“Du bist verrückt mein Kind. Du musst nach Berlin, Wo die Verrückten sind. Da gehörst du hin”

I haven’t always found goodbyes difficult. At first, as a child, it was mainly because in saying goodbye, I didn’t ever feel like this was a permanent end. So I didn’t – in the moment – see much to be sad about. It was only afterwards as a delayed response that the emotions of being absent from a person or place – the home of a friend or relative, somewhere my family spent on holiday – flooded towards me. First, in my mind, driven by nostalgia if nothing else, I’d think about how I was in that place; able to relax, have fun and laughs; and feel the warmth of the people around me – and then how I was no longer there, and no longer could savour that state of calm contentment. Musing on it, thinking myself impervious to anything that could follow, I would soon realise I’d disturbed a pebble that would often trigger an avalanche of emotion. These moments would bring me to tears – short and sharp pains. Intense for a time, but thankfully they would not burn like that for long. The fire would often be rekindled, again not for long, and would spread in some ways, as other memories would flash in my mind and would send a further sense of ever-growing distance between where I was in that state of happiness and where I had now arrived (being driven home in a car often as not along dull English motorways).

Growing older has through some unknown mechanism made me less sensitive to this nostalgia-driven process. In fact, indulging in nostalgia is now one of my favourite pastimes. A benign, innocent nostalgia, you understand. Not the kind of longing for a former golden age that makes frustrated men turn aggressive in a futile hope to seize some long-forgotten, lost sense of power and control they apparently had at some point in their lives. No, I’m talking of the kind that allows one to slip back pleasantly into the calm contentedness that we all (should) get to enjoy at some point in our lives. Content which I will always enjoy with close friends and family around me. Talking about nothing in particular and anything that comes to mind, saying things that don’t necessarily make sense (nor have to), that may or may not be especially funny (nor do they have to be, which can make them funnier) or that can sometimes sound profound (but certainly do not have to). This is callef chatting waffle (or wass) in my parents’ house. The great thing about this is it can be done anywhere, including on the move (sometimes adding to the sense of uncontrolled momentum in a wafflous conversation). Wandering is another pastime of mine that leaves me content. The kind of wandering that can be undertaken when you have nowhere to go and nowhere to be. In those moments when you just go where the road takes you. Of course, the whole experience is easier in a city, since one doesn’t have to go far to find new places, sights and smells that you never knew existed before. It also makes things simpler when going back home to dinner and the sofa, and when your feet scream up to you ‘enough! No more walking!” Nevertheless, even for an unfit person such as myself, strolling around a city endlessly and aimlessly with a companion as curious and enthusiastic about finding something(s) interesting as I am has always been the most fertile ground for my memories, which I have been able to nostalgically reap time and again in my seasons of sentimentality. It has also provided fertile ground for dreams about how I want to spend future days.

To return to the matter at hand, these semi-regular trips to the fields of nostalgia and memories somehow stopped triggering waves of sadness for a long time, except on very uncommon occasions, with very uncommonly special people, having spent a very uncommonly memorable time with them. Instead what would trigger a stronger emotional response – significant perhaps, given how emotions signpost the soul – would be the dreams I’d cultivate of visiting new places, exploring them, finding places to sit and sip and survey a whole new part of the world I’d never seen before, which could be added to the mental map of my living experience (those who’ve read Night Train to Lisbon may know what I’m talking about: Amadeu, a Portuguese Doctor and protagonist of the novel, tells us by going to new places we not only expand our personal geographical map but also our mental map of experience and reference). The dreams I had cultivated would lead me to crisscross Europe – so much diversity in one relatively small part of the world and so much to see. And honestly, after 2019 it is unclear how easy a Briton will find it to travel around the European mainland. It was difficult for me to decide where to go next, so when I say that Vienna was not at the top of my list, understand that almost nowhere was, since I felt anywhere could be. However, having thought about it (and having read Stefan Zweig’s essay on The Vienna of Yesterday) it’s strange to me to think I had not put it clear in the lead. This bastion and crucible of European culture, this place where the essence of the continent could be tasted in the air – at least once upon a time, in the twilight years of the Victorian Era, when languages from all over the Habsburg Empire could be heard, and with them, the influences seen of those languages’ mother cultures.

