Berlin

19/5/22

Arrived late at night. Got on the S-bahn to meet Annina in Neukölln. I joined her and her choir (or who were left of them) sitting on the street outside a Lotto drinking store-bought beers. It was hot in the city and the tarmac still retained the warmth of the sun. Hearing Annina dip in and out of German to speak to me and her friends was a joy. She had bought me a bottle of pilsner with a bottle-top you pop open. After you finish drinking you should leave the empty beer bottle next to a bin, so that someone can come and collect it and get 8 cents from the state. ‘Never throw a beer bottle away into the bin Rimi, or else they can’t get recycled.’

20/5/22

We woke up in the spare bedroom of her cousin’s. It had a high ceiling with long white curtains that let the light in softly; outside I could see green treetops and blue sky and hear the hum of the city. We went to a coffee bar called Bona. The interior was decorated with wheat sheafs hanging from the ceiling, bare lightbulbs and raw wood. As with all of Berlin, their practical carefree attitude and cobbled-together cool aesthetic makes everything look interesting while simultaneously being nothing special. We shared a pecorino salami croissant and chimichurri avocado bagel, got two black coffees and talked about our parents’ generation. 

Next, Annina took me to a large disused airfield called Tempelhof nearby. She had brought her roller-skates and began drifting along the smooth tarmac of the air strip, while I mounted her bicycle which was too high for me and pedalled up and down. I returned to find Annina had done a backward somersault after crashing into a skater girl. We went back to Wedding where she lives and dropped off my bags and had a shower. For lunch Annina cooked me white asparagus with brown butter – crunchy, fried, wholesome – and freshly boiled potatoes.

I put her arm into a makeshift sling then we left the flat to go to Alte Nationalgalerie to catch a Paul Gaugin exhibition. There was surprisingly little of the modernist painter’s works on display. A few paintings of the sensual forms and vivid tropical colours of the Pacific, but really the exhibition was dealing with the controversy of the character. Gaugin was a French colonist who promoted an idealised version of himself as a native while continuously marrying underage indigenous girls (his first wife was 13, the second was 14 years old), contracting syphilis, becoming badly in debt and then dying. There were pieces by Polynesian heritage artists which off-set the white man’s cultivated image of Tahiti as a “primitive, pleasure-laden land”; contemporary video footage of women on the island remaining voiceless and a political poem that I liked called Guys Like Gaugin by Selina Tusitala Marsh.

We walked around the plaza of Museum Island with the newly built Homboldt Palace and heard the Berlin Cathedral bells tolling. There was going to be a storm, so we headed to where Annina works at the Kino Arsenal (an independent cinema) to watch a Frederick Wiseman retrospective. I met her cute colleagues who gave us bottled beers from behind the box office window. Before the 4-hour film was set to start we ran across the road to get the best fast-food burgers I’ve ever eaten from Burgermeister. The film called Belfast, Maine was a documentary detailing all the elements of an American town: church, school, healthcare, hunting, factory work, social care. It was a bleak and at times poignant long-ass film.

21/5/22

We woke up late and went downstairs to get food for breakfast. There is a fresh produce store on the corner of the street called Katofferladen, which translates to Potato Shop. We bought a punnet of strawberries, two sticks of rhubarb and homemade jam. Down the street there was a bakery where we got white crusty bread rolls, croissants and a pastry filled with spinach and cheese: Breakfast of Champions.

We visited a flea market where the stalls were crammed full of inexpensive wares. Mangled screwdrivers, phone chargers, chipped china. I rifled through some boxes as is my want and got two porcelain Chinese soup spoons for a Euro. Annina foraged a wonky golden candlestick and a beaten-up bell with stars like asterisks carved onto its body for me. It threatened to rain, so we ducked into a fancy Turkish café where we had sweet snacks and coffees and talked about what we feared the most.

It never did rain. The stall-owners were packing up and Annina bought a ship in a bottle and a vase with a broken lip that had been glued back together. We walked home stopping off at a well-stocked Asian supermarket where I bought soba noodles to make for our lunch. Annina read me an interview with Frederick Wiseman and I watched her 17-minute documentary she had made about Internally Displaced People (IDPs) in Georgia. A quiet, thoughtful, melancholic film. 

