So I am getting on the train last night at twenty two minutes past ten in Berlin, to return to Heidelberg. Sitting down and preparing myself for a long journey (rocking in to HD at 5am, to be precise) when of course, naturally, who should sit down next to me but Talkative Weirdo. I don't know if you're familiar with this particular train passenger, but he is more or less the worst possible person to have sat beside you at the beginning of a long night train - even worse than, say, Hungry Weirdo (now with rustling plastic sweet wrappers included!) or Weirdo with Sticky Outy Albows, or even Weirdo with Slight Facial Tic (this guy is actually pretty okay and even sometimes adds a note of irreverant humour to proceedings.)Talkative Weirdo or his equivalent have also sat next to me on pretty much every journey over 5 hours long I have ever been on.
I sigh and stare longingly at one of the numerous empty seats surrounding us, tantalisingly close but kept far out of reach by the large and wittering man beside me, who has left me hemmed up against the side of the train carriage. Using my coat as a make shift pillow, I squash my head up against the window and prepare for a long night.

While I am sitting wedged up against the glass with a man jabbering away incomprehensively to my left, I cast my mind back over the events of the previous few days. Too disparate to cover in this blog (although I am sure I will write something about the mauerfall at some point) but nevertheless, worth commenting on. For some reason, I am reminded of a scene I witnessed in Kreuzberg, Berlin's hippy-yuppie district (think bong shops and expensive daycare centres) which I spent an enjoyable few hours exploring earlier. A trendy hippy-yuppie father and son combo and a lady who was clearly no relation to the child were stuck in a pavement deadlock scenario, with tears and tantrums clearly only seconds away. As I endeavoured to get past and out of the blastzone postehaste without exacerbating the situation, I heard this little snippet of interaction:

"Don't you want to go to the record store with Donna?" The father bleated in a baleful American accent, to his miniscule son complete with adorable miniscule brown leather jacket. I at first assumed he was just asking his child this in that way that parents do to disguise what is actually a statement as a question in order to make the child feel more autonomous in their actions, but as he began to repeat it with the same note of desperate cajole in his voice I realised that, no, this man was actually asking his tiny son whether he wanted to go check out the record store over the road with Donna (who wasn't the mother and remained passively uninvolved, looking desperately uninterested) and, furthermore, actually expecting a response.

I think at this juncture I need to highlight just how small this little boy was. He can't have been more than 3 - he was walking on his own, just about, so probably talking a bit, but despite his rather natty little leather jacket and tiny converse I sincerely doubt he was able to fathom that particular concept of vinyl as an aspirational accessory for the hipster elite. Furthermore, even if he DID have the desire to go over to try and track down a limited edition pressing of Robert Hood's Minimal Nation, it would probably be only for the purposes of chewing on it. Now, I don't have kids and so therefore that technically renders any opinions I might have on the matter legally irrelevant, but surely it's not healthy to be giving a 3 year old the burden of responsibility for making decisions about things he neither understands or cares about? And come on, a vinyl shop has got to be pretty fucking boring for someone under 6, at least if it's one of the brightly lit, sterile, surgical school of which this one was. F*cking yuppies

Returning to Heidelberg at 5 am, I am heartened, despite my sleep deprived and travel-sick zombification, to find there is a maverick homeless man outside the station playing slightly manic 80s cheese (which incidence of, sadly escapes me) on a portable stereo.

Moral of story: we can find our own spaces everywhere. Not always where we would think, and sometimes they are full of assholes