I had really wanted to see Vienna. For the fossilised remains of one of the ancient imperial powers of history, the Schlösser Hofburg and Schönbrunn, St. Stephen’s Cathedral, walking down the Graben, breathing in the air on the banks of the Danube, absorbing the smells of the cafés and bakeries – this is the stuff of discovering a new city. However, what is really special about it all, and what I had really wanted, more than seeing anything specifically, is to take someone there with me to discover these things together. The magic of all those moments we create in our minds is having at least one person, one extraordinary person, there with you to give the experiences the emotional charge they need to be seared into your brain as memories – to make those fertile fields worth being harvested during the seasons of nostalgia. I didn’t want to just go to Vienna, I wanted to share Vienna, and all it offered, with someone. Someone as intrepidly inquisitive about new places as I was. Who might understand what I hoped to see – in this provincial capital the former majesty of a metropolis that had led and shaped and had been shaped by all of Europe, an inheritance the likes of which few other cities could claim. Every place is different, and the fun in exploring them is seeing how they differ and how they are similar; how people do things differently and how they do them the same. How restaurant staff in Rome will desperately run after you if you’ve ‘left your change behind’, the livid smouldering of their counterparts to the north in London and Berlin if you leave them nothing. How were things in Austria? How were the bars and the cafés and the promenades of Vienna? Would they really stand up against those in the capitals of their larger neighbours to the north and south? I wanted to discuss these ever-pressing questions in the course of our trip, no doubt. What would have been found there that we’d find nowhere else? What else would we have seen, and laughed about and talked to our friends about in the course of our travels? I wanted to take you to so many places. But goodbye to all that.

I have found goodbyes difficult again recently. Naturally, real goodbyes are always more difficult than your average ‘yeah, see you tomorrow pal’ affairs. Goodbyes when you won’t see someone again for a very long time really do make you think about how your life has been refracted through the lens of ‘what are we (rather than I) going to do now?’ for longer than seems possible. I had one such goodbye last June, perhaps one of the first truly painful goodbyes in a long time. But the most recent ones have been different. The mind cannot present a more stark contrast between then and now than presenting you with a moment you were with a person with whom you may never find yourself again. And it isn’t simply a case of the dreamed-about events that will not take place, that you tossed about in your head and looked forward to, but the everyday silliness that develops between people who know each other over the course of several years, that you realise has only held any reason or sense between you and that person, and doesn’t to anyone else – and now that you won’t see that particular person again, these gestures perhaps hold no meaning at all. I find myself struck every time I recall this thought, that something the meaning of which was clear and unquestionable has now become totally meaningless. Little parts of your life earmarked and altered over the course of those years spent with someone now serve no purpose and have no business being altered. The bits left behind, even the simple objects and paraphernalia, have great big question marks looming over them, challenging you: why are they still here? Looking for the answer, it is long gone. The paradox of having memories seared into your mind eternally for reasons that no longer exist; the memory and emotion can be recalled from the past but the source stays there and is irretrievable. But emotions do not obey the laws of time as we see them.

Having no new memories, returning to the old ones provoked a nostalgia that made me fully aware of the distance between then and now; the fact that there are ends to some things, and all you have left is the photos and the memories they invoke. Their value, for some reason and I suspect to all of us at first, seems irreparably damaged. The memories’ and photos’ relevance seemed to stem for the immutable nature of the emotions which they represented; it becomes clear those feelings, and their source, do not last forever, so how can the value of these mental and photographic images stay unchanged?

