Berlin

After spending Easter weekend in the miasma that is Berlin, I think I'm getting closer to some vague understanding of what Germany is about. The city is of course a pile of genres, historical periods, social classes and sorts of weather, all jumbled up and mashed in a city which has been split in so many political nuggets so many times.

The place in the picture is the back yard of an art squat called Tacheles, which evidently dates back to the 80's and before, when it was genuinely a haven for the more marginal artist types. Now it has become a pretentious tourist attraction, flaunting its messy graffiti and exhibiting its clever art made from car parts and bits of industrial rubble found around Berlin, trying to immortalise the 'we are no longer Soviet occupied' feel of the 80's. Yet it hosts several very trendy and overpriced bars, and scruffy types who spend the day touching up an already finished piece and talking to American girls about how yes, this really is my own artwork, and I really am an East German.

Cynical as this may sound, I think Berlin has nevertheless maintained an aura of the postmodern creativity it inherited in the 80s. The inhabitants are either business types to outdo the worst corporate fodder from London's city centre, or else wear the same bright purple vests, died beards and orange bikes they got hold of after the wall came down. Parts of the city still have bars sprouting out like daisies popping up out of concrete pavements, and probably rave parties to satisfy the most hedonistic technoid.

I don't know whether this is the most creative city of Europe, or a consumerised sham parading as an artists' revolution. Suggestions welcome.

the highlands

The trip I made last January to the highlands reminded me that the characteristic power of this landscape has nothing in common with other mountain areas I have seen. From the all-too-quiet valley I live in, these photos are a reminder of how the highlands don't allow the mind to rot the way it can here. The living, breathing streams that cut their way through the tundra-like plains are full of a palpable energy which is missing in this part of Germany. The feeling that at any moment you could be blown off your feet by a gale or frozen on the spot by a sudden chill. The highlands cut through the dreamy mental fuzz of tourists, and allow mental space without mental flaccidity.

The more time I spend in Stuttgart the more I understand where Nietszche's disgust with German idealism came from. The same boiled-sausage boredom he railed against in the end of the last century prevails here still. For all their intellectual merits, the Germans do not escape the European limpness which drove me from the UK and Italy alike.

Two weeks ago I was invited out by a friend to an outdoor 'light show', funded and organised by Stuttgart's electricity company. There was of course a light show and a few gigs, but the real highlight of the evening was that shops were open till 12.00 at night! Oh the joy! A whole Saturday evening of walking in and out of shops with thousands of like-minded bargain hunters. 9 hours per day of weekend shopping is after all a meagre consolation for having do sit behind a desk and fill out bits of paper for your boss. The bliss of continuing this orgy of shopping into the depths of Saturday night could only be equalled by the buzz of hearing Dieter Bohlen's latest pop idol candidate.

Meanwhile the wind whistles nonchalantly across the plains of the highlands, and long may it bristle the turf from Tyndrum to Orkney island. Give me a swig of Islay and a highland winter chill over the heating fans of Kaufhof shopping mall any day of the week. Or weekend.