For some reason of late, I seem to be getting lots of links and readers from Berlin-based blogs. Nothing wrong with that, I hear you say. I’m in Germany, Berlin is the capital of the Fatherland, it had to happen eventually……
It started off with Broke In Berlin who has an obviously delusional commenter who admonishes him (and my ego loves this)
“Blog more dear boy. We will both have to work incredibly hard to reach the standards of In Actual Fact, whose post Cheap, Meaningless Sex is, I believe, almost perfection.”
To which Broke in Berlin replies
“I’m delighted you’ve discovered IAF. He’s awfully good, and a fellow Englander stranded in Germany. Not only does he write nicely and entertainingly and wittily, he also takes the trouble to comment on every comment, which is awfully gentlemanly, you’ll agree.”
Flattery will get you… Well it’ll get your comments quoted on the blog of some smug egomaniac.
Next up is The Berlin Review “a new Berlin blog in English that will post on a wide variety of topics related to this fine city and what goes on here.” Who list me on their blogroll despite acknowledging that I’m 600km away.
And last but not least (as the saying goes) is “I Hate My Neighbours”. A title which I think could resonate with all of us, well, it resonates with me anyway, and all of whose readers appear to reside, or at least work, in Southwark. Not only does she link to Broke in Berlin and my good self, she also points readers to the fabulous Belle & Sebastian and a discussion about Pot Noodles in her sidebar – this is a woman with taste, I tell you.
You may have the cars and the wealth down there in the south-west, but we’ve got it all up here in the north-east. Erm, we’ve got… erm… long-term unemployment! That’s what we’ve got! And no industry whatsoever! (And the government.) And we’ve got… erm… tourists too. Yes, bet you don’t get many of those in BW. But our crowning glory is, ça va sans dire, that we’re clearly the centre of German blogdom, ready, paternalistically, to take you provincial bloggers under our wing and even blogroll you on our public-spirited sites. What’s Stuttgart ever done for us, eh (apart from fund everyone’s unemployment benefits)?
BiB: Extolling the virtues of this state is not something we get up to on this website….
Quite right BiB. 600km is nothing between blogs. As for extolling the virues of the state…the state we’re in is bankrupt, and the state I’m in is drunk and listening to Thunder Road…musical perfection.
Thanks for the mention.
It’s not true that all of my readers work for the London Borough of Southwark. A lot of readers seem to find the site via google, thanks to searching for “anal”, “german”, “i hate my wife”, “nazi”, “gernan anal wife nazi”, and “i hate humpe”. And these readers come from as far afield as Singapore, Pontefract, Japan, New York, Paris, as well as Peckham, Crystal Palace, Dulwich, Camberwell, Bermondsey, Walworth and Rotherhithe. Did I forget The Borough and Nunhead? Maybe I did. Well who cares.
And who says I’m a woman? Perhaps I should rename myself.
Daggi: It was the self-identification of being female in the e-mail you sent to Harry Hutton. Of course, if you want me to, I’ll happily change it to “person of non-specified gender”….
As a son of this fair city, I fully agree with BiB. He forgot to mention one this city’s biggest assets, though: Our visionary mayor. Sporting a fair-coloured suit, he called Berlin a “gateway to Asia” while touring the Far East. Recently, mayor Woworeit penned the foreword (grusswort) for an S and M magazine. This esteemed publication promoted a gathering in Berlin for those who indeed think that pain is not only very close to, but rather identical with pleasure. As widely reported in the press, the cover featured a masked man chained to a pissoir (urinal). (By the way, AF looked very dashing as usual.)
Without this sage governing the capital it would be much harder to bear the underfunded universities, the ineffective administration, and the social, culinary and sartorial underdevelopment of the local population.
Greetings from Steglitz,
JCS
JCS: The first I ever heard of him was in a room with a group of elderly, conservative CDU voters (don’t ask), who were mortified that a, to quote the old lady standing next to me “you know, ‘one of them’” had been elected mayor.
“An SPD member?” I asked in faux innocence.
After a few more embarrassed sentences her husband, who was somewhat more blunt, obnoxious and drunk stumbled across and guffawed “Klaus ‘Po Bereit’” that’s what we call him”.
Much discussion ensued about whether “sexual deviants like ‘PoBereit’ should be allowed to hold public office”. The high point of which was when I challenged them about their then FDP coalition partner and the sexuality of Westerwelle and was told “Yes, but he’s only gay because he can’t get a girlfriend with that awful skin of his, poor man”.
Now, I’m not sure how big the S&M voting bloc in Berlin is and whether writing for such an esteemed publication was entirely politically astute, but I kind of like him (of course I don’t live in Berlin, I just see him annoying social conservatives here and think: Great!).
I think I’ve mentioned here before the tendency of all the segments about S&M in eurotrash featuring germans, and I’ve seen the window of your version of ann summers, with the thong with the balls on it, and I can safely say, I am unsurprised that germany has an openly S&M mayor. Good on you all.
Easy: Berlin’s mayor may or may not indulge in certain things, but nobody knows and that’s not the point. I (and probably most fellow Berliners) could not care less. Mr Woworeit wrote a foreword in an S&M publication praising this city as a place of tolerance (and I believe welcomed the S&M gathering’s participants). The problem is that the mayor lacks taste, behaves like a klutz and lacks any kind of political vision for the bankrupt city of Berlin. In the past he travelled to distant places while important decisions were made in his absence. On top of all this, at least one of his feet is in close proximity to his mouth most of the time.
JCS
Dagmar’s blog has actually been banned by every borough in London apart from the one mentioned. Oh yes, and it’s certainly best to forget Nunhead.