I have thought about this, and have at least an answer. It is because the moments they capture do not change, despite their retreat ever further into the past. The value they represent is the value that was captured at the very instant they were taken, and nothing before or after. They create the illusion perhaps that if this moment can be captured eternally then perhaps the emotions they stir can also last for eternity, and so when that illusion is broken, it is natural to question what the memories are actually worth. But the truth is the memories are worth everything they were then, when they were sowed in the fields of the mind – because that’s what they are: then. Memories ultimately, are the visual and audial, physical and chemical form given to the emotions one feels at a particular time and place. The stronger the emotion attached to a memory, the stronger the memory: the more vivid the images; the more rich the smells; the more tangible the surroundings. But beyond that moment, they are connected to nothing. Nothing else signifies their meaning. Their value is not determined by what happens after, only what happened, and how you are feeling, then. And that is what makes them eternally valuable, because through the unknown wizardry of the mind, they can draw you back to those moments when you felt those emotions so you can feel them, and experience those moments, again. Knowing they are always there, I can say goodbye to those times and the people in them.

In a way I’ve created a construct in my brain that allows me to draw on the strength certain people in my life give me when I need it most. It is a living room, exactly like the one in my parents’ home: I’m sitting on a sofa and around me are those special people. Mum, Dad, my brother and sister, close friends – the people I can rely on. It uses this mechanism of nostalgia because going to this place in my head feels like remembering a particular moment. Like a dream this mental place is not created out of thin air but experiences I’ve had in that living room with those people. I feel like I go ‘back’ there whenever I need to remind myself of the people I can count on – and the fact I can count on myself – despite the fact ‘there’ is not in the past because the scene I think of never actually happened. But having this place in my mind, artificial as it is, works. It manifests the reality of those emotional memories. The feeling of knowing someone was in that mental home and decided to leave it was one I am lucky enough to not have felt before – and so I was not prepared for it. So I returned to my actual home. Having spent over a month there, I can now say the memories of those times with that person are then, and hence goodbye to them. Because I am here, now.

***

Last time I was in Berlin was 20^th February. From then until now it feels like I’ve come to a completely different city; the place has woken up and come alive. The past week has seen temperatures of +20°C, which has demonstrated loud and clear why one should visit Berlin in the summer. I have been here for three days now and yet the change in life in this city is staggering.

I chose to spend two of the last three days in Köpenick given that it is both nearby and a beautiful part of Berlin. The Altstadt, sitting on a peninsular where the rivers Dahme and Spree meet and flow on through Schlesisches Tor into Berlin Mitte has cafés and bars many of which have terraces facing the water. Behind them is the Rathaus – the town hall. Further along the bank is Schloss Köpenick, a small palace built by the Hohenzollerns in 16^th Century to serve as a hunting lodge, and where Frederick the Great was imprisoned as a young man by his father, Frederick William I, for desertion.

There is something just very calming and relaxed about Köpenick that I appreciate significantly, whether it’s the small streets that are lively but not busy, the cafés which aren’t large and impersonal, the rowers on the river silently gliding past the bank where I’m seated, the wooden benches with all kinds of people seated on them, spending their warm April afternoons playing music and lazily chatting with their friends. There is no urgency in Köpenick, no sense that time is running out. In contrast to London, the change is appreciated. Even in my hometown, Harlow, things are far more urgent, busy and hurried. While this can be appreciated as well of course, I felt on my return to Berlin the relaxed cool breeze of Köpenick was a welcome change from the roaring oven that is London and its periphery.

In Europe, we work to live. This separates us from the New World. And that is what I have seen in Köpenick. Those months of often meaningless toil are rewarded with a few weeks, a weekend or an afternoon of being able to simply relax and enjoy ourselves; to savour the essence of life, and do the things that we enjoy, whether that is nothing, something ordinary, or something extraordinary. The café is a natural setting: sipping freshly brewed coffee; sitting on a terrace overlooking the broad stretch of water where the Dahme and Spree meet, and beyond, the human conglomeration on the far bank; savouring a slice of Altstadttorte freshly baked that day. Reading whatever managed to fit into your pocket as you left the house. Breathing in the air and absorbing the sounds coming from the surrounding vicinity. Taking our time: a favourite pastime of mine whenever the occasion permits, and also when some would say it doesn’t.