Berlin feels like a large shared apartment with both flatmates away; London can feel like a stag party in January, in a claustrophobic one-bed flat in Vauxhall.
It feels like a city waiting to be used, not a city that is manipulating you. It feels open and tangible, the fundamentals are in the correct places. Unlike London, which can sometimes feel like you've got the vision of a mole and turned off the light without leaving your spectacles on the bedside table.
The pace is slower, so much so, that in an attempt to tame the beeline movements that become instinctive in London throngs, I developed a stutter to my walk. Unable to quite standstill, to an onlooker this may well have looked like I was perpetually in search of somewhere to urinate.
There is no twilight hour in Hackney - never more than a minute passes without noise. The window rarely lasts beyond a drawn-out blood vesseled blink, thirty seconds at most. The last door shuts, the last fox emits, the last brown rat scuttles into the Thames, before the phlegm of the next day rises and splutters.
In Berlin it is silent, disregarding the occasional loose comment by the ancient water pipes in the corner. The city doesn’t feel empty or have the baying menace - the that bear could stand up any minute and then he’d be really fucking huge – that London can portray when it falls silent.
TBC...
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