Totally Hooked

After successfully giving up alcohol (temporarily, anyhow), quitting cigarettes (ten years ago) and limiting my coffee intake to a maximum two cups per day, my addiction-free lifestyle has hit the rocks rather badly. I blame my flat-mate Alex. Ever since we've lived here, we've been enjoying free entry to Club Alex, a handbag-house spectacular staged regularly in our kitchen by Pedro Alejandro and his trusty laptop. Many's the time I have wiggled my hips and performed abominably cheesy dance moves over the simmering pasta, little suspecting the ambush that lay ahead.

A moment of geeky interest in the source of Alex's extensive gay disco repertoire produced an enthusiastic response from Alex. "It's Spotify!" He told me "You should try it".

The only previous reference to Spotify I'd come across was in an online news article, which I'd downloaded purely for teaching purposes because it had so many excellent examples of the Passive Voice ("to be" plus past participle, example sentence: I was arrested for apalling dance moves by the Disco Police).

So, seeking a little music while at my mum's in France and needing a change from our over-familiar CD and MacBook collection, I Facebooked Alex in Mexico (really, this has become very geeky all of a sudden, I do apologise) and asked for a link and invite to the Spotify site. Alex obliged almost immediately, so I registered, downloaded the software and before you could say "gay disco" I was clicking my way merrily through a forest of tracks.

Being a slightly obsessive music lover anyway, I was instantly hooked. Loads and loads of tracks from a huge variety of genres and eras just a double-click away. Because the audio is streamed rather than downloaded, all you need is a half-decent internet connection to rampage through the available catalogue at will.

Which is exactly what I've been doing at every conceivable opportunity. After a year without my previous favoured provider of new and half-forgotten music, BBC 6Music, it's been bliss to feast my ears on a host of fresh stuff. In the days of yore I was a dedicated user of the Napster website (before it got legalised) and although I downloaded loads of tracks without paying for them, my monthly CD bill went through the roof as my discoveries fuelled my desire to possess more and more tunes. On balance, I'd say the record industry gained much more from me than it lost in those Napster days. I was bereft when it had to close down and none of the other file-sharing, peer-to-peer, thoroughly lawless internet data sharing processes have ever quite done it for me in the same way.

The beauty of this one is that it's perfectly legal, as well as being free (if you don't mind putting up with the occasional advert - you can pay for a commercial-free service if you want) and although it's all streaming audio, you can grab the tracks you like and stick them in playlists rather like the ones on iTunes, so you can find them for instant gratification whenever you need to.

My only worry is if something happens to our internet connection. Without my constant supply of new music I think there might be serious repercussions to my health. Cold turkey, the lot. I'd probably get the shakes and start gibbering or something. It's all getting rather worrying, actually.

Round Berlin (for a fridge)

It shouldn't be possible, but today we managed to drive across the centre of Berlin, West to East then East to West, twice. I say this because just imagine trying to go across London or Paris. Not fun, not easy. But in Germany, crossing the capital city (population 3.5 million) was a bit of a cinch.

The reason for our grand traverse was that we had a couple of tasks to try to achieve today before we got on with the business of being tourists. Firstly we had to go to Steglitz to try to get our MacBook fixed - it's developed an annoying line down the middle of the screen. This meant an 8am departure from our campsite in Potsdam in order to be there when the shop opened at 10am. Now our experience trying to find glass for Sheena should have taught us a thing or too about how chains work. We had been to the Mac store in Amsterdam who had told us, after examining our laptop, that we needed a new hard disk, which would take a week to order. As we were leaving Amsterdam the next day this wasn't an option. However, we struck on a plan and with the help of my German friend Franzi, we had telephoned the Mac store in Berlin a week ago with this information, asking them to order in the relevant part ready for us. Unfortunately the store assistant (who hadn't seen our laptop) we spoke to decided he knew better than the technician in Amsterdam (who had seen our laptop), and said it wasn't a disk problem. Be there at 10am Monday and we should be able to get it done by Thursday. We were there at 10am Monday. "Oh it's probably a disk problem. This may take between a week and ten days." We should have known! Anyway rather than faff around any more, we've decided just to put up with the line - it only really impinges on our ability to watch films.

Our second task - to find a new fridge for Sheena, our previous one having expired in Lubeck - was succesfully accomplished. After a quick, google in German - an interesting experience, rather like attempting to buy clothes for somebody you've never met - we found a likely looking caravan centre. The extreme opposite side of the city. It being 11am we decided to go for it. We were there by 12pm. Driving in Berlin you see is simply a matter - based on one day's evidence - of surfing a massive green wave down long, straight 6-lane streets with amazing names like Karl-Marx Allee and Strasse Parisienne Commune, full of Eastern Bloc block housing. Once we got there and bought our new fridge (or rather, electric cool box) we realised that the campsite we wanted to go to was back the other side of town, in Spandau. Back we drove, this time going right past the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag and through the Tiergarten. Amazing.

You couldn't do it in London. In fact, 20 years ago, you couldn't have done it in Berlin. Perhaps that's why it's so easy now - the Germans are making up for all those years when you couldn't go West-East without passing Checkpoint Charlie (which I think we drove through) and are now determined to make it as easy as possible to traverse Berlin. It's bizarre to think the journey we did today in just a couple of hours would have been inconceivable 20 years ago. A strange notion for all, I suspect, excepting perhaps the residents of Jerusalem.