WTF Berlin E-Book

Jacinta Nandi

• Herausgeber: Satyr Verlag
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 287

Beschreibung

It's been a squillion years since Jacinta Nandi arrived in the German capital – and like Jesus, she has suffered, so you don't have to. In this collection of short texts, she'll tell you everything you need to know about stingy male "feminists", oppressive church taxes, unnecessary Anmeldungen – and how to make the perfect German Abendbrot (exhausted cucumbers are key). Why are Berlin house numbers so confusing? Why does everyone love dogs and hate babies? And do you really need to learn German to survive in this city? Join Jacinta on her expatsplaining journey through the German Hauptstadt filled with ketamine and glitter, judgy grannies and scary Beamte, and, of course, Currywurst and pain. A travel guide is nice to have – but this book is essential if you want to survive in Berlin! German Version: Survivaltipps für Berlin: Jacinta Nandi lebt seit 20 Jahren in Berlin. Satyrs erstes englischsprachiges Buch versammelt ihre Erkenntnisse über Kirchensteuer, deutsches Abendbrot, rassistische Beamte und den Geiz männlicher Feministen. – Dieses Buch ist der unverzichtbare humoristische Überlebensratgeber für alle Expats und Berlin-Besucher*innen.

Leseprobe

Jacinta Nandi

WTFBERLIN

EXPATSPLAINING THE GERMAN CAPITAL

JACINTA NANDIwas born 1980 in east London and moved to Berlin aged 20. She writes in German and English and has published four books in German, most recently “Die schlechteste Hausfrau der Welt” (Edition Nautilus). She writes and blogs for “Exberliner”, Berlin’s Englishlanguage magazine. She is the mother of two boys and lives with them in sleepy Lichtenrade.

E-Book-Ausgabe Mai 2022

© Satyr Verlag Volker Surmann, Berlin 2022

www.satyr-verlag.de

Cover: Jussi Jääskeläinen | www.kobaia-design.com

Lektorat: Phil Butland, Volker Surmann

Korrektorat: Ruby Russell

Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet abrufbar über: http://dnb.d-nb.de

Die Marke »Satyr Verlag« ist eingetragen auf den Verlagsgründer Peter Maassen.

