What a tonic it is to have a spell of decent weather.  It has stayed fine for the six days since we got home, and the grass is at last dry enough to walk on and to cut properly: it looks better than it is, actually: it is full of lumps and dips.  Martyn has put in several strenuous hours of weeding and edging, to which I've contributed a little, mainly with the lawn mower.  Between us, we've got it looking something approaching presentable.

I plan to plant out a few more seedlings today.  The few aquilegias I planted last year from a packet of bought seed are starting to flower with big, long-spurred blooms.  I hope they'll be as vigorous as their less spectacular neighbours.  We shall be very short of rudbeckias this year - germination from saved seed has been poor or non-existent, and the snails have been at them in the cold frame.  Cosmos seeds have done well, and a half-dozen are already planted out.  Dwarf nicotiana (bought) and antirrhinum (saved) also look promising. The orange oriental poppies started to show colour for the first time yesterday, so we're looking forward to seeing them in bloom.  I have potted up a handful of the seedlings of Immy and Jonathan's crimson one, and hope they'll come true to colour.

The art group met here for a change yesterday, since we had a project to debrief.  My colleagues and I were given the very broad topic of flowers, and the range of output was impressive.  We next bend our

minds to the latest topic - bird's eye view.  I have a 'here's one I prepared earlier' on the wall - the view of Lake Geneva from the Rochers de Naye, but suppose I'd better knock out something new.  Unusually, the female mallard (Doris Duck...) was here on her own yesterday.  She came crashing noisily in while the art crowd was here, much to their delight.  She was unusually vocal, calling for her mate (Arthur Mallard...), who systematically ignored her for five hours.  Later in the afternoon he started returning her calls, and soon afterwards came thumping in.  Their take-offs are short and powerful, but their landings are awful!  They stayed quite a while, and have been back for half an hour this morning.  Must take a stroll up to the pond to see whether that's where they spend the rest of the time.

Since Martyn first spotted Miniatur Wunderland on YouTube, we’ve been promising ourselves a trip to go and see it. It is an enormous model layout in Hamburg’s Warehouse City, largely dedicated to railways, but with aviation and shipping sections as well. He subsequently found that there’s a similar one in Berlin, a city I have been wanting to visit since a couple of quick trips during my short spell in Munich. 

So, after a bit of surfing for reasonably priced flights and a lot more to find places to stay and eat and things to see and do, we set off on Tuesday at an unspeakably early hour. We’d thought we’d be on one of the last few hundred flights into Schönefeld, since it was scheduled to close on 3 June to make way for the adjacent new airport, which uses the remaining Schönefeld runway, but not the DDR-era airport buildings. The current scandal is that the opening has had to be delayed by some 10 months because of safety concerns. The project management company has been sacked, as has the planning director. (Quite a week for sackings: Chancellor Merkel has sacked her campaign manager following a serious drubbing for the CDU-CSU alliance in the regional elections in Nordrhein-Westfalen. Her hold on power suddenly looks a bit shaky, particularly when sentiment, following French and Greek elections, seems to be moving from austerity to a more Keynesian approach.)

We were at the reception office for our apartment in Berlin soon after 10:30, having driven to Gatwick, done the flight, queued for our 3-day passes at Schönefeld, ambled into the Hauptbahnhof on a leisurely regional train and caught the one-train shuttle line from the Hbf to the Brandenburger Tor. It was just a few minutes’ walk to the flats, where to our great relief, our flat was ready, even though check-in is from 15:00 onwards: the reception staff were friendly and helpful, and highly indulgent of my shaky German: bad marks go to those who sigh deeply and shift to English: good marks here. To my surprise, it wasn’t just the block where the office is, but a whole stretch of apartment buildings snaking its way down two blocks of the Wilhelmstrasse, part long-term and part short-term lets, or so it appeared. Our flat was a pleasant surprise. I’d seen a few photographs taken by short-term tenants, and it all looked OK but basic: old-fashioned kitchens with cast iron hotplate cookers. Well, ours was spacious, modern and well equipped: the pots, pans, crockery and linen were old friends from IKEA. Oddly, for a city centre development, there was a big car park to the west of the blocks. An explanation emerged only after we got home– see later.

