Author: C.C. O’Hanlon
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A Wolf, Crossing
When night falls in the Charente, the inhabitants of its rural villages retreat to their homes. They lock their doors and pull iron-hinged timber shutters over every window. Pale sandstone walls, grey with age, cracked and pitted, their seams of lime mortar dried to dust, become as impenetrable as medieval keeps. In the dark, you…
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A New Map of Berlin
Anton Newcombe, leader of the psych-rock band The Brian Jonestown Massacre, is one of my more unlikely acquaintances in Berlin. His recording studio is just a few blocks from my apartment, north-west of Nordbahnhof, where affluent Mitte begins to meld with the predominantly Turkish, working-class neighbourhood of Wedding. I sometimes cycle there for a late…
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Notes on Being a Father, and a Son
It was a curious experience to read for the first time, several years ago, a biography of my late father, a well-known Australian author. It was even more so when I heard the biographer talk on the radio “about getting into other people’s lives who are not there to tell the story themselves… about staying…
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A New Map of Berlin
I had no intention of bicycling in the snow, this winter. I started riding just seven months ago to stave off the inevitable corrosion of old age. I have no tolerance of cold. I grew up on the beaches of Sydney, where anything below 15ºC is thought of as gelid. In Berlin, the average winter…
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A New Map of Berlin
I am an inexperienced cyclist. As far as possible, I avoid Berlin’s main arteries and stick to the backstreets. Bike lanes constricted by car traffic, tram tracks and intrusion from roadworks and heavy construction make me nervous, so my routes are often haphazard interconnections of empty footpaths, public and corporate plätze, service alleys, old river…
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A New Map of Berlin
Fehrbelliner Strasse intersects the indefinite, porous border between the old East Berlin neighbourhoods of Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg. Forming a T with the sloping green space of Volkspark am Weinbergweg, the street is lined with pretty late 19th-century altbauten that had survived artillery and aerial bombardment at the end of World War II, and featureless…