E-Book-ISBN: 978-3-947106-83-7

Content

Introduction: Learn German or Die Trying

Chapter One: A is for …

Abendbrot

Abtreibung

Annie-Way

Anmeldung

Chapter Two: B is for …

Bäckerei versus Backshop

Begrüßen

Birne

Chapter Three: C is for …

Cringe

Corona

Chapter Four: D is for …

Der, die das

Daten

Denglisch

Dosen

Chapter Five: E is for

Erziehung

Einladen

Chapter Six: F is for …

Fernsehenturm

Ficktermin

Chapter Seven: G is for …

Gendern

Chapter Eight: H is for …

Handy

Hartz IV

Hund

Chapter Nine: I is for …

Impfen

Indianer

Integration

Chapter Ten: J is for …

Jugendamt

Chapter Eleven: K is for …

Kaltmiete

Kartoffel

Kirchensteuer

Kita

Koch

Kopftuch

Kur

Chapter Twelve: L is for …

Latzhose

Chapter Thirteen: M is for …

Migrationshintergrundler

Mülltrennung

Chapter Fourteen: N is for …

Nikolaus

Nummer

Chapter Fifteen: O is for …

Opfer

Chapter Sixteen: P is for …

Patriotismus

Partys

Chapter Seventeen: Q is for …

Queen

Quer

Chapter Eighteen: R is for …

Romantik

Chapter Nineteen: S is for …

Schwarztee

Shoppen versus Einkaufen

Silvester

Späti

Spielplatz

Steile These

Bonus Chapter: ß is for …

S-Zett

Chapter Twenty: T is for …

Theater

Toastbrot

Chapter Twenty-One: U is for …

Umlaut

Unzuverlässig

Chapter Twenty-Two: V is for …

Verwandte

Chapter Twenty-Three: W is for …

Wachsen

Westdeutschland

Wiebke

Chapter Twenty-Four: X is for …

XL

Chapter Twenty-Five: Y is for …

You: Du, Ihr or Sie

Chapter Twenty-Six: Z is for …

Zecke

Zug

Epilogue:Why You Should Learn German and Some Tips on How to

Glossary

Introduction: Learn German or Die Trying

My friend Tanja and I are out in Neukölln, eating dinner with an American friend of hers who has a PhD from a renowned American university. We know he has a PhD because he mentions this fact every 7.4 seconds, and we know the uni he went to is well-renowned because he mentions that fact every 23.5 seconds. Approximately. Tanya and I both went to bog-standard comprehensives and then studied German at non-renowned British universities. Modern languages are taught at such a basic level in Britain that I sometimes feel my Bachelor’s degree is almost of as much value as a Seepferdchen certificate.

“I like your girlfriend, Paul,” I tell him. He has a younger Polish girlfriend who is funnier and sexier than him. At the very least he should be aware, right?

“Yeah?” he says.

“Yeah,” I say. “She’s great, articulate, smart …”

“She’s not that articulate,” he says. “Her English isn’t that great, to be honest. My cousin was over from the States the other week and he said he couldn’t understand everything she was saying.” I take a breath. “I wouldn’t know,” I say icily. “I speak to her in German.”

Maybe I am too petty for words, but I sit there fuming. The arrogance of English speakers in general – and Americans in particular! It drives me mad! Shortly afterwards the waitress arrives and Paul, of course, orders in English. Why wouldn’t he? We’re in Neukölln, after all.

“How long have you lived here, Paul?” I ask him innocently.

“Seven years,” he says.

“Maybe in another seven you’ll be able to order your drinks in German,” I say.

“Oh, I could order in German if I wanted to,” he answers. “It’s just easier to be understood in English.”

Look, I get it. You couldn’t have much more German-speaking privilege than me: eleven years old when I started learning the language (Und wie geht’s Ihnen, Frau Singh?), twelve when I visited Limburg for the first time (I saw Pretty Woman dubbed into German and understood everything because I knew it off by heart), and twenty when I moved here.

“Are you going to pack your Oxford Duden dictionary?” my mum asked worriedly.

“Mum, I’m practically fluent!” I yelled confidently. Then I arrived here and tried to order a Currywurst – “Ich spreche kein Englisch!” the guy screamed in my face. I was crestfallen – that wasn’t English but practically fluent German, right? What was wrong with him? At Warschauer Straße I bought a Motz off a homeless guy and he wished me a nice day like an American. “Even the homeless speak English,” I whispered to myself forlornly as I suddenly realised that I wasn’t brilliant at German. I wasn’t even that good at it – I could just speak a tiny, basic bit of it. (Entschuldigung, Frau Singh!) So, I’m not about to judge anyone for not being able to speak this horrifically difficult language. And I know how judgy Germans can be: after twenty years here I basically am fluent – but because of my non-white appearance and terrible accent, there’s a certain type of German (racist) who doesn’t even notice.

But not being able to speak German isn’t, in my eyes, something to be smug about. It makes life harder – sometimes it can even be dangerous. I remember after giving birth in 2004 in Urban Krankenhaus. It was the first time I had to pee after having my catheter out, and it felt like I was being sliced open by a blade.

“Mein Pinkel, mein Pinkel!” I called.

“What’s wrong, what’s wrong?” gasped the nurses.

“Mein Pinkel ist ein Messer!” I announced as they burst out laughing.

“Wir wissen genau, was Sie meinen,” they said, and reassured me it was normal.

But the last time I went to my family doctor in Neukölln, the doctor got me to speak to the receptionist, showing me off like I was a dog who’d learnt to curtsey or do a Hitlergruß.

