The new ‘breast cancer awareness’ round robin is back and this time it’s even more abstract and pointless than ever.

The idea is, you update your status with a place name, mapped to your month of birth and the day on which you were born is the number of months you’re going to spend at said place. Apparently, the last game about the bra colour or where you leave your handbag “made national news and reminded everyone why we’re doing this and helped raise awareness”.

The great new addition this year is that you reveal your date of birth (not something that everyone wants to do) and make people worry that you’re moving away- what an innovative way of increasing awareness of breastcancer! Not to mention the fact that all of this must be kept secret from the men. Who can also get breast cancer. Didn’t think of that one, did you?

Seriously though, I’ve tried to see the point and have wracked my brains over how that message landing in my inbox and me updating my status accordingly is going to raise awareness of breast cancer in any other way than making me aware that breast cancer exists and confusing my Facebook friends. The conclusion: A headache.

Just as I am aware of breast cancer, I’m also aware that homelessness exists: I see homeless people all over the place in Berlin. It doesn’t however mean that I’m going to do anything positive to help those people unless I am given the opportunity / shown how. And that is exactly what is missing in this message. Where’s a link to somewhere I can donate? I know breast cancer exists. I have breasts. What does that mean for me?

Actions count. Updating your Facebook status does not.

On that note, here are some links for information on breastcancer prevention and further ways you can help raise funds:

http://www.breastcancercare.org.uk/

http://www.breakthrough.org.uk/

http://www.breastcancercampaign.org/

http://www.againstbreastcancer.org.uk/

And here we are, stepping boldly into 2012: The apartment’s a mess, the dishwasher needs emptying, I need a haircut and the Mother-In-Law arrives on Monday.

Now where did I put that bottle of vodka?

Happy New Year, everyone!

Of course, Philipp being a typical child, wants everything that other kids have in their hands. There may have been a whole pool full of balls, he still wanted the ones that the precious and delicate little girl had in her hands at that moment. The mother rushed to her daughter’s aid, shouted at Philipp, grabbed the balls from his hands, gave them to her daughter and sat down again.*

BOY WAS I ENRAGED. Heart thumping against my ribcage, I couldn’t even muster up a sentence in German, never mind give her the tongue-lashing she deserved. A few deep breaths later and things were going relatively well until, once again, big, boisterous Philipp shoved a little too quickly past the girl and she fell over. Onto her bottom. And didn’t cry.

Again, Super(moronic)mum rushed to her daughter’s aid, picking her little defenceless baby up and shouting at poor Philipp. At this point, I entered something I call ‘Assi-mode’ (Assi= something like chav/trailertrash) and shouted back that there was absolutely no need to scold in badass slang German (which I learned from my wonderful German man and probably some hiphop that I heard).

In reality, I wanted to stab her to death with a cake fork like a real Assi. Also in reality, I may have made a few grammatical errors and not shouted as loud as I might have done in my mother tongue. Nevertheless, the thumping of my heart and curtain of red rage before me was a brand new experience: parent rage. So beware, parents of Berlin. DO NOT CROSS THE LADY WITH THE CAKE FORK!

*Schoolgirl error: if she had any experience with older children, she would have known to put exactly the same thing into his hands and say calmly that we don’t take from others.

There’s no point in complaining- it is afterall the season to be jolly, so we set about reinforcing our own Christmas traditions that we started last year..

According to the German Christmas rulebook (or at least the rulebook according to H!), Christmas begins on the 24th December when darkness falls. Dinner is prepared and eaten  and then gifts are exchanged. Because the British Christmas rulebook is written slightly differently, we decided last year to split the gifts into German and English: German gifts are opened on Christmas Eve after our non-traditional Christmas meal (accompanied by a little British tradition: Crackers) and English gifts on the morning of 25th.

Last year, we also ate another ‘special’ meal on 25th but as H was working, P and I went to visit some friends of ours, who were wonderful hosts and kept us fed, watered and entertained late into the afternoon, though I did have a momentary wobble thinking about missing my Mam’s sausage stuffing!

Today is Boxing Day and H has the day off so perhaps we’ll take P’s new bike for a little spin and get some exercise after all the food and sweets we’ve eaten over the last 3 days!

I’d be interested to hear what other people’s favourite, missed, multicultural or just plain odd Christmas traditions are…

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Just because Christmas is nearing doesn’t mean it’s all glitter and glühwein though: This weekend, a very bright star went dark: Joan Swift, an exceptionally brave, strong and inspirational woman lost her battle against cancer. I didn’t know Joan so well in person but she touched my life like that of many others with her harrowing story, her immense strength of character and over all, her will to survive and make the best of let’s say absolutely shitty circumstances.

I don’t think I can do the life of one person much justice with a blog post but I’m going to ask if maybe my readers could perhaps cough up some of the cash they might have otherwise spent on a couple of pints / glasses of wine this Christmas as a donation to Willow Wood Hospice, where Joan spent her final days.