We walked through two large parks near her house: Goethe and Reheberge. Animals were being kept in the latter – I got to see wild boars! Dark and bristly fur, their bodies densely compact tapering down to tiny trotters, keeping themselves very clean. One was making satisfied grunting noises as it rubbed up against a wooden post to have a scratch. Small white tusks were visible above articulated snouts, a little longer than a pig’s and seemingly more dexterous. The three boars were happily rooting around and throwing glances at us humans who were watching them, while in the far distance we could all hear the thudding bass of a techno gig. The park has a beautiful lake with a fake beach on the other side. We sat overlooking the lake in the setting sun and talked about cultural differences in expressing emotion, as a businessman stripped off to have a swim in the lake.

We walked to Moabit where Annina’s friend Clara lives. Clara had invited us to a dinner party where she'd made the most delicious Syrian food. Stuffed roasted peppers, aubergines, courgettes with rice and meat, a rich red sauce, white creamed veg all served with helpings of olives, dill and lemon juice. The guests brought an interesting mix of heritages to the table I’d never experienced before. One girl was Jewish and had returned home to Berlin after living in Colombia for many years. An Iranian couple where the wife had lived in Tehran and Toronto. We spoke on the topic of strangers. How in some places strangers are suspicious or people in exile, while in some they’re welcomed or even seen as courageous for having boldly set out to find their own path. I realised that in Japanese there is no word for "stranger" only "someone you don’t know", apparently this is also the case in Farsi.

22/5/22

I packed my hold-all bag and wrapped my trinkets from the flea market in dirty socks. We had delicious breakfast and coffee again, then headed out to walk to Gesundbrunnen where I would catch my train to the airport. We stopped off at the Silent Green and enjoyed the summery garden there. We walked along the river and had an ice coffee in a café next to the flat where Annina used lived. At the station I bought currywurst sausages with a white bread roll and said ‘so long’ to my friend. It had been a real holiday from my norm and I'd been happy to see the city opening up post-Covid. I’d be visiting again while Annina is set to come to London in June. Good times ahead.

For the love of England

First run of the year. Running up the hill being chased by my dog, we run parallel until I am an inch ahead of her then she races ahead leaving me in her tail’s trail.

I have been away a lot recently, traversing the country. I have seen sea, tilled fields, rocky cliffs. Once I found myself staying in a fairy tale place with a stone castle stood in the middle of the village. It dates back to the time of early Christendom and is contemporaneous with the Tower of London, I was told. Now a ruin on an escarpment; sturdy, thick-walled, held together by clods of flint. You couldn’t bulldoze it, but it has been worn down over millennia by forgetfulness. 

Some entrepreneurial agriculturalists used its fortified plains of grass to graze their sheep. People looted the castle remains for building materials. Feudal systems waned, industrialisation peaked, people got replaced by other people and they forgot why the castle was built.

ROLO accompanied us on all these journeys to bygone picturesque places around England. We walked as a pack along the white cliffs of Dover. I kept her on a leash as one unflappable guide at the lighthouse at the end of our walk told us a dog ran off the side of a cliff only the other day. No fences. Not at a National Trust site – where talk of carving a giant bust of Vera Lynn was met with grand disdain – for the love of conservation!

Last weekend I found myself staying in the middle of a field in a tastefully converted ginormous farmhouse. Nothing for miles apart one tractor working its engine off. Tilling the land with heavy machinery. Couldn’t think of anything I had less knowledge of. I met a boy that day wearing a T-shirt with a tractor design on its front, and I couldn’t be sure, but these were my only two touchpoints to tractors. Tractors as a symbol for something like toys? Big cars? Horses? And then an actual tractor (with me watching it move slowly across the landscape) hurling piles and piles of dusty earth in its wake. 

What was it doing? I asked the Uncle of the family horde. He said it was probably churning fertiliser into the ground. Oh right, I said. From that point I couldn’t even extrapolate what happened next. Does it have to rain for the fertiliser to work? What then grows? How long does it take? Basically, what steps need to take place before the fruit/veg appear on the shelves of Tesco? I couldn’t tell you. So, experiencing the real tractor in life made me question food supply chains and reminded me of the rising cost of living. How milk now is £1.10 and I swear it was 90p quite recently. Maybe this is just London prices and milk goes up arbitrarily like the cost of pints. I wondered then whether the alt-milk movement was pushing up the price of milk as there was less demand.