“Listen to this,” the doctor said. “It’s amazing. She can say anything she wants to. She’s talking in full sentences,” he went on.

“I’ve been here twenty years,” I protested weakly.

I think it’s okay to live here for twenty years and still not know your adjectival endings – in fact I think it’s a bit unsolidarisch with people who work in Dönerläden to get too good at German grammar. And I think it’s absolutely okay to watch all your Netflix shows in English. I also think it’s okay to become demotivated and lazy when speaking to those German friends whose English is practically perfect and who, let’s face it, just want to use you as a free English teacher (hello, Cornelius!).

But it’s not okay to judge non-native speakers whose English isn’t perfect when you’ve been living in the country for seven years and still can’t order yourself a fucking Orangensaft. Come on, man. And now that everyone’s streaming all their favourite shows in English, you’re not going to teach yourself German through daytime TV or by watching the same episode of Friends dubbed into German one million times. The only thing you can do is get yourself back to school – and I don’t mean an Ivy League one. The Volkshochschule will do.

Chapter One:A is for …

Abendbrot: Abend means evening and Brot means bread, but if you put them together and look up the word Abendbrot in the dictionary, you might get a bit confused. They’ll try to tell you it’s dinner – or supper. But in British English, at least, it’s more like tea – AbendESSEN is dinner whereas AbendBROT is a light evening meal, normally cold, made up of bread and cheese and salami.

And when I say light, I really mean LIGHT. There are anorexic fruit flies heavier than German Abendbrot. It is, quite literally, the Perfect German Housewife’s best kept secret.

Abendbrot: The German Housewife’s Best-Kept Secret

I am a bad housewife in more ways than I can count: I hate hoovering, I can’t mop, I don’t even know how to iron. When I iron something it looks more creased afterwards and has these funny black marks which I don’t think are supposed to be there. I once stacked the dishwasher so badly that my ex-boyfriend cried actual tears of actual frustration and true grief. And I think if Marie Kondo watched me folding laundry it would possibly break her.

But when it comes to German Abendbrot, I am the Perfect German Housewife. I have that shit down.

So, I’m babysitting my lovely friend Florence’s kid when my equally lovely little friend Lola comes over. Lockdown has been lifted, but I still want her to sit on the balcony. I know she’s been partying loads. Lola is so tiny and perfect – I swear, she is the only person on the planet who actually lost weight over lockdown – and now she looks so perfect and petite and tiny, like a tiny miniature porcelain chimney sweep.

“They change the rules every day,” she says mournfully, placing two bottles of Sekt on the table. “It’s cold on your balcony, let’s just open the balcony doors, then your kitchen is kind of part of the balcony. Oh, I am so confused about the Corona stuff. Are you confused? It’s so confusing!”

“It is confusing, isn’t it,” I say.

“It’s exhausting and confusing!” she says. “I don’t even know what is allowed or not anymore! Are we allowed to shake strangers’ hands? Have sex with our old pre-Corona fuck buddies? Smoke crack together if we disinfect the pipe first? What about ketamine? Is ketamine illegal now?”

“I think, even in non-Corona times, ketamine is not strictly speaking legal. But yeah, it’s all so confusing! I think they need to make up some simple rules and let us know what they are and then we can stick to them. I’m not even sure if I should have let you come over when I’m babysitting. Listen, I’m gonna make the kids some Abendbrot, you open the Sekt, okay?”

Abendbrot is probably the greatest trick the Perfect German Housewife ever played on German men/ausländische women, I think, as I get the kids’ tea ready. That is, I place two slices of grey bread, one slice of cheese and one slice of salami on the plate. Lola looks over my shoulder.

“Has that kid you’re babysitting’s mum fucked your ex-boyfriend or something?” she asks, looking at the plate of food I have prepared.

“What?” I say.

“You obviously really hate this woman? You’re giving her kid the cheapest, stingiest, most miserable excuse for dinner known to man.”

I look at Lola in surprise.

