The verdict is that November sucks. That’s just a fact. Of course this is both a gross sweeping statement and generalisation, be that as it may, let me sweep the crap out of November and reiterate that November sucks.  If December is the season to be merry, then November is the season to be angst-ridden and self-destructive.

This is a month that I can only compare to a state of clinical depression. I have no concrete reason for feeling this way, I just do. All of my efforts to give up smoking and drinking seem forlorn and come back as the only viable pleasure in an otherwise dismal month.  All I want to do at the moment is hide under my duvet, watch re-runs of ‘How I Met your Mother’ whilst devouring Snickers bars back to back. There’s nothing I like more than eating myself into a diabetic coma,  only to wake up the next morning in a sea of candy bar wrappers and a chocolate covered pillow, feeling as chipper as when you wake up next to some random guy the morning after a drunken one night stand. Yes, I am a winner in every sense of the word.

We are a hop and a skip away from Christmas, which is generally a non-event for me.  Unlike my friends I have never really had any discernible family traditions or regular get together to speak of. I guess that is the fall -ut for any culturally confused misanthrope like myself, straddling several different cultures yet belonging to none all at once.

In my experience, nothing good happens in November. Let me illustrate a point in case,  last November whilst living in Copenhagen for two months, within a four week period I:

● Had the worst haircut ever; sporting a Victor/Victoria meets Jack White ‘do. Trust me to find the one hairdresser in Copenhagen who didn’t speak English.
● Contracted a bad case of food poisoning, where for three days straight, executive decisions had to be met as to which way to face the toilet.
● Experienced my first earthquake; in Scandinavia of all places. I find this mildly amusing, considering I was in San Francisco six months earlier.
● Was relocated from my swanky apartment in Frederiksberg into a former brothel  in Vesterbro, wedged between the ‘Beirut Heaven’ kebab snack bar and a porno cinema. Nothing says “Home Sweet Home” than a slap-bass soundtrack thumping through the wall, stale cigarette smoke, the scent of kebab grease wafting into my bedroom window, whilst trying to block out the cacophony of the crack whores in the alley below.

It’s really no surprise that Søren Kirkegaard, Godfather of existentialist despair, was Danish.

Berlin is no different; there is a strange cloud of hopelessness that seems to seep into my bones this time of the year, where I fall out of love with the city and see everything I once liked with grey-hued misery spectacles.  I always advise friends to visit or move to Berlin after February, as the city seems to be imbued with the strangest sense of ill-being in winter. I know it’s the natural state of seasonal blues innate to most northern European cities, yet it’s hard to explain what in particular it is about Berlin that drags me into a sense of dread and ennui, that no amount of SAD UV lamps can remedy.

Perhaps this self indulgent malaise is an intrinsicallly urban sickness that permeates the being of most cities, as we become starkly aware of the concrete jungle we inhabit and which alienates us from our very selves. In the case of Berlin there is also something about the city that the attracts the directionless who drift onto its shores, desperately trying to live out a Christopher Isherwood-style existence. Nothing irks me more then the wide eyed romanticism of most expats seeking some kind of depraved self destructive Iggy Pop style excess, coupled with idealistic fantasies of Weimar Republic Berlin. I tell you, the amount of Anita Berber or Sally Bowl wannabes in this city are a dime a dozen.

November is a month where I’m sure Jean-Paul Sartre must have written his existentialist treatise Nausea. Coincidentally,  he actually wrote the second draft to the novel whilst living in Berlin. There must be something about this city that brings out the inner malcontent; perhaps we’re located on some ‘Weltschmerz’ lay line or something. At any rate, there is a sense of purposelessness that engulfs and consumes me every year at this time, which can only be medicated with the vices that brought me here in the first place; in my case cigarettes, alcohol and a sprinkling of casual encounters of the sexual kind.

Since this November marked the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, I actually tried to prise myself out of my melancholic solitude, with a heavy weighted sense of obligation to witness something of merit, though in principle I hate the pressure of having to commemorate anything. With this in mind, Instead of the painfully cheesy events taking place at the Brandenburger Tor, I opted to visit the ‘Mauer Mob’ art project, marking the fall of the wall and those who had lost their lives to traverse it. The ‘Mauer Mob’ performance piece was a line of people who stood at various points in the city, with candles to form a human wall along the same lines where the wall once was. After battling with my umbrella in gail force winds and turning up fifteen minutes too late, all I saw were a couple of people loitering around with flashlights in the rain. That was one hour of my life I won’t get back.

I returned home to watch the ‘uplifting’  third re-run that month of Florian Henckel’s Oscar winning film Das Leben Der Andern (The Lives of Others), about a Stasi agent in 1984 East Berlin spying on a writer and his lover. Great film, but it reminded me that not everyone was celebrating that month, especially an acquaintance of mine Sabine*, who fell into a deep fit of depression every November.  I wanted to shoot the telly the whole month, when watching the saccharine and nauseating BBC World coverage. Berlin became centre point that month for the media, as a beacon of change and hope, when for Sabine (name has been changed for purposes of requested anonymity) it was a thorn in her side every year.

Sabine had grown up in the former East Berlin, where her family had been subjected most of their lives to demoralising and frightening surveillance by the Stasi.  She later found out that friends and neighbours had betrayed her and her family for years, imparting  even the smallest and most inconsequential pieces of information about them onto the secret service.  Watching their every move,  they lived in fear that every time her father would leave for work he might not return, having been arrested or accused of some falsehood.

This eventually resulted in a successful escape to West Berlin in 1988, where they left every sense of their former lives for a risky and uncertain future.  Sabine experienced palpable disappointment after the fall of the wall. All the torment and sacrifice she and her family had gone through a year before had in some sense been in vain, and this still marks her psychologically twenty years on.

Things weren’t made any better this month with the general hysteria of this apparent flu ‘pandemic’. Taking the U-Bahn the other day, I found myself seated next to this teeny weeny elderly woman  coughing her figurative lungs up.  It was a pitiful sight, this poor woman wheezing and struggling for air like a 19th Century consumptive midget, whilst all the passengers were cartoonishly pressed up against each other occupying the space furthest away from this human phlegm machine. The other half of the carriage remained empty, bar me and the pneumonic plague victim.  God forbid I betray my bleeding heart liberalist tendencies and isolate this walking petri dish, who has probably infected me with the delightful swine flu as we speak.

Anti climatic doesn’t come close to describing this month.  If this month had a soundtrack it would be Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller’s classic  ‘Is That all there Is?‘, though originally recorded by Peggy Lee, I’m partial to the PJ Harvey version.  As it so happens this song was recorded in November 1969; in fact this month marks the song’s 40th anniversary – how appropriate.

With this in mind, I will light another cigarette, drown myself in a red wine haze and tip my hat  to November – you sly misanthropic bitch you, once again you got me. So I’ll take the following advice:

“Is that all there is, is that all there is
If that’s all there is my friends, then let’s keep dancing
Let’s break out the booze and have a ball
If that’s all there is”