There was a supermarket nearby where we stocked up on essentials – and where I was nearly separated from my Visa debit card. While fumbling with the back pack and the wallet, I must have dropped my card. A helpful assistant caught us at the bakers, enquiring ‘sind Sie der Herr David Smith?’. ‘Der bin ich’, and he handed me the card. Phew. We sat back for an hour or so in our luxurious surroundings before venturing out again. One of the best free sightseeing tours of Berlin is the N°200 service bus, which also takes one to the Embassy of the Nordic countries, where the canteen is open to the public outside the hours of 11:30 to 13:00. We had a simple, wholesome lunch for €5 per man, then hopped back on the bus to Alexanderplatz, since it’s near there that one finds the Berlin model railway thing, Loxx. It’s stuck on the top of a big shopping mall, so were it not for the S-Bahn and ICE trains passing by outside, one might be anywhere in the world. The layout is pretty extensive, and Martyn was wondering how they got to the trains when they went wrong. Soon to be answered when a section of landscape popped up, followed by the head and shoulders of an employee who proceeded to sort out some misbehaving trains, popping up again a bit later from another trap. Impressive stuff. Good detail, nice reproductions of some of the Berlin stations such as Friedrichstrasse, which figures so prominently in the history of the divided Berlin. In view of the early start (we were up at 03:30), we decided to eat in the apartment and have an early night.

Much of the fascination of Berlin for me is the history of the four-power occupation of the city that lasted from before I was born until I was 40, punctuated with the airlift and the seclusion of West Berlin after the DDR found that its best talents were haemorrhaging to the west. So it was a pain to get to the Allies Museum to find that it closes on Wednesdays. Well it’s an ill wind: we wanted to go to the nearby Potsdam anyway, and on getting the bus back to the station in Zehlendorf, I spotted a Vodafone shop, where the boss didn’t mind giving me a driving lesson on my new phone – I hadn’t managed to work out how to get connected to the internet. (I think one answer is ‘ruinously’, but at least I could deal with a couple of urgent emails while I was out and about.)

Potsdam is a delight, before sampling which we took the tram up to the Glienicker Brücke, famous for its exchanges of spies during the cold war. We did the walk walked by Gary Powers, sometime U2 pilot, and Greville Wynne, dapper Humber Super Snipe driving import-export broker (spy to you and me) and numerous other denizens of the world’s second-oldest profession. It was suitably grey and threatening rain when we were there, which added to the atmosphere. Having crossed the bridge from the old East Germany into the outer limits of Berlin, we looked for a bus back to Potsdam. In a curious hangover from the cold war, the Potsdam tram stops on the old DDR side of the bridge, and the bus from Spandau (in the old British sector) loops round and heads back without crossing. There is a night bus that actually crosses the bridge, but no day-time service. The earlier Glienicke bridge was destroyed during the war, and replaced in 1949 by the DDR with the ironically named Unity Bridge, which came to symbolize the obsessive separation of the two German nations.

Glienicker Brücke

When the tram back into Potsdam was invaded by noisy primary school kids, we decamped and walked the rest of the way into town, striding the length of the Brandenburger Strasse to the gate of that name (not to be confused with the one at the top of Unter den Linden). Lunch in Café Babette, of a curious Norsky/Helvetic dish of gravad lax with rösti. Tasty and copious, and not a good idea given the evening’s dinner plans. We did the circuit of the Sanssouci park by tram, buses and hind legs, and liked it. We’re neither of us great visitors of stately homes, and in any case much of the infrastructure now houses the University of Potsdam. We hacked back home on S- and U-Bahn trains (the main line service is suspended at the moment for great works on the infrastucture). Mental note: do not change from the S-Bahn to the U-Bahn at the Zoo station – it’s complex and confusing, and not a good idea when you’re already getting footsore.

Footsore and altogether, we walked from the flat to the site of Checkpoint Charlie, and thence to the Hallescher Tor to get the train out to Neukölln for dinner. Martyn being a great fan of the Wiener Schnitzel, a place I’d found on the web seemed appropriate. Café Louis in the Richardplatz prides itself on serving the capital’s biggest schnitzels. Gawd. They’re the size of tennis racquets. We ploughed through about a third of a hyper-schnitzel per man, whereupon tin foil and carrier bags arrived unbidden. We’ll restrict ourselves to the small serving next time – someone at the next table who’d ordered one such also left with tin foil and plastic bag accessories.

Berlin's biggest schnitzels

On Thursday we started with a walk up to the Reichstag. But not before a visit to the monument to the homosexual victims of the Nazi regime. Standing across the road from the whole-block monument to the murdered jews of Europe, it is a restrained and stark monument, reminding the world that the persecution and mass murder of homosexuals was not acknowledged in Germany until many decades after the events. It is understandable that such a group should be overshadowed by the holocaust, and it’s also right that it should be commemorated in such a restrained and dignified way. It was vandalised soon after it was built in 2008, but has been repaired. But we got a disapproving look from a tall, blond-haired runner as we left the monument.