“Lola!” I say. “This is Abendbrot! This is German Abendbrot! This is good, normal, German Abendbrot. This is how you German.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake, you are so mean about the Germans sometimes.”

“No, honestly, this is what German kids get for dinner.”

“This is what people in the Bastille got for dinner, more like! At the very fucking least put the two slices of bread on top of each other and call it a fucking sandwich.”

“Lola, I am a perfect German housewife, and I would never do anything as outrageously and horrifically un-German as give my kids a sandwich for dinner. Well … not when we have guests over.”

Yep, Abendbrot is probably the greatest trick the Perfect German Housewife ever played on German men/ausländische women. If you grab a slice of bread, but actually go to the trouble of chopping up an onion, frying some bacon, getting some turkey ham involved. Or even smearing said bread with something vaguely healthy and interesting like hummus or peanut butter. YOU SLUT YOU LAZY SLUT YOU DISGUSTING WHORE YOU FUCKING … AUSLÄNDERIN.

The brilliance of Abendbrot is, the less effort you put in, the more German and perfect it becomes.

Now, for example, in my home country, England, a country famously famous for being bad at cooking, we think the mums who make easy dinners – bangers and mash, say, or beans on toast – we think THEY are the lazy housewives! Whereas the women who actually make complicated, tasty, delicious meals like lasagne or quiche are the good mothers – and proper housewives.

But Germany is like opposite world and everyone (except Lola) knows that the Perfect German Housewife makes a perfect Abendbrot: two slices of bread, two slices of tired, slightly wilted cucumber (you should try to buy your cucumbers at the supermarket already on the verge of exhaustion to get the real Abendbrot feeling), one slice of cheese, one slice of salami.

One thing I’d like to see: a Nigella Lawson German Abendbrot reaction video. Or how about if we forced Nigella Lawson to make a German Abendbrot herself? I think this would be literally torture for her. I reckon at the last moment she’d go crazy and start smearing the bread with organic goose fat, smashing up avocados and throwing smarties at all the kids.

Abtreibung:So, Treiben is a super weird German word. It means something like drive, but not in a car, right. The drive in what’s driving you. But sometimes it just means do. The complicated thing is when you übertreiben, you’re overdoing things, but you might be exaggerating – when you untertreiben, you’re kind of playing things down – and when you abtreiben, you’re having an abortion. It sounds really dark and cruel, like you can imagine DDR doctors using old-fashioned knives and stuff.

A kind of euphemism for abortion is Abbruch. The way I always think of it is: abortion is Abtreibung and Abbruch is termination.

Abortions are hugely taboo in Germany, even in Berlin – slightly less taboo in East Germany and East Berlin than in the West, but still super taboo. The thing is, Germans, like the perverted weirdo weird perverts that they are, don’t actually look down on women who have abortions because they think they are sluts or that sex is dirty and disgusting and shameful and stuff. Germans actually just seem to think sex is this thing you do sometimes, kind of by accident. But the thought of a woman being enough of a disorganised hot mess to forget to take a pill at the exact same time each day horrifies them.

Don’t forget that abortions are actually officially illegal in Germany, and it’s only just been made legal to “advertise” – i.e. inform people – of the fact that you carry out abortions if you are a gynaecologist.

Now, while it’s true that they don’t actually prosecute women who have an abortion before the twelfth week (which I find a super early date to decide by, by the way) it being officially a crime means that it is really hard to get one, or talk about it openly.

We spend a lot of time in Germany worrying about how fucked-up other countries are, and sometimes it means we don’t notice the ways in which Germany is a fucked-up place to live. The abortion stuff is super fucked-up over here. White German men assume it’s easy to get one, but they don’t want to hear any details.

Abortion, Abortion!

I’m super pregnant and at a new gynaecologist on the Schönhauser Allee. People make jokes about how you can’t be a “little bit” pregnant, but it’s not true, huh? Loads of people who get a faint line on their pregnancy test end up miscarrying. And I, right now, here, right now, I AM A LOT PREGNANT.

