Dear Varsity,

Berlin makes strange bedfellows.

Nikita Khrushchev treated the city as “the testicles of the West. Whenever I want to make the West scream, I squeeze on Berlin.” Nowadays this manouevre evinces nothing more than a murmur of pleasure; but Berlin remains the world capital of below-the-belt carryings-on, and possibly the only place where a perfectly normal boy celebrates moving into a new flat by organising an orgy. Somewhere on one of my nightly rummages in the knackersack of Europe I met Lotte and her boyfriend, Gary.

She was a simple Bavarian girl running away from her job in the ball-bearing factories of Munich; he was an ex-Fascist ex-drug-addict with a string of fare-evasion convictions to his name, who’d promised to change his ways. Together they tried to start a new life in a little flat in the heart of Neukölln with an adopted tortoiseshell kitten. But would the shadows of their past return?

Well something happened, because they broke up last night. Probably it was because none of us had had any dinner. Anyway, Gary ran off with a girl called Greta or something and my best string of pearls, and Lotte and I ended up sharing an empty U-Bahn carriage back towards Gleisdreieck. Which is the bombsite I live on, named after the triangle of railway-lines that cross it, its only landmark.

The carriages are horribly bumpy. Rattle your insides about, and they’re so very, very yellow. Lotte pulled out an unmarked bottle from some unexpected recess.

“Drink this. All of it.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. You must drink all of it. I’m going to tell you something.”

She was insistent, so I drank it, and felt even, even worse. I retched.

“Are you OK?”

“No.” I felt my insides rising. “What did you want to tell me?”

“Why Gary ran off.”

There was a horrible inevitability to it all. “Why?”

“I used to be a man.”

And that was the point where I vomited.

I don’t know what to draw from that particular episode. Except that Khrushchev was probably right about Berlin. Rather more people than you think here have at some point, had testicles.

Otherwise entirely unedifying,

Ali