Monument to homosexuals murdered by the Nazis

The Reichstag tour is a must. Norman Foster has worked wonders to restore the dignity of the old shell of the Reichstag and turn it into a building suitable for the federal parliament. We saw the debating chamber from the lobby, from the visitors’ gallery, from the upper floors and from the roof, and heard all about the technology involved in heating and ventilating the chamber. Our guide was a superficially austere but dryly witty fellow, and we learned vast amounts not only about the building and its history, but also about the electoral system and the current preoccupations of Bundeskanzlerin Merkel (aka ‘Mutti’), who appears to be riding for a precipitous fall.

Martyn on the Reichstag roof

Thence to the Museum of Technology: a shade disappointing, I felt, though the coverage of WW2 was pretty frank: a number of mock-ups of V-weapons were on display, together with a Heinkel He-162 jet fighter, designed and built largely of plywood late in the war when strategic materials were scarce. There was a fine selection of old railway rolling stock, in two half-moon roundhouses.

Lunch at the flat – Round 2 of the schnitzels, as open sandwiches on toasted baguette (yesterday’s), followed by a siesta. This was Ascension Day, when German males are somehow licensed to go out and get wrecked with their mates. Wherever we went, blokes were staggering about, clutching beer bottles and behaving like British football supporters. It might not therefore have been so smart to head out to Köpenick, an attractive and historic town in the old East. The tram ride to Köpenick was instructive. Though much of the area has been prettified, there’s no mistaking the vast Soviet era apartment blocks (rather like Alexander Street in Dundee’s Hilltown, I should add). There were large areas of abandoned industrial land, and a lot of vandalized factory buildings at the roadside. The last couple of kms into Köpenick were flanked by grim four-storey blocks The museum was closing as we arrived, and pleasant though the stroll round the cobbled streets was, it was spoiled by the bellowing of drunks as they were kicked out of various Kneipen to be poured into taxis or piss on walls. Shame, since Köpenick is a pleasant town with a good waterfront and history both entertaining and grim. But we were glad to see that the S-Bahn was running, contrary to announcements, even if it meant changing at the drunk-infested Ostkreuz and Alexanderplatz, negotiating a path through the broken beer bottles. In the circumstances, we opted to eat at home– guess what: schnitzel leftovers.

Last morning in Berlin, first afternoon in Hamburg. We strolled up to the Hbf after breakfast, enjoying views from the waterside path along the Spree. On arriving at the station, I spotted a Deutsche Bahn Lounge, and went to check the entry requirements. We qualified, so could sit comfortably for an hour with complimentary tea and croissants, and a loan of the FT. The train, which I’d expected to be a DB flagship ICE high-speed electric train, turned out to be a diesel multiple unit, loosely badged ICE, but it got us to Hamburg in acceptable comfort, despite complete confusion over where to find our carriage and whether we were booked: well, we were firmly planted before the double-booked passengers arrived, so we sent them off in search of the conductor, who found them some seats, I think. (Martyn later discovered that they use diesels on the Hamburg to Copenhagen route to take advantage of lower Danish diesel prices, and that the trains are loaded on to a ferry for part of the journey.) We lunched on sandwiches of leftover chicken and – yes – schnitzel, and were in Hamburg before we noticed it, travelling in an odd little four-seat cubicle that blocked our view but failed to block out the grizzlings of the sprog next door. Easy connexion to the appropriate S-Bahn to the hotel, though we learned later that the bus would have saved some blisters. The hotel was disappointing: the receptionist was somewhat lacking in warmth, and the room, if adequate was pretty basic. It included a fancy tassimo machine that would only deliver beverages from the cassettes provided: there was no hot water option. Let the record show that your obedient non-coffee-drinking servant does not like plastic mint tea either. Didn’t help that, when reporting this to reception, I was referred to the barman, who referred me back to reception so I started my stay with a strop, I’m afraid. A little rest later, we hopped on a bus to the ferry piers, whence it was a hop in the U-Bahn and a short walk to Miniatur Wunderland. Schools seemed to be out, bridging from the Ascension Day holiday to the weekend, so the place was teeming with children who, like us big kids, were spellbound by the layout, the model buildings, the trains and the wealth of detail. It is laid out on geographical themes: there are German bits, based on Hamburg and including a faithful and functioning model of the airport; a mountainous Swiss section spread over two floors, complete with spiral tunnels, dizzying viaducts, cable cars, cows and even that most Swiss of experiences, a motorway traffic jam. The Scandinavian bit includes a tidal fjord complete with a remote-controlled ferry, and the American bit has large dollops of Las Vegas, plus a seemingly endless coal train. The Italian section was not yet open, and Britain and France are to feature later. Perhaps the most charming part both of Loxx and Miniatur Wunderland is the transition from day to night and back again: Loxx even features rather realistic thunder and lightning effects, though I’m glad to report that the torrential rain is audio-only. We struggled to tear ourselves away, I have to say.