Be kind to eachother, people. Life is so, so precious.

The internets said that to do this, you bake a cake, destroy said cake, whack in something gooey, form balls and freeze so that balls remain, well,  ball-y. However, this was a whole load of faff, in which a mother of 1 with a part-time job just doesn’t have time to indulge. Hence, my new toy!

It’s a Babycakes cake pop maker. No babies are harmed in the baking of cake pops, though they shouldn’t get too close to the machine as it gets VERY HOT indeed.

My first batch unfortunately stuck a bit to the non stick (sic) plates but the 2nd turned out really well after I greased up the machine. I decorated them with some yellow Candy Melts and sprinkles. To make the Candy Melts more liquidy, I added some Palmin Soft (coconut oil)

This was just a little experiment so they aren’t stunning but they taste bloody lovely!

I’m looking forward to getting creative with more balls of cake when I return from a little pre-Christmas break with Philipp and my family in the UK, armed with some more cool baking supplies. Watch this space!

The worst part of this is the heartstopping realisation that I, being the dimwit that I am left my toasty-warm, down-filled winter coat at my brother’s in England…

Anyone living in or passing through or visiting Prenzlauer Berg may have noticed recently that Kastanienallee is a bit of a building site at the moment. This is apparently because the Bezirksamt (or whoever’s in charge of such things) wants to make the road wider to allow cars to park on either side. Seems to make sense since find a parking space in Prenzlauer Berg is like trying to find a needle in a great big haystack full of fellow angry motorists. However, for some people this is not a positive thing.

Since I don’t have a car and don’t live in Prenzlauer Berg, never mind on Kastanienallee, I don’t actually care that much about the street’s fate. What has caught my eye, though is the rise in hate towards the ‘yuppies’ and the Swabians (people from Swabia in southwest Germany) in this area. For example, this and this.

We’ve already talked about yuppies in the past but what about the Swabians? Well, apparently there’s tonnes of them here and they’re all hip, cool and stuck up and live in Prenzlauer Berg. Apparently, 34% of the Berlin population are from other parts of Germany but no bugger can say what percentage of this are from the land of the money-mad, head-up-their-arse Schwaben so I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that, based on the size of Germany, probably not that many really. Despite this, the Schwaben have managed to draw the short straw in terms of winning the hearts of the Berliners and have become the focus of their hatred instead.

Why, I don’t know- perhaps a scapegoat is needed and the notoriously hardworking, thrifty Schwaben are it and because they’re German and white, it’s ok to hate them? I wonder who’s next, the lazy, loud, lager-drinking Brits??

Ok, when the 90′s began I would’ve been 10 years old and even for a child of a working class family, living in a council house that’s a little too early to be starting with an alcohol-fuelled whoring career. When the 90′s ended, however there was a never-ending stream of booze and debauchery ohne Limit (as the Germans would so concisely say).

Actually, the debauchery was relatively limited due to various life occurances such as being a religious nutter for a couple of years and then having a very lovely boyfriend from rather early on in my uni years (Hello, Matt, if you’re reading this!) I did however have an utterly awesome time, especially in my first year at uni in Salford….

Indie clubs (Muttz Nutz- it’s the dog’s bollocks), 70′s nights, ‘rainbows’ (invented by Mr. Bird, carried forth into the world by many), Revolution vodka bar, walking round in the Mancunian rain, unable to find a taxi driver willing to take us back to Salford, cheese toasties and tea after a night out….

I think the prospect of turning 31 in a week’s time has got me wanting to relive those golden years and I would if I could- just not in the body of an almost-31-year-old-mother-of-one. I suppose it’s time to accept that the parties I now go to are ones usually taking place in the daylight hours where the most alcoholic thing present is the tiramisu and debauchery comes in the form of a frisky game of ‘pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey’!

One of those hangups has to do with food. Look, I have never in my life been considered as ‘thin’. I’ve been proportional to very overweight. At the moment, I’m the lightest I’ve been in a good while. However, now that I’m about to stop using up my extra calories making milk, thoughts of the dreaded DIET are starting to creep in.

Yo-yo dieting has been part of my life for so long that I don’t think I know what  ‘normal’ eating entails. Just the thought of dieting makes me hit the bakery section. HARD. “Must..store…calories”, says my body, having heard through the grapevine of my nervous system that my brain is thinking about putting it on a diet. *Sigh*

This is, to me, the psychology of fat.

So how do thin people think that makes them not fat? That must be the key to weightloss, the thing that the diet books are missing, surely? Thin people maybe don’t obsess about food as much because they know that cookie isn’t going to stick around in that spot left of their bellybutton, causing an unsightly overspill when they wear those jeans so they just eat it and enjoy it and don’t feel guilty afterwards. One cookie, no guilt. Instead of 1 cookie, guilt, another cookie to compensate for the guilt and then the whole pack because once they’re gone, they’re out of sight, reach and therefore mind. The body doesn’t forget, though, does it?

Yes, I must learn the psychology of thin.