Sugar Shaker

Weeping Ink

When I get all steamed up hear me shout: Tip me over and pour me out!

Hat

USB

Twisty Vio

O Saft

Thanks to my teenage love
Guzzling orange juice
Straight from the bottle
Makes me feel like a boy.
Extracting two Euros
From my tight jeans pocket
For the Kaiser counter-cutie
Takes longer than flicking off the lid.
Before I’m even out the door
The bottle is angled at my tonsils
And sloshes down my chin.
Was never good at multitasking.
But I take it like a man
Wipe it off
With the back of my arm
And rub it on my shirt.

Kafisatz

Coffee addiction quenched for now, I am able to give due attention to short-crust K that balances on the spoon next to my hand. Pondering the remnants of foam that are encrusted on the metal, my mind retastes memories that I have recently chowed down in the past few months.
I have been travelling – capturing pictures of foreign lands and people, deleting whole roles of pictures from foreign lands and peoples, following people across countries, across seas, ravenously searching for an ‘authentic’ paella or confit’d Canard. Eating so much white bread in Spain that it was coming out of my ears and, being spectacularly and unexpectedly taken out to dinner by two Finnish business-partners in Zurich.
I have munched on perfectly juicy, slightly bloody Wild Deer and had tar-tare of Blue-Fin Tuna topped with Wasabi Mousse roll around my mouth. I have been baptised (or could have been) in a bucket of hostel-made Sangria in Barcelona and swamped my taste-buds with Tinto-Verano (a brick of red 0.60 euro Spanish wine with Coke) in Bilbao.
When comfort has been needed I have spread an essential but luscious amount of butter on Zopf and swathed that in turn with Nutella (Meret you are right, the combination just seems to work). While travelling and sleeping in a car in the south of Spain we barricaded ourselves against the wind with Bunsen-burner-cooked porridge and honey-sweetened Chai.
Oh that places I have been! They have been etched into my body via my stomach and tastebuds. The people to have been connected to my soul via the food we have shared and talked about. I can’t help it. If I can sit down with a stranger and talk food for a good half an hour, all the while making them and myself salivate, they will inevitably become a friend. In Paris, Sylvie offered up basins of Cous-cous and tagine that without a doubt made anything I ate (yes the touristy places) in Marocco look and taste like a toilet-turd. With Claudia I dreamt about Almond croissants and duck done in all ways . In Nice I bonded with someone dear to my heart by handpicking Tortellini. In Edinburgh my Haggis-cherry was plucked and delighted, and in Barcelona I drooled over pistachio ice-creams and olives with new-found friends.

Eating Eclecticism

As I sit on a 70s leather chair on the edge of a highly eccentric room I’m not sure if I’m intruding on this familial hole in the wall café. Every corner and surface holds some fascination for the eye.  There is a counter full of alcoholic bottles full of Campari and Jägermeißter, and perched on top are glass jars haphazardly stuffed with lollypops, gummies (only Haribo of course since we are in Germany) and straws. Competing for room is a coffee machine, a cash register, a kettle and a porcelain jug of milk. Next to a rusting tin sign for "Standard Motor Oil" a small blackboard, half hidden behind a speaker and candles, presents the menu with simple scribbles of a steaming coffee cup, a wedge of cheese and a little Wurst. Good morning, or more precisely good afternoon, Germany!

I am inspired to write (so I am), draw and take photographs of this random wooden jungle but the waiter informs me “Kein Photos, bitte” [No photos, please]. At first, I think he is joking but he says it again seriously. Now I feel more foreign to this space. I’m not a piece of furniture and definitely not one of the 1950s uber-posed pin-up girls that adorn the walls. It is way to cold for one, to be wearing a swimsuit on the first of November in Berlin (pinch and a punch by the way). I am not regular enough to be jovially welcomed into the warm clutter as others are who hobble in off the street or skip in, holding hands, like the caricature goods painted on the wall with names such as ‘Mehl’, ‘Senf’, and ‘Tofu’, wander off the street. I am alien to this country. I stutter the words, am embarrassed by my limited German that seems to my ears to only consist of ‘danke’.

Yet, I want to make this place my home. The coffees are just too close to my apartment and way to good to shrug off and move on from. They are creamy, sweet without the addition of sugar and have the perfect size cap of foam on top. I do not even miss chocolate shavings that I usually crave and even request more of at other places. I could make this a romantic ritual for one, complete with candlelight… but for now, I will console myself with another dive into coffee-goodness.