to be honest. I started The Residence with great hope, but it descended into mid about halfway through the first episode. Dept Q is one of those rare shows that you can’t use your phone with at the same time because you will miss some plot. Of course, that means Netflix hasn’t renewed it yet, and it hangs in the balance. It’s a pretty perfect first season though, especially if you like cold case/high stakes mystery solving. Also based on a series of Scandi crime books, which (this is rare) look less interesting than the TV show. There’s also a mysterious Syrian refugee who joins the team and is just basically… a legend.

  

  Plus Lady Mary’s second husband is very good in present day clothing as well.

• It’s been an extremely rainy month here in Berlin and as a result, we’ve had very few of those long lazy summer days that make the dark winter months worth it. I tried to embrace the rainy day, but it’s been hard, especially knowing we only have another month before the season changes for real and heads back into autumn. Maybe that’s the worst thing about being an adult, how time just flashes forward. That’s why I try to write this newsletter regularly, you know, otherwise life goes undocumented and you wonder how you’re suddenly at the end of July when you could’ve sworn it was just May, and also how it feels like your trip to India was so long ago, when it was only this March.
  In fact, it’s been so rainy that I actually went to Humana (large second hand store chain) yesterday to buy a raincoat, a garment I don’t normally need because when is it both wet enough to need one and warm enough not to need a thick jacket? Humana is usually rubbish for me, but having identified what I needed, I went straight to the sports section (okay, I meandered a BIT, but not very long), perused the racks and found a long hunter green poncho which are usually very unflattering but this manages to have some shape, because it has sleeves and a zip at the neckline. It also packs up small for my purse. Then, walking downstairs, I found K a gorgeous heavy cotton indigo chore jacket in the men’s workwear section, complete with someone’s paint flecks in the corner. These paint flecks, plus the fact that we couldn’t find a price tag on the raincoat, and the store was closing means the lady at the counter said, “Look just give me 9 euros for both.” PRACTICALLY FREE, YOU GUYS. (OG prices were 9 euros for each.)

  

  This is also the Humana where the department store scenes of The Queen’s Gambit was shot.

  
  I bought the raincoat also because we’re travelling from Tuesday. K has this colleague, he doesn’t know her, but she posted on their shared message board that she needed someone to water her plants for two weeks at her house on the outskirts of this village in Apulia, Italy. A free house in one of the most gorgeous parts of Italy? YES PLEASE. We’ve signed on for a week of plant watering duty (we’re nice so we let someone else also have a chance) and we’re making our way entirely by train. So we do Berlin-Munich on Tuesday (where it was supposed to be dry and warm, but this same rain front has moved there now and is settling down and making friends) then Wednesday night, we take an overnight train to Rome where we’re staying with old friends we know from Delhi. From Rome, another day train up to Brindissi, which is either two ds and one s or vice versa, so I’m defaulting to this spelling, from where we take a bus to the small village this person lives in, and there we stay for the week, before doing the journey in reverse, but instead of Rome, we’re doing Brindissi-Naples, Naples-Bologna, Bologna-Munich and then home. Most of this journey is about exploring Europe by train, so the railways are part of the holiday as well, not just a way to get around. (Tips, as always, for any of these places, appreciated. I’ve never actually been to Munich before either unless you count passing through on my way to and from India.)

• The other day I went to buy a bikini with my friend V, who lives next door. This is not a story about the bikini buying, which was quite bad, the same shop I bought my old one at has somehow reduced their selection of tops for the heavier chested woman, so I had very few options, but in the end, decided on this one which is not bad.

  

  Anyway, on the way back home, we stopped for drinks at one of my favourite local bars, Hermann Schulz. (Of course I have loads of favourite bars, especially in our area, so I divide them based on my mood.) It’s on a tree-lined street, with outdoor seating and a living room vibe on the inside so generally, quite nice for a quiet evening drink. It gets a softer crowd as well, not people looking to get fucked up, but who are generally meeting and catching up. It helps that it also serves, in addition to alcohol, milkshakes etc, as well as a limited selection of baked goods. (V rare in Berlin to have a bar that does both.)

  I realised when I was back home that I had lost my phone. This is a city teeming with pickpockets, so it’s rare for me not to check all my belongings repeatedly when I leave a place, but perhaps that glass of red wine, the nice evening had made me forget. My phone is old but nice, my biggest problem was that it had my India SIM card, which I use for my bank OTPs. Luckily, I remembered just in time that one bored afternoon, I set up a Find My Phone app on it, and this I used to discover it was still at the bar. K biked back, ten minutes away from home, and the phone was still there, miraculously, at the bar, waiting for me, ten minutes before they closed for the night. This is a reminder to do that for yourselves as well.

• Our building abuts another one on the corner and the two sets of residents share an inner courtyard, called a Hinterhof in German. Our bedroom and kitchen windows overlook it, we very rarely sit there because it’s usually overrun with children and doesn’t get much sun. The lady on the ground floor flat in the house adjacent to ours began with getting two cats, siblings, in addition to the older cat she already had. These cats had incest kittens, a set of five, two of which she gave her immediate neighbour, and they all hang out in the backyard, occasionally, to the distress of our ground floor neighbours, going into their houses and peeing on their things. There’s always a black cat to be seen—they’re all black, like miniature Squishys, who likes to sit in our window and watch them. Anyway, I see this lady with her kids—three (two teens, one small one) and her cats—frequently in the backyard, most of the mess, plastic toys, cat poop, an old trampoline, is hers, and it’s very hard not to feel resentful at this taking over of public space. However, she doesn’t know me at all, doesn’t realise that she’s visible in essentially a fishbowl, that I sometimes look out the window when I’m cooking or making coffee. The other day I saw her out and about, at the supermarket next door, and it took all I had not to run up to her and say, “Hiiiiiiii! I watch you all the time!” Truly a parasocial relationship.

• Finally, I Googled the other day why some people’s sweat smells sexy and others remind you of rotten food, and it boils down to two things: 1) how attractive your body finds someone else, so not your mind, but how your actual physical self responds and 2) your diet. People who eat more fruit and veg have nicer sweat than those who don’t, so something to remember if you’re struggling with eating your greens. (In Berlin, at about armpit height to most, I think it’s also to do with how often you wash your clothes, that damp musty smell of a dirty cloth can’t be washed out unless you use baking soda in your machine. It also means holding your breath on the U Bahn.)

  PS: In stuff I wrote, here is my untourist’s guide to Spain, part of my regular column for Splainer, which, so sad, is closing their news section at the end of the month.

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Have a great week!

xx

m

Who are you? Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, writer of internet words (and other things) author of eight books (support me by buying a book!) and general city-potter-er.

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