the way there

A work trip to New York for us both; B. for a gig, me touring with a show. Somehow we ended up spending New Year’s Eve on a warm and strange Bahaman island. A bad cold, coupled with some American Horse-Tranquiliser medication meant I kept walking in to things and falling asleep while cutting carrots with a meat cleaver. So we skipped the NYE festivities and stayed home. After watching a re-run of a 1980’s Tina Turner concert we wandered out to the deck to ring in the New Year. And there, swinging back and forth in a hammock chair we hatched a plan to move to Berlin.

We were both changing direction – I was leaving the theatre to study acupuncture, B. was leaving his band to write more music for himself and for film. Berlin, with its wide streets, grey skies, candle-lit bars and grubby edges. It’s fleamarkets, glühwein, bicycle lanes and cobbled streets.

Its biting cold winters and thermal underwear. The starkness of the concrete and graffiti. Even though we were coming to the city too late to get our teeth in to the full-on ‘old Berlin’ there was enough of it left to be a refreshing and damn exciting change to the death throes of the Celtic Tiger Ireland we were leaving behind.

We cycled the legs off ourselves those first few months. Exploring the city, eating, drinking finding our feet. Working out how to stay warm in -20. Buying old furniture and vintage boots. Marking maps and making lists of places we loved, streets we wanted to live on, bars we wanted to return to. We had a blast.

Cut to just shy of 8 years in: 1 wedding, 1 apartment renovation, 3 acupuncture qualifications, many many pieces of music and 2.5 kids (#3 is on the way…). I’m cured of any vague ideas I ever had that high heels are a good idea. I split bills and buy organic and wait for the green man. I have a bicycle-lane radar than means I’m no longer ploughed over by an errant footstep. I go to naked saunas and hardly blink at the 60 year old guy sunbathing starkers along my jogging path. My kids strip off and run around in water fountains in the park and I ferry them about in a bicycle trailer. I wrap them up to within an inch of their lives for a winter’s day and put REAL CANDLES on my Christmas tree.

I am still not, however, as excited as most about the arrival of the Great White Asparagus at the end of April.