I was right to be paranoid about the 240 euro bike. Leaving it outside my Prenzlauer Berg abode, in a bike stand for two weekend nights, I return to find it keeled over. After unlocking it, I find the back wheel has buckled. Bang goes my 150 euros resale.

Not so. The bike man at spezialrad.de bike shop, or fahrradstadt, is ever-so helpful, and immediately pushes it back into shape, studiously twisting and reprogramming the spokes to engineer the perfect turning circle.

He tells me that at weekends, some kids have an excess of “criminal energy”, and it has become a bit of a sport for them to stamp on bikes lying prone, and alone, in stands such as mine. It’s a mild crime compared to the unruly, armed feral youths in London, for whom the vandalism of stamping on a bike wheel is but fare for toddlers.

Unfortunately, and rather embarrassingly, I have cycled through some dog scheisse – an everyday hazard in Berlin, especially given the size of the dogs and the fact they run free, nicht lead. The wheel is turning right before Stefan’s very nose.

He recounts a tale, about how one day he had been biking through puddles, only to get home and smell dog scheisse. He checked his clothes, his boots, but no trace of the evil dirt. Dreizig minuten later,  still somewhat befuddled, he looked in the mirror and spotted a fleck  right under his nose.

“I’d had my mudguards removed and it sprayed up … I always call them scheisseguards now.”

The anecdote was as free as the repair job. He didn’t charge me. “Don’t worry,” he says. “Life’s too short. See you Thursday.”

This man is a God. He can probably walk on water, as well as cycle on it.

* Photo courtesy of artsy Lucy Hull

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If there’s one thing liable to put you off smoking, it’s waking up in the morning, ambling onto the balcony, lighting up a tab and staring at a funeral parlour, full-on in the face. The coffins, all oak and mahogany, almost rubbing their handles gleefully as they stare blankly at you.

It’s depressing, though not as depressing as waking up at 7.30am each day to the sound of drilling and banging, and a balcony on Falkensteinstrasse, Kreuzberg, that resembles a war zone; albeit a war zone ensconced in scaffolding.

Not just scaffolding. It seems the works does not involve repainting, per se, but insulation. The Turkish builders are lining the facier with six-inch thick mottled grey and white polystyrene, cemented to the wall and then cut away, before facing with plaster and filling with some sort of insulating goo. I wonder what colour they will eventually paint it. I rather like the mottled hue; it’s rather now, so textile.

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Christina has just admonished me for trying to take the empty soda bottles, along with our plates, back into the self-service restaurant on Falckensteinstrasse. It’s not a telling-off, per se, rather an explanation.

“Leave them on the table; people will come along and collect them – they make some money on recycling.”

Who will? “Homeless people, students, poor people,” she says matter of factly. “They redeem the deposit paid on purchase.”

How much, I enquire,  a change of career perhaps imminent?
“Anything between 15 cents and 50 cents,” she says.

Cripes, the pfennig drops. That’s why you see people walking around, accompanied by the steady clink-clink of bags of bottles, either rummaging through bins or collecting bottles off tables or pavements. You only have to grab a few bottles each day to buy lunch. Well, 20.

It makes one wonder why all societies don’t do this. For one, it helps the less better off – “students, homeless, poor people” – scrape a living; it may even deter begging – you don’t see much begging in Berlin, mainly people coming onto trains and selling the German equivalent of the Big Issue, all preceded by some explanatory spiel (spiel that seems to be rewarded with everyone digging deep into their pockets).

The scheme also promotes sustainable living. People take their bottles back to the shops that sold them, and they get rewarded for it. Feral youths in the UK could do this instead of mugging people. Everyone’s a winner.

We had the system in the UK in the 1970s, with deposits paid on big bottles of drinks, such as RWhites and Corona – you kept the bottles and got the cash back. It no longer exists, though I can’t fathom why not.

* Nein green bottles, sitting on the wall? Should be nicht, or kein, I think boss!

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Where were you when you heard the news? Berlin, Schlesische Strasse, Kreuzberg.

I was enjoying a cold Beck’s, outside the uber-cool Mijkowka bar on Schlesischer, interrupted at regular intervals by trendy drunks shambling back home from Freischwimmer. Every 20 minutes one would amble, nay stagger past, saying: “Michael ist tot, Michael ist tot!”

Many seemed upset, most didn’t. God knows what will happen when David Hasselhof goes toes up!

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