Berlin……..

 
 
 
 

.......having a few spare days before Christmas, we decided to spend them with Hattie in Berlin. Those of you who know Hattie will be thrilled to know that she is living her dream. She works regularly with a variety of musicians and has a very bohemian flat in an inner city suburb; the church steeple is the view from her car park. It was great to hang out, go to a few of her pre-Christmas gigs and of course to visit “the wall”. Astonishing to drive through a city with remnants of something that was so ‘huge’ in our lifetime and discover that we really know so little about it. The first big realization for us was that Berlin was actually situated in Eastern Germany and that the wall created a small piece of West Germany (in effect an island) in what was in fact part of the Eastern Bloc. For some reason we had imagined that “the wall” went neatly through a city, tidily dividing East from West, which it sort of did of course, but not in the way we’d envisaged.
We spent a very informative afternoon with a friend of Hattie’s explaining to us, how it
was for Berliners when the wall came down, suddenly, without warning……one friend had been out of the city on a gig – he came home to a totally new way of life….extraordinary……Hope your Christmas was great…..more about ours later…..lots of love xxxxxx