Spring Fever

It’s Wednesday 26^th February, it’s quarter past two in the afternoon and I’m sitting with the balcony door open listening to the sounds of the street.  The weather has been monumentally beautiful, nothing like anything I’ve experienced before at this time of year in Berlin.  The sky is a clear, luminous blue and there’s just a mere hint of a chill in the breeze to suggest that it is, after all, February and not April.

I’m just beginning to get over a virus that has knocked the stuffing out of me and kept me inactive for the past nine days.  I’ve no idea what it was, it just arrived last Monday morning in the form of a racking cough – one of those awful dry coughs that won’t let you get any sleep – and a debilitating lethargy.

For five days I never left the flat and by Thursday I was beginning to think that I belonged in the hospital.  I was incapable of even the slightest effort, to the point that even reading left me tired out and in the end I couldn’t even be bothered to pick up a book anyway.

So I spent all of last week dragging myself between bed and sofa.  I saw so much of the winter Olympics that for a while, every time I closed my eyes I saw people on skis.  I acquired a rudimentary understanding of sports that, until a few weeks ago, I hadn’t even known existed.  It reminds me of when I was seventeen and laid up with chicken pox whilst a snooker tournament was on.  I’d never seen a game of snooker up to that point but by the time I was back on my feet I felt that I knew the game inside out.

On Saturday, I took my first steps outside, venturing out to the Kaiser’s round the corner – a very small step, but the day before I wouldn’t have been able to contemplate it.  On Sunday I managed to get a little further.  We walked across Prenzlauer Berg as far as Zionskirchplatz where we stopped for coffee and cake.  My appetite hadn’t been very great all week so I did my heroic best with the cake but I was just glad to be able to get out, to watch the people sitting in the sunshine, reading their Sunday papers, walking their kids and dogs, meeting friends, generally to-ing and fro-ing.  After a leisurely hour, we walked slowly back, meandering across Helmholtzplatz which was thronging with people making the most of the outside tables at the cafes around the square.  Even though it tired me, the walk helped me feel connected once again to the amazing, irrepressible life of the city.

On Monday evening I managed to get down to Soho House (luckily the tram takes me door-to-door) to see Julia Franck, author of the prize-winning ‘The Blind Side of the Heart’, talking about her latest book.  I took a glass of white wine and nestled into a soft deep leather armchair and listened as she read an extract from the new book and spoke about her inspiration for both it and The Blind Side.  It was a lovely evening but I left almost straight away as I was beginning to feel fatigued and didn’t want to set myself back.

I’m getting there very slowly, venturing out for a daily walk.  I’m nowhere near able to contemplate getting on the bike just yet but the continued glorious weather is doing a lot to lift my spirits, and that, to me, is half the battle won.