Tea with the Allies

A lot of our adventures in Berlin are of a culinary nature. That´s not really surprising, given that (a) we love food and (b) the whole point of being in Berlin is often to be able to sit in cafes/bars/restaurants not doing much at all apart from eating and drinking and watching the world go by. But there are more important reasons, too.

Food is notoriously associated with homesickness on the one hand, adventure on the other. Our sense of our lives is closely bound up with how and what we eat. During my first years in Berlin, I refused to believe that I ever got homesick, or ever could. But my enjoyment of German food has always had a slight undercurrent of anxiety. For one thing, I was completely unable to cook it properly. (I still struggle when cooking here, even if the dishes are, to an outsider, exactly the same as in England. Cheesecake eludes me; Spiegeleier, fried eggs, a staple of German snack food, mysteriously break up in the pan; I am unable to peel a cooked potato or slice cheese correctly...) But more importantly, back then I had no cultural understanding of what German food meant. My first meal - breakfast, after a cold and anxious arrival at Wannsee train station at 8 in the morning - will forever remain in my memory. Andrea, the mother of the children I had come to look after, had prepared a pot of tea, which was even in an English tea-pot. But to my bemusement, this was accompanied by cake. Cake for breakfast? At the time, I had no idea that Germans eat cake for breakfast on special occasions. I was only twenty, I was cold and hungry, and the idea of cake, when I had just made a twelve-hour train journey at night, in winter, across a thousand miles of forest, was, to my mind, tinged with mockery. My heart sank. I probably looked suspicious. I may even have frowned. It was only later I realised the honour Andrea was doing me.

My longing for tea and toast, however, never really faded and was never satisfied. Tea in Germany never tastes like tea in Britain – this is not just prejudice, it's a true fact (Andrea also told me about her visit to a FairTrade tea plantation in Sri Lanka, where the proud owner told her all about how tea is blended for different markets.) German tea tastes...more floral, more…weird. But its cultural significance is different too. Tea is made in a pot (good) but preferably an expensive glass one (strange) through which one can observe the color of the beverage gently changing into a magical, amber substance (amber?! What about British orange?). Milk is almost unheard of as an accompaniment, although in Berlin, this is changing. Bags are sniffed at (and with good reason here), as they would denote a cheap, working-class drink; the true tea drinker is a ceremonialist, the leaves are all-important.

I agree that tea should be a ceremony. But not that kind of ceremony! I want a nice china pot of hot, strong tea. Leaves are good, but not those big, floaty leaves that look more like flowers unfolding and taste like it too. Dust! Tea dust! That´s what Made Britain Great (Again) – the remnants of Empire in a small paper bag. And although I later delightedly went on to explore the strange, rich world of German food (pickled pumpkin, cheese, rye bread, cakes with cream, egg nog on ice-cream, any amount of coffee…), there was one part of me that most definitely resisted. Not for any colonial or political reasons. Just because, although most of me wished I was German, the tea-drinking part definitely didn't.

One of the children´s regular questions, repeated on a near-weekly basis (I seem to remember it got up to daily levels at one stage), was "What´s your favourite meal?" The two older ones would approach me in tandem, usually when I was sat alone with my comforting tea-cup ("Why do you always hold it with both hands?"), and stand for a while gazing at this ritual, entranced. Then, eventually, they would take a deep breath and one of them would put the vital question to me. A pause, while I considered. The considering part was very important. They needed to see that I was really thinking about it. And in fact, I was. Nonetheless, my answer was always the same. "Tea," I would say, eventually. "And bread and butter. Or toast."

They would look at each other and screw their eyes up in delight. Then to me, "Are you sure? What about…spaghetti?" "Nope," I would reply. "What about…Pommes?" (pommes frites, chips). "Absolutely not." "What about…" Their imaginations failed them. Then, to their mother, "Mama! Emily mag nur Tee und Brot!" (Emily only likes tea and bread!). The Mary Poppins association, from then on, was inevitable.