I look like a whale. I feel like a hippo. People treat me like a walrus. I waddle around like a penguin.

My ankles are swollen up like soft, fleshy balloons. I feel like my bones have melted inside me.

In the form the lady has given me I have to tick which pregnancy this is. This is my third pregnancy. I had two abortions before I came to Germany. I feel like lying on the form, but I worry the doctor will be able to somehow “tell” – possibly by looking at my AOK medical records, and, slightly less possibly, but even more horrifically, by looking at my vagina? So I tick third on the box, hand my forms in and go back to my seat in the waiting room. The waiting room is full of pregnant women, expectant mothers. There’s pink carpet, beige walls, and sepia pictures of mums breastfeeding their babies everywhere. It’s expectant mummy hour at the gyno.

The doctor’s receptionist comes into the waiting room and says to me, loudly and clearly: “These two pregnancies here, how did they end?”

“Pardon?” I say.

“Did your two previous pregnancies end in miscarriage, abortion or birth?” she asks.

“Abortion,” I whisper through the side of my mouth.

She shouts loudly: “TWO ABORTIONS!” Zwei Abbrüche!

I nod.

The receptionist leaves the waiting room, and it’s just me, fat like a whale, a load of pregnant German women, and the sepia pictures. I start studying Bild der Frau like I’m really into it. Maybe I should change my name to Jacinta Two Abortions Nandi, I think. It has a nice ring to it.

Annie-Way: Annie-Way is the way Germans in the early 2000s (the Nullerjahre, as they would put it) pronounced anyway. As with almost all the best Denglisch terms, the way they used it was slightly, ever-so-slightly, wrong.

Denglish is Like Bindweed

Denglisch – I personally think the most annoying thing about Denglisch is not the way it crowds out and destroys Proper German like some kind of disgustingly destructively violently vandalistic Unkraut (Denglisch is like the grey, violent, American-style “squirrels” which invaded Britain after World War II and Proper German is like the sweet, innocent, totally cute, actually-look-like-squirrels-and not-bastard-rats-with-fluffy-tails-type squirrels which died out in Britain, but still, gorgeously, live here. Every time I see a cute orange squirrel I say to my son, darkly, all the squirrels I grew up with were ugly, I only saw this kind in books, look how cute it is.) Denglisch starves Proper German out. I once sat in Tropical Islands for two hours, trying desperately to remember what the Proper German for lifeguard was. In the end, I went to my locker, took out my phone, and googled it. (It’s Bademeister, or Rettungsschwimmer, by the way.) I once asked everyone in a hotel in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern what they said for einchecken and auschecken in the DDR. Honestly, the Denglisch terms take up the space in your brain where the Proper German should go, that was some serious Mandela Effect shit, yeah, like as if the aliens had been wiping everyone’s memories most effectively. A lot of people said, 100 per cent certain, “It was always ein- and auschecken!” But some people whispered vaguely: “I … don’t … know. It couldn’t have been auschecken … could it? Could it? What did we used to say? We must have said something … I think I knew it once.”

DENGLISCH literally KILLING the Proper German in your head is very, very, very annoying – but it’s not the most annoying thing.

The most annoying thing about Denglisch is, without a doubt, when Germans throw a Denglisch word into a German sentence for no reason whatsoever – and you have no idea if they are doing it especially for you because they know you are a native speaker, or if this is A New Thing People Say.

There’s a poetry slammer organiser who always says to me: “Du bist so charming auf der Bühne!” – have checked with others, this is just for me. It’s not A Thing. But how the fuck are you meant to know? “Das ist ja irgendwie doch super niiiiiiice!” THIS IS A THING. “I know, I know,” inexplicably plonked into the sentence: THIS IS ALSO A THING.

