Winter in Berlin: a test of stamina and endurance

Winter in Berlin has always been a test of stamina and endurance for me. One would assume having been through it year in and year out for the last four years, I should be well versed and prepared for the dirge of the city’s winter in its many guises.  The winter here is like an old relation who comes to visit and always seems to overstay their welcome, driving your patience to the limit, where the mere sound of them breathing makes you want to sucker punch them in the face.

Alas, winter in Berlin is a sly devil, with the ability to wrong foot you into a false sense of security. It sneaks up on you in November, a bit dark, a bit cold, making you feel generally blah and like an unpleasant but tolerable muffy odour in the U-Bahn,  you think to yourself:

‘Hey it smells kind of off here, but no big deal. My stop is coming up soon, I can bear it.’

Mid January arrives and initial rapture over the first snow and winter festivities winds down,  now you’re getting pretty sick of trudging through the grey sleet, dressed like the marshmallow man with a permanent case of frizzy hat hair.  The winter intensifies into a unpleasant stench, like that of the drunken knob seated next to you on the night bus eating a kebab at 4am, where you think think to yourself :

‘This is rank, but if I can hold my breath or breathe through my mouth long enough, I can get through it.’

Once you hit end the of February/beginning of March and realise rather than subsiding, the winter is in fact intensifying, as you continue to battle a never-ending cold and general feeling of clinical depression that is engulfing you within the concrete walls of the city. You feel a little off kilter like some deranged character in a J.G Ballard novel. At this point the winter stench has transformed into the foul stink of a pissed, drenched tramp who passes you by for just a few seconds on the street – his smell is like a kick in the stomach, and though he has gone,  his pungent odour lingers around like the sting of a slap in the face.  You must restrain your reflex to partially vomit in your own mouth and  think:

‘What in the name of Jesus, Mary and Gandalf am I doing in this godforsaken place, where is the wardrobe door so I can escape from this grey Narnia?!’

Perhaps this sounds rather over dramatic and to some extent perhaps you are right, but anyone who reads this column knows that I am prone to indulge and flatter my misanthropic nature.

The new year started on a good footing in January. After the previous year where I recovered from the corporate burn out, whilst working odd jobs and living hand to mouth, I finally managed to land a job as an editor for a reputable Berlin lifestyle site. This was what I had hoped for, finally fulfilling my desire to earn my living being creative and doing what I genuinely enjoyed every day, i.e. writing. I counted my lucky stars and thought that all that patience and effort had actually paid off.  As fate should have it, the beginning of February arrived and the crest of good luck I was surfing was to come crashing down against the shore, taking me into a winter whip-out.

Everything started innocently enough; after resigning from my rather mundane day job with glee in my heart, I thought I’d squeeze in the long overdue appointment to get my wisdom teeth out.  Nothing inspires confidence-shattering terror than when the patient before you exits the operating theatre and passes out at your feet like a felled tree.

'I Feel Pretty'. Not so much...

The nurse seeing my trembling hands, tried to subdue my fear by giving me an iPod to listen to during the operation. Not that I could hear the dulcit tones of Dvorak whilst my face was being drilled into two, like the main character in Darren Aronofsky’s ‘Pi – ð ‘.  To add insult to injury,  just at the point of wisdom tooth extraction,  a warm gush of blood spilled forth onto my chest and the the ipod skipped, so the soundtrack that accompanied my oral torture was (and I’m not joking ) ‘I Feel Pretty’ from West Side Story.  I mean, really?

After a week where my face was blown up and I looked like horror hamster roadkill, with a skip and a hop, I began my first day at my new job. Three days into my new career, I was called into my bosses’ office, only to be told that due to budget cuts and investors pulling out, all the newest employees were to be cut.

Two weeks before my 31^st birthday, I stand once more unemployed, out of pocket and having to take on a dead end waitressing job whilst battling recurring infection from my wisdom teeth and I ask myself how the hell did I get here?  I had in fact come full circle to where I was this time last year, where I waxed lyrical about turning 30 and my hopes and fears of walking the metaphoric plank of adult expectations.

Unlike my 30 year old self of the year before, a year on I have come to realise that part of being an adult is not really about where you are at per say, but learning how to navigate the sometimes rocky shores of the choices you make and the unexpected pitfalls life at times presents us, in my case aided by the of magic Lorazapam. Let’s hope once the spring makes its long overdue appearance, little Miss. Anthrope that I am, will have a turn of luck and resist the lurking urge to stab customers in the neck with a spoon in my new swanky role as peeved off waitress, writer and winter whiner.