Berlin. Sunshine. Bits of it, anyway.

I drag Wilken out of bed at 11.30 (luckily I packed the cattle prod) to visit the Berlin flea market, or one of the many, anyway. Turns out everyone else in Berlin has the same idea, and we all have a merry time of treading on each other’s heels.

Even Wilken gets the hang of it after a while, once he’s recovered from the grave mistake of asking “What precisely are you looking for, anyway?” (I don’t know till I’ve found it, do I?) Naturally enough, I turn a few ancient books over, finger one or two dusty rugs and end up buying nothing.

Wilken, on the other hand, comes away sporting a new T-shirt that reads My Pen Is Huge (get it?) and a 1937 Mickey Mouse cartoon which appears to have been sold for a song but, as the inside back cover so tellingly indicates, was in fact printed in 1985.

The evening starts out rather pinkish, and I don’t mean metaphorically. We catch the S-Bahn to Rosenthalerplatz station and amble the length of Rosenthalerstrasse to a restaurant in the Rosenhof that is, fittingly, decked out in pink. I have a pink margherita with my scampi linguini that itself is arrestingly sauced in pink.

Then we walk two blocks, four flights of stairs and over a short overpass – I don’t remember the colour of any of these – to get to a comedy show where we are seated in, um, blue chairs.