Sprichst du Scheiße?
Berlin has been hard. I really ought to be here with Mike, who told me there was a big risk that if I came, I'd never leave. Or with Erin, who traversed the city with a filmmaker's eye, a curious heart and a romantic's ear. But it's just me, amid blocky buildings and other-sides-of-roads that seem so far away. Entering places with a-boards and signs in English, only to feel a frost descend as I proceed to speak solely in English.
That crossing the road feels like a commitment, that I don't want to speak here for fear of offense - this makes the city feel like a walking decision-demanding machine. It is the opposite of langorous.
What I want to say is, do you speak shit? Because I can talk with you of that. This shitty mess we're in. Of the heightened sense of responsibility I have for the accident of my birth in a country that is now broadcasting a desire to 'beat the bounds', to declare its self-sufficiency and belief that it will be stronger alone, governing itself, rejecting compromise and collaboration. I want to speak of the shit that is a national curriculum that continued to water down the humanities to the extent that learning a foreign language is no longer compulsory. I want to ask of the shit that seems implied by signs in English that perhaps you yourself did not put in the window, that perhaps you resent because it puts you in a position that you did not choose. I didn't choose to withdraw from the European Union. Though I don't know how to say that to you, in the language you understand. I don't know if it would make a difference to you.
The choice I did make, at fourteen, is the real choice that is preventing my communication here. I moved school, mid way through the year. Was forbidden from taking French and Spanish, which I'd been learning in my previous school. Was instead forced to take German and Spanish. I won an award at the end of the year for being one of the top students in German after only three months of study. Then it stopped being compulsory. Then I turned my back on it. And that decision was an emotional one - laced with my disappointment at moving to a better class of neighbourhood with a far less diverse community; my frustration at being denied my choice of language study. It was, perhaps, the first rebellious act of a timid child.
We can't see ahead, to all permutations of our lives that might call for enough German to be polite (or at least not ignorant). Some of the people I admire have counselled that leaving the EU could be the change needed - for either the reasons so many people wanted to 'get Brexit done', or because it will go so badly that the appetite for real reform could reach a tipping point.
And so, from your own correspondent, I'm signing off for another day, trying to find the composure inside to stop fighting the ideological tide and 'see what happens', whilst refilling the emotional tanks that allow me to act, practically, where it matters: for people, at need.