And Annie-Way? This isn’t, and don’t ask me why, a thing anymore. But it was for ages – right up until, like 2009, I’d say – and it was really fucking annoying. In the middle of a sentence, for no reason whatsofuckingever, out of nowhere, “Annie-way!”

Anmeldung: Anmeldung means registration, and Abmeldung means deregistration. But Germans register for things more than English speakers do – you have to register with the library, register at the gym, register at the nursery. And they definitely deregister more. I feel like in other countries you can just stop doing something, and then it’s over, but in Germany you always have to abmelden. But one of the weirdest things about Germany is undoubtedly that everyone in the entire country has to anmelden with the government – and nobody seems to mind!

Achtung, Achtung, Anmeldung, Anmeldung!

Germans love privacy and stuff, but weirdly don’t mind the government having a huge database of where everyone in the country lives.

“Are you still sleeping with that old boy? The one who didn’t know that Wales wasn’t part of England?” I ask my tiny friend Lola, who can sometimes have really bad taste in men, especially old men.

“Of course not!” she says, outraged. “I’ve been socially distancing! I’m only having casual sex with people I actually like!”

I nod.

It’s the first time I’ve seen her since the half-hearted German lockdown ended. We’re sitting by the Paul-Linke-Ufer and not sharing two separate bottles of cider. I keep thinking I see Prof. Dr. Christian Drosten walk past, so I smile. But it’s just a vaguely sexy, fairly sad German guy walking with a bike. I have to admit, it’s great to be out. I always thought I was a hermit, but after six weeks stuck inside, I actually truly enjoy going out again.

It’s a great feeling.

The constant, slight boredom – a constant, slight panic I wasn’t having fun and would rather be at home on Facebook – has disappeared. I now know I do want to go out sometimes.

“He really is old,” she says. “He’s an old man. He smells old. He feels old. He feels wrinkly. His waist seems like it has arthritis.”

“I was surprised by how old he was,” I say, diplomatically.

“You know how you notice how old he is?” she says. “He still says polizeiliche Anmeldung. Have you ever noticed that? Old people are always saying polizeiliche Anmeldung?”

“What?” I say.

“You never noticed? Old people think it’s called polizeiliche Anmeldung. I guess in the olden days – like in the sixties and stuff – you had to go and anmelden at the police station? You never noticed?”

I stare at Lola, horrified. I had, in fact, not noticed that. I had very much not noticed that. And I’ll tell you something else I hadn’t noticed. I had not noticed that young people don’t call it a polizeiliche Anmeldung anymore.

And I will tell you another thing I hadn’t noticed: that I am an old person now, my skin wrinkled, my vagina crumpled and crinkly like the pages of an old, dusty bible. My body is so old and ancient that when Germany’s top euthanasia-ist talks about letting old fogies die of Corona to reduce overpopulation, it is, basically, me she is talking about. I am old now and death is, quite literally, just around the corner.

I have been anmelding in Germany for twenty years. When I arrived, I was petrified of the idea. I thought it was, basically, Stasi as fuck. The police had a big database with the name and address of everyone in the fucking country? What? I channelled Kafka, registered myself and felt scared and petrified and horrified the whole time I was doing it.

I’ve got used to it now, though. This is what twenty years in Germany has done to me. I now often forget that you don’t need to register with the authorities in Britain. To be honest, a part of me, a tiny part of me, still thinks it’s weird and oppressive. Why are we slagging China or North Korea off? But 95 per cent of me thinks it’s pretty practical and useful. During that awful year after the Brexit referendum, when Polish teenagers were being asked to submit twenty years of electricity bills with their names on them or leave the country immediately, it seemed to me that the only possible solution would be to implement some kind of Anmeldung system. If you are going to be Stasi as fuck, at least do it right.

But what about all the white Germans who think the Corona app is creepy? Or that Impfpflicht is somehow a terrible human rights abuse? Or those weirdos who think it’s child abuse to put picture of your kid blowing out their birthday cake candles on Instagram? I don’t get it. If I was 100 per cent on board with Anmeldung – with being literally legally required to tell the fucking government where I lived – I wouldn’t care about my privacy in any other way. But I guess, despite twenty years here, I’ll never really be German.