Dinner in a retro Bavarian style beer hall, Paulaners Miraculum, attached to a big hotel by the main railway station. Good, brisk service, and a copious mixed grill per man, served with chips, a mixed salad and herb butter, and followed by Strudel for him and rote Grütze for me. If we go to Germany again, we’ll have to plan our eating a bit more carefully – I think my weight is at a record high, but the precise figures shall remain a state secret until I can express them in terms of kilos lost.

Who needs a Hafenrundfahrt? Our package included a three-day public transport ticket that allowed us to use ferries as well as buses and trains. We took a ride up the Elbe to Finkenwerder (not quite as far as the Airbus factory – next time perhaps). We’d thought of taking a connecting ferry across the river to connect with a bus to an S-Bahn station, but opted instead to stay aboard and complete the round trip. It took us in as far as Sandtorhöft, giving us a close view of HMS Ocean, a helicopter and landing craft carrier that had been visiting Hamburg for its ‘harbour birthday’ celebrations. We hobbled (I had a fine blister by this point) from the ferry pier back to the U-Bahn and on to the Rathaus, thence to the Alster arcade and the waterfront of the inner Alster. Finally back to the station to collect our bags and, I’d hoped, a copy of the Süddeutscher Zeitung, which a couple of girls were dishing out free. A condition was that you gave your address so they could canvass you for a subscription. ‘Ah, I don’t live in Germany.’ ‘Then I can’t give you a free paper, then’. Great marketing, eh?

David at the Hamburg Rathaus

The airport is unrecognizable from my last visit there in 1984 – but I guess that can be said of any airport, with the possible exception of the Soviet-era Schönefeld. Hamburg Fuhlsbüttel is now a super-modern, airy cathedral of a place, and quite a pleasant one in which to while away an hour or so with a salad from the buffet and watching the traffic. Unlike most over-cautious British airports, it has a big viewing terrace, and large indoor areas with views across the field. Less welcome was the very long walk to our boarding gate. One of the down-sides of using so much public transport is the prevalence of anti-social sprogs. We had a marathon sniveller on the train from Berlin, a yelling one on the S-Bahn to the airport and an ear-splitting screamer on the plane – she didn’t want to be strapped in for the landing, and wanted the other 150 passengers and crew to be in no doubt of the fact. It didn’t help that doting Mama had put her in the window seat, making it harder to get hold of her, hence prolonging the assault on the eardrums. We were decanted at the most remote point at Gatwick’s north terminal, which meant that your obedient but footsore servant had to negotiate miles of corridor and the bridge, plus a fair bit of the south terminal to get to the car park bus. I admit to getting off the bus and sending Martyn to fetch the car!

Back at the ranch, all was in order, and the ducks were in residence, if barely visible through the long grass. The good news is that the ground is finally beginning to dry out, so I managed to get the grass cut yesterday. The motor mower is still sulking, so I had to make with the old electric job – which I have to admit is easier to use round the edges. The grass, being so long, was pretty wet, so the mower kept clogging up, and it left a lot of cuttings behind. The job took the best part of two hours, compared with half an hour with the motor mower, and it’ll need revisiting in a day or two’s time, dammit. Otherwise, the garden is coming along nicely. The aquilegias are in full bloom, and the potentillas have started flowering. There are lots of buds on the oriental poppies, and lots of bugs on the surviving lupin, which will find its way to the recycling bin today at some point. The aquilegias, nicotianas and oriental poppy seedlings I pricked out before we went away seem to be doing quite well, and I’ve moved the tomatoes outside. I’m not sure how well they’ll take to the exposure, but we were getting fed up with the cats’ piss smell they give off, and of the clouds of fruit flies they seem to attract. One of the plants has set fruit already, so I hope they’ll ripen. They’re the ‘Sweet Olive’ variety – close to £7 for eight seeds - so the cost will probably comfortably exceed that of a year’s supply of the same from Lidl. But as one of the airlines used to say in happier times, getting there is half the fun.