I was glad that family weekend offered much free booze and many distracting conversations otherwise my city brain might not have coped. ROLO was also put in kennels for this episode, so I yearned for her whilst the others tempered my flurry of emotions and told me she was having a good time playing with other dogs. Making new dog friends. I texted the kennel owner – Ronnie and he texted back saying she was ‘very nervous’. My extended family are very kind to me.  I’ve learned from watching them and being amongst them that love knows no limits. 

My Canterbury Pilgrimage

In the summer of 2021,

I undertook a pilgrimage from London to Canterbury with three friends and a dog.

You can read my account of it here via an ArcGis Story Map: https://arcg.is/15q1CS0

There's pictures and interactive maps too. 

https://arcg.is/15q1CS0

The Kings Arms

The Kings Arms is a pub in Waterloo 

Rating: 3 paws out of 4

Arrived on a busy Wednesday night to a packed pub tucked in the damp alleyways behind Waterloo Station. You can sense there’s a rat at least five meters away from you at all times. ROLO didn’t seem to notice even though she’s a ratter, she was too busy trying not to get trodden on inside this old-time boozer.

An independent pub with an independent spirit. Lots of cask ales and bitters on tap. However, no real refreshing lagers and so, the joint loses a point. 

It was dog-friendly, in the sense that no one seemed to mind the presence of our pooches (ROLO had her mate Echo with her that night). Echo clambered on top of a pile of coats that some women had thrown down next to the bar, in the vein of nightclubs of the pre-pandemic era.

The King’s Arms carried a very English charm and swagger – you know – brass knobs and frayed curtains. There were lopsided lampshades and an old flat-screen TV propped up in the corner that wasn’t turned on. Ceiling fans rotated in ennui overhead at the post-industrial post-imperial landscape. The crowd was older, the music was quieter. There was a humdrum atmosphere to the place. It was the feeling of getting by.

Over yellowing wallpaper hung framed black and white photographs of the Waterloo area. The Cut and Southwark all getting dredged up and built over during the 1960’s. Not usually a fan of pubs with Saint George flags hanging in them, but this one also had a fair amount of St. Patrick’s Day memorabilia plastered on top of warped Victorian glass, which off-set the decor nicely.

They served good Thai food. The bar staff were calm and friendly, fondly cooing over our dogs. I left the pub with a slightly sad funny feeling, like that scene at the end of Mary Poppins (OG) where you see the pigeon lady feeding the birds, something akin to that. Thanks Windmill Taverns, will return with ROLO again!

*

Addendum: During my pub search I came across this gem of an article published in the Architectural Review on the Typology of pubs. Definitely worth a read.

The Sail Loft

For my new year’s resolution, I have decided to go to pubs in London that are dog-friendly. It’s not really a resolution and more of a fun task I’m going to tick off whenever I feel like it. However, to make it a bit more like a game with rules, I’ve made a Google map with lots of dog-friendly pubs pinpointed. When I visit a pub I like I turn the pin into a heart. If I don’t like it then the pin gets deleted. Also, I’ll try and do a little review of the pubs that I heart.

Starting with this one that I visited today in Greenwich called The Sail Loft

Rating: 4 Paws out of 4*

Definitely dog-friendly! The sweet staff asked me whether I’d like a water bowl upon entrance. I said, yes please and they whipped one out and placed it under my table for ROLO in a shot. Great dog-service.

You get a splendid view of the River Thames. There are enormous windows with lots of natural light filtering in, you can even see the spikes of the Millennium Dome (do people still call it that? The O2 sounds so boring) across the river.

The décor is very appealing. Wicker baskets hanging for the ceiling reminiscent of lobster pots. The pub is spacious with a mezzanine. Importantly – it’s not echoey, so the sound of screaming kids don’t bounce back at you harshly. They’re child-friendly as well as dog-friendly. I watched well-dressed families with prams swan through the downstairs pub with ease.

Top marks for cleanliness – I smiled at a lad spraying and wiping down tables as punters left. The bathrooms are big and have cool faucets, they’re made of re-furbished pipes and have a pressure valve handle instead of taps. 

I ordered a shandy lager and automatically it came with Peroni. Fancy. I could read a book quite comfortably in the ambience of this light and modern pub. It’s also five minutes from the Thames Clipper boat service, which takes me home. Perfect.

*because dogs have four paws. Four is the highest rating.

