Fly-tipping + self-ID + Syrian mayor

Dear Reader,

• You didn’t hear from me for most of last week as I was busy moving house. Creeping towards middle age and more concerned with baby bottles than beer bottles, I’ve decamped with my family from hip Kreuzberg to the bourgeois west end of Berlin. The move itself was an interesting character study in the various faces of the German capital. Anything that we didn’t take with us, we left out on the street in front of our Kreuzberg flat - standard practice in recycling-conscious neighbourhood. Within hours everything from books, to a broken pair of skis, to a kitchen cupboard had all disappeared. Sometimes Kreuzberg’s obsession with getting things for free takes on strange dimensions, though. Unable to find a buyer for a clunky, old table, we put it on Ebay labelled ‘zu verschenken’. A woman soon snapped it up. Instead of picking it up herself, she sent round a transport company. Their fee? €100. The people of Kreuzberg have no shame about picking something up from the street if i…