So on one day, when there are clouds rolling across Berlin, the sky is darkening and the sun sets early, I decide I have waited long enough. In 24 years, it has never "just happened". I have to actively seek out this favourite meal, ideally to be accompanied by an open fire. And to my immense surprise, a search on the internet for "teehaus mit kamin" results in a list of which the second item is "Teehaus im Englischen Garten". This sounds promising, no, amazing! Apparently, there is a British tea-shop in Berlin that I have never heard of, and what´s more it has been there since, the 1960s! How is this possible? Surely it will just serve German things dressed up in English kitsch. "House of Windsor" jams or something.

I am wrong. A glance at the menu reveals that the English tea-house actually sells English food. Including clotted cream, scones and fish and chips. And tea. "Mel! Mel!" We stare, as entranced as the children, at this picture of home.

(c) Michael Zoll

A few days later, we enter the world of the English Teahouse. From the outside, it is small, thatched, hidden away in the green depths of Tiergarten, near the Academy of Arts and the 1960s, retro Hansa Quarter with its orange and blue tiled houses and wooden balconies. Rain drips from the trees as we push open the door. Will there be doilies? Or china cats? No. Berlin is always good for a surprise, and the tea-house is no exception. Like a Tardis, it stretches back, immense, into dim dark depths, while on the walls, orange and purple lighting repeats the 1960s theme and plain dark tables with candles group around a bright burning fire. Chandeliers glitter, while hungover waiters drift between the chattering visitors with trays of scones, pots of tea and the occasional glass of wine. Their undeservedly superior expressions melt into indulgent smiles when I ask for more milk with our tea. They can tell how excited we are. And when the High Tea arrives with its cake stands and crustless sandwiches, we forget about the waiters – we are too excited by scones. Real scones. Better, far better than mine and even better than most of the ones we've had in England. Modernism, tea and scones, an open fire and chandeliers – who could wish for more?

I feel a sense of my two lives coming together; not just because of the food, but because someone else, too – in this case the occupying British forces – deemed it a Good Thing to bring a little bit of England to Berlin. But not by pretending Berlin is something other than it is. Instead, a strange but enchanting mix of Berlin cool and British comfort allows us to sit for a moment and feel happy. You can keep your Brexit, your Great Britain and your "identity". It's not identity that matters. It's the happiness when you can put two wonderful, totally different things together and still enjoy it.

...what does being boring actually mean?

Apart from being a song by the Pet Shop Boys, of course.

I was bored a few weekends ago, and it's the kind of boredom I wouldn't wish on anyone: mind-numbing, eat-your-own-arm kind of boredom, as I heard a man repeatedly telling us how many contracts he'd been offered for how much money over the past few years. It was a mistaken attempt to get us interested in entrepreneurship, sadly undermined by his off-hand remark that of course, he'd put far more work into a presentation at a conference for which he was being paid a thousand Euros than for a teaching seminar at an adult education class where he was only getting paid two hundred. It's a shame it was our education class he was talking about...

Anyway, it made me think that for him, no doubt the conference and the thousand Euros represented excitement, success, something he had achieved. But do all those things have to be synonymous? How about failure? How about everyday life, things that happen by accident, things that ordinary people like to do? How about being boring? 

In Berlin,  it's easy to feel you are on a merry-go-round of events, ideas, debates and tasks that you can never get off. Lucky, unlucky to be part of it? Lucky, of course. But what's at the centre of that merry-go-round? Is it a centrifugal or a centripetal force, does it push us away from the centre or draw us in? Or do we just get so dizzy, we fall off?

Kleinmachnow

Here at the edge of the city, the weather has changed. Suddenly we've been waking up to blue skies and heavy frosts like snow glittering on roofs and hedges. The first evening of winter, I took the cat out across crisp, crunching leaves that to my astonishment were turning white with frost already at seven o'clock. I stared up at the stars which were clear and bright in the already dark sky, while the cat delicately and disgustedly lifted her paws high to avoid as much of the cold ground as possible and then raced home as if being chased by White Walkers (That was pretty much the last evening walk we did.)

There's so much to write about - English tea-shops, strange translation workshops, a visit to the Berlin Authorities and German bagpipers in a cemetery - but this morning, struggling with the stress of going out to work, dealing with home admin, and wanting to write as well, I didn't even try. Instead, I opened the kitchen window wide and leant out into the freezing air to breathe in the frost. No-one else was up. It was silent, except for birds twittering and rustling through the otherwise still trees. A woodpecker was darting up the beech, which still retains a few golden leaves, and I watched it for a while. Its feathers were puffed up and it seemed driven, perhaps by the cold, to run up as many branches of as many trees as possible, never settling. By contrast, I was doing nothing at all, not to any outward eye. I wondered if this is what I mean by saying it is good to be boring. 

Recently, an article in Zitty (the more left-wing of Berlin's two regular listings magazines) decided to tackle the subject of FOMO head-on. The writer, a young journalist, took on the challenge of doing something every day and night, not saying no to any event that might be offered to her. The joke, of course, is obvious to any Berliner. Even with events filling her entire day and half the night (or the other way around), she would never be able to do even 1 per cent of all those things she might be aFraid she was Missing Out on. 

But does this really make life more exciting? Or, to put it another way, does the quantity of "things happening" equate to a life less ordinary? Or, in fact, a life that is better?

The honest answer is, in some ways, yes it does. The sheer volume of Things Happening, people making things happen, is in some ways infectious and amazing. The fact that people care enough to make things happen is liberating. The fact that people are humble and excited enough to learn new stuff, do new stuff, is joyful. 

But there's another side to it as well. And I've thought about this a lot, because some people probably think I'm just being smug and irritating saying that it's good to be boring. So I need to have my answer ready. It's not good if you're stuck in a small town where even learning a foreign language makes you a crime suspect! I imagine them saying. Or there's no cinema or theatre! Or art! Or dance classes! Or...anything! 

That's true. I know those small towns, I was that suspect (well, in my head anyway). But I never said it was good to be bored (that's a whole other blog).  Being boring is not the same as being bored. 

Being boring can mean a lot of things. Obviously, it can mean that you make other people want to bite their own arms off, which is not a good thing. But it can also mean simply that you turn away from Things Happening, in the usual sense of "Things Happening That People Are Doing".  Or "Noisy Things". Or "New Things". Other things are happening, too. They're just not always new things. Or loud things. Or, most importantly, human things.

Alone at a window, with no other humans nearby or awake, not even the sound of other humans to remind me of what I am, I am enthralled by existence. Birds fly here every day. For all I know, their routines are so regular that they fly to the exact same tree at the exact same time every day. The sun comes up over there, beyond that house, every day, not at the same time, but pretty much in the same way, although today is particularly beautiful. The wild boar are out every night, in pretty much the same patch (you can tell). Are their lives boring? I would hazard a guess that they're not. Not just because the fight for existence doesn't leave time to think about boredom, although that's probably true as well. Animals in zoos do get bored. The cat gets bored, now and again, though I'm sure she doesn't think of herself as boring.

The thing is, I'm not an animal or a bird or a tree. I can't stop measuring time or live entirely in the moment, or not for long. I can't really imagine what it's like to be that way, to be entirely and totally connected to the earth around you and your own body upon that earth, because I'm a human. But I can imagine it a little bit. I know what it is like, just a little bit, to be somewhere, in a time and place, where the present totally and entirely demands your attention, where you begin to be present, all the time. It wasn't boring. It was something quite different from either boring or exciting. And it's no coincidence that this was a place, an island, where there were more animals and birds than people and not enough electricity to run a coffee machine.  

There's a tension here I can't ignore; I love new things, new people, new places, new ideas in particular. But I also love everyday life. The older I get, the less I want to consume culture in an attempt to gain excitement, or to look for a way out of boredom, and the more I'm interested in those other things. Things I haven't been looking for. Things that happen on the edge of a city, rather than in the centre. Things that happen outdoors: falling conkers, buzzards wheeling overhead, the turn of the season. Things that are, in a way, boring. 

Winter's coming...