Site of the Führerbunker

Since we got back, we’ve made a couple of interesting discoveries.  One is that the train we were on from Berlin to Hamburg will have completed its journey to Copenhagen via the Fehmarn belt ferry.  The other discovery has to do with the car park behind our flat at 90 Wilhelmstrasse.  Every so often, guided groups of people would stop while the guide addressed them for a few minutes.  There was a signboard facing away from the flats, and I did mean to go and see what it said, but forgot.  At one point yesterday, there was a sharp ‘aha!’ from behind the laptop opposite mine, Martyn having discovered that we had looked out on the site of Hitler’s bunker. 

Like the Roman geese, our part-time pet ducks raised the alarm the other morning when the heron landed by the pond, and my opening the curtain to see what was going on was enough to scare it off for a moment or two.  So an honorable mention to the gallant watchducks, and a photo.

We had a good lunch here yesterday with a former colleague, Martin Sharp, and his wife Kath.  It must be 20 years since we'd seen each other - longer still in Kath's case - but we chatted away happily for the best part of five hours while the rain came and went.  The garden looks OK from behind glass, but I do wish we could get out and walk on it - the photo above shows how badly the grass is in need of a cut.

While the weather has prevented gardening, I've been poking about for things to see and places to go (and eat) in Berlin and Hamburg next week.  I think we can just about survive on Wiener Schnitzel and Currywurst, but the potato salad may be a bit hard to take.

Interesting times

Just happened on a breakdown of the French presidential elections results via the Libération web site.  It gives the result for the nation as a whole, and a breakdown by departments and individual communes; for the first and second rounds and for the two previous présidentielles as well.  It also gives the size of the electorate in each commune, the number voting and the number of voters who expressed a valid vote.  A must-see for anyone with a connection to France and an interest in politics.  In brief, Sarko is out, decisively, but by no means by a landslide.  Hollande is in - France's first socialist president since François Mitterand whose 14-year presidency ended in 1995 - with a Keynesian agenda of stimulating the economy out of recession, in stark contrast with the EU's policy of austerity.  Perhaps we'll see in my lifetime who was right.

Of more interest is the outcome of the imminent législatives, in which French voters will elect their parliamentary representatives.  I imagine that not a few European heads of government will be hoping for another cohabitation: a left-wing president and a right-wing prime minister, which would cripple Hollande's hopes of pushing through a radical programme.  Such a result is not unthinkable, since the result of the presidential election has, I think, as much to do with Sarko's personal unpopularity as with any degree of political conviction, and the narrowness of the vote could conceal an underlying tendency to the centre-right. Whatever the result, it can hardly be worse, some might say, than the lumbering coalition now in power in a neighbouring Member State.

The wildlife is barely managing to get from the feeders to the pond without first hacking a path with machetes.  It's still far from clear when I'll be able to get out and cut the grass - even if I can persuade the mower into life.  The pond is very high from all the rain we've had, and has attracted at least one visit from our neighbourhood heron: I chased it off as I opened the curtains this morning.  No idea how many of the latest batch of goldfish have survived: another effect of the near constant rainfall in recent weeks is that the water is very murky.  Too murky for the heron's liking, we hope.  The mallards are spending more and more time in the garden, so we are slowly learning more about their behaviour.  Once she has finished eating, swimming, snoozing or just lying about, Madam looks east for a while, then taxis out as far to the west of the grass as she can before launching into her eastward take-off run.  Even then, they just clear the fence, and fly between the gable ends of a couple of houses down the road.  I'm hoping she's heavily in egg.  Himself is just heavy!  Other visitors include a family of dunnocks, plus the usual crowd.  And the starlings are back.

Apart from the grass, the garden isn't looking too bad.  The pansies are flowering well in their tubs  and baskets, and the aquilegias will soon be covered in bloom.  The aphids are flourishing as well, of course, so I must admit to having been out there with noxious chemicals. 

Another trip to the charity shop and the tip today: we loaded up a lot of junk from the loft, and separately some of the numerous bags and holdalls that had been gathering dust up there.  One holdall looked just about big enough to take a carefully folded MI6 agent, but the contents were just (inorganic) rubbish - honest.

Off to the framer once we'd been to the tip - three of my daubs to do, plus an oil landscape that has been knocking about in other frames, neither of them specially good, since I acquired it from a relative some decades ago.  We've chosen some different mouldings this time, so I'm looking forward to seeing the results.