Potluck zine

© Rhia Cook

I have a piece of writing published in a dedicated food magazine called Potluck zine. The piece is called Our Rice Relations and you can read it here. 

This zine's issue 5 was all about ritual. How food, recipes and meals can make memories and tell stories. It was a delicious publication to be part of.

If you'd like to get a copy then you can order here. Part of the profits from each magazine sold is donated to The Trussel Trust - the UK's largest food bank organisers.

All illustrations by Rhia Cook @rhiacookmakes.

© Rhia Cook

Christmas in quarantine

Almost finished the first half of my quarantine in my hotel room with a view overlooking Yokohama Bay. Each morning I open the curtains to see a different dawn and through the day new cruise liners and ships sail into the harbour across dark blue waters. There are factory chimneys in the near distance emitting elongated plumes of smoke that look static, like a collage cut-out stuck on the sky. At night, city lights glow and glimmer over vast unfamiliar terrain looking like an alien city.

‘Please report your daily health condition’ my app says. ‘Do you or a family member living with you currently have a temperature of 37.5°C (99.5°F) of higher? Please take the temperature if you do not know it.’

‘No.’

‘Thank you for responding.’

The hotel gave us a thermometer when we arrived and each day you have to enter your temperature into an app, otherwise a person calls you and waits for you take your temperature, awkwardly hanging on the line for the bleep bleep bleep of my reading. 

Every day I get two calls through my government covid monitoring app, either from a bot or a real person. The bot simply asks you to blink and records your face for 30 seconds. Initially, I stood still for these mug shots, but now I wink and blow kisses at the bot. It doesn’t seem to mind or interfere with its work. When I got a real person, I was gazing out across Yokohama Bay at night and the caller screen was blank even though there was a woman on the other end checking on my condition. She was probably trained to study whether I “looked ill” from our one-way video call. We had a nice chat and I showed her the view outside my window and she said it was キレイですねー　(very beautiful indeed, I mean, then I was probably hindering her work). 

She asked how I was feeling, and I said I felt really sad because I was having to quarantine for the whole 14-day period because someone on my flight had omicron. I just wanted to go home and see my Obaachan whom I hadn’t seen in over two years. My blank screen caller really did sound sorry for me and made exasperated noises of concern.

‘I actually meant how do you feel physically; do you have a fever or a new cough?’

‘No.’

‘Thank you for giving me your time.’

The next real person called me on Christmas Day and when she hung up, she said a cheery ‘Merry Christmas!’ and that was quite cute.

//

I’ve had to stop my newly reset iPhone from creating “memories” with my photos because the albums were very sad. It kept cycling through limited snaps of the plane, meal boxes and the view from my window. It was like a dystopia where I'd spent my entire life in quarantine.

The meals are very good. Can’t complain about the three meals a day the hotel staff deliver and hang from my doorknob. The boxes get progressively nicer as the day goes on which is better than the reverse. I look forward to the yoghurt pot at breakfast (blueberry is the best), though not a fan of the vacuum-packed bread rolls like the ones you get on aeroplanes. Lunch and dinner you get an assortment of things, always including rice and some meat, fish and veg. The presentation is like a bento box with different compartments for different dishes, so that the flavours stay separate and clean. 

The most tragic thing about this quarantine is that there is no booze. No alcohol on the premises! Agh. Why had I brought tins of biscuits to give as gifts to the neighbours when I should have packed tinnies? You can’t have Christmas without a drink. I felt like I’d been checked into rehab. 

Hark! There was a Christmas miracle. My aunt Mariko (angel) sent me a festive selection of Asahi beers which arrived on Christmas Eve! Just in time for dinner and before a surprise display of fireworks that went off outside my window. Praise be. I had a PCR test and the results came back negative. Hallelujah. 

On Christmas Day my lunch box contained a piece of roast chicken and dinner included a slice of chocolate roulade affixed with a figurine of Santa Claus playing the trombone. The TV was showing Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence – with a storyline I couldn't fathom – but seeing David Bowie and Ryuichi Sakamoto playing side by side as massive pop stars of their era felt like a blessing. Also, that hauntingly elegant score. I had calls with family in Orkney and Aidan’s lot in Northumberland, who were all preparing feasts to be had later in the day. Bang whizz pop! Gorgeous fireworks were set off again outside my window and I had a special Christmastime indeed.