Chapter Two:B is for …

Bäckerei versus Backshop: Bäckerei is the German word for bakery, and it says something about British bakers that the first time I went to a Bäckerei in Germany, the German guy I was with told me that they didn’t even bake the bread on the premises – and I thought for the first time in my life “Oh yeah, the word bakery must come from baking!”

Backshops are cheapo Berlin-style bakers. I love them. German people in Berlin are always complaining that real bakeries are dying out and you can’t get good bread anywhere and stuff like that. And I feel for them, I really do – but not enough to go to a real bakery.

Baking My Way Through Lockdown One

This is the kind of mother I would have liked to have been during the lockdown: calm, conscientious, relaxed, loving – and good at baking. Yes, good at baking – but not in a smug, smarmy sort of way, oh no. I wish I was good at baking in a sloppy, vegan, witchy, almost-but-not-quite lesbian kind of way. This is the kind of person, the kind of mother, I would like to have been.

The kind of mums who are good at baking in a smug way are sensible, practical people – good at baking, good at homeschooling, too. They baked scones, muffins, brownies, things like that. The kind of witchy women I admire fucked the homeschooling in the mouth with a broomstick and made weird, vegan stuff – Indian scones or zucchini muffins or gluten-free, 100 per cent kakao brownies. I despise people who bake in a middle-class, show-offy kind of a way, and want to be like people who bake weird vegan stuff. Oh, and sourdough bread! I think I admire people who bake sourdough bread. I don’t know what it is and can’t be bothered to google, but I think if I knew what it was, I would want to bake some. A lot.

But this is the kind of mother I am, and this is how I bake during the Half-hearted German Lockdown: I scroll recipes on my phone for inspiration, recipes for scones, muffins and brownies. I look at the list of ingredients, and then half-heartedly scour my Corona-Hamster-Schrank for flour and baking powder. I don’t bother weighing anything, and decide to use Traubenzucker instead of Feinzucker, and tell myself that if the thing we’re baking comes out more like chocolate scones, we’ll call them chocolate scones – that’s a thing, right? – and if they come out more like muffins, we’ll call them muffins, and nobody will be any the wiser.

“Maybe,” I say to Baby Leo, my assistant baker, “we will have invented a new type of chocolate goodie, the scuffin.”

“Wow!” he says wisely, and then runs to the kitchen wall and presses a chocolate hand against the whiteness, and makes a perfect handprint. My heart sinks when I see this and I look at the goo we have created, and remember baking powder.

“I forgot to put baking powder in!” I say to Baby Leo.

“Wow!” he says.

“No, it’s bad,” I say. “It’s bad Mummy forgot.”

“Oh no!” he whispers. “Oh dear!” I think he might be a TV presenter when he grows up, there’s this gorgeous simplicity to his emotions which reminds me, kind of, of Holly Willoughby or the lady who’s always on with Piers Morgan.

We put the chocolate blobs on a tin and push it in the oven.

“Wow!” Baby Leo says magnificently. I wash his hands clean and try to remove the choccie hand stain from the perfect white wall. I take him out onto the balcony.

Baby Leo starts playing dinosaurs and I scroll Facebook, feeling guilty for even having a balcony in the first place.

I watch a boy I know gingerly removing the crime scene tape the landlords put over the slide in our courtyard playground and have a sneaky, slide down. I don’t blame the kids for sneaking onto the playground equipment, I don’t blame parents for struggling. But it makes me mad that we could all bear to not go to playground when it was cold – but we can’t avoid the playground for a few months to save people’s lives?

The timer on my phone goes off.

“I think our muffins are ready,” I say to Baby Leo. “Or scones. We’ll see what they most look like. Maybe scuffins. Maybe we’ll have invented a new type of food. Maybe I’ll get rich. And we can move to Potsdam!”

I pull the tray out of the oven and the scuffins I have baked are pretty much inedible. Maybe I should tell everyone they’re rock cakes, I say to myself. No, even if chocolate rock cakes were a thing, these are disgusting.

Baby Leo bites into one and announces, cheerfully: “AUWA!”

“They’re not very yummy, are they?” I say.

“Cookies. Is. Nicht. Yummy. Cookies. Is. Auwa. Meine. Mouth.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” I say. I’ll wait for them to cool down and throw them on the compost heap, I think. And then we’ll put a bit of telly on. This lockdown. It won’t last forever.

Begrüßen: Begrüßen means greeting each other, and it’s a much more serious affair over here than in the UK, at least. You also have to, if you’re on the phone to someone you know, send them ganz doll schöne Grüße. This is much nicer than just telling them you said hi, but isn’t QUITE as nice as giving them your love. I feel like maybe in the olden days British people greeted each other like Germans do – but nowadays it’s all giving love or saying hello – or maybe even saying nothing at all!

Important German Greetings Etiquette: Greet Each Other in the Coldest Voice Imaginable, and Then Say Absolutely Nothing to Each Other Ever Again as Long as You Both Shall Live

Have you guys noticed how, whenever you enter a German doctor’s waiting room, you have to say “Guten Tag!” to everyone in the unfriendliest, coldest voice ever, do a small clicky nod of your chin, keep your mouth shut tight like they are your mortal enemies, avoid eye contact, and then sit down in ABSOLUTE SILENCE?

This is known in Germany as Grüßen – greeting people – and apparently it’s a very, very, very, very important tradition. “Guten Tag!” Bark it out like as if you’re a Kontrolleur on the U8 on a Saturday night. Avoid eye contact. You don’t want any actual contact with these people. Make sure, whatever you do, you don’t smile. DO NOT SMILE. Please, please, please for the love of God, don’t smile. And then sit down in ABSOLUTE silence. Grüßen has nothing to do with actually wanting to speak to people or smile at them or spark up conversation or be friendly with them in any way. It’s just this inexplicable thing you do, which inexplicably, is incredibly important.

When my first son was little, another mum at the nursery came up to me and said: “Can I ask you a question?” I don’t want to poke fun at her for doing this, it was obvious to me that something was really bothering her, that this conversation was really important to her, that this was something that had laid heavy on her heart.

“Yeah!” I said.

“Why don’t you greet me?” she asked, flushing. “Have I offended you in some way?”

I stared at her. It was the first time in my life that I realised, that in some ways, English speakers can seem rude to Germans. It was a kind of epiphany moment, I guess. I almost felt guilty, and I definitely felt kind of touched that she had confronted me for this perceived slight.

“Erm?” I said, as politely as possible. “Because I don’t know you?”

She gulped at that, and I really did feel guilty for a moment.

“I think if our kids attend the same nursery, the least we can do is say hello to each other in the cloakroom!”

“Okay,” I said. And from that day on, I’ve been grüßing like a fucking pro.

I only got in trouble one other time for it, years and years later, at a kind of like BnB/cheapo hotel in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (Pomerania? Lol). A kind of scary-looking white guy, not scary-looking enough to be an actual Nazi, but still a tough guy, barked at me at breakfast:

“In Germany we greet each other at breakfast!”

“Not in hotels?” I exclaimed back. “Das wäre echt übertrieben!”

I have lived here, as I always annoyingly say, for one million, zillion, SQUILLION years but to be honest I’ve never really understood the whole Grüßen thing. Why do we greet each other at the doctor’s, but not in the tram? Why do we greet each other and then sit there in silence? What’s the point? Why do we greet each other but not smile and joke like we’re glad to be alive? People in England will not greet each other for hours or days or weeks or months before anyone gets offended – but once you do greet each other you have this weird crazy totally strange thing called AN ACTUAL CONVERSATION afterwards.