Weekly digest, Dec. 18th 2022

Dear Reader,

It has been a month of surreal news stories. Last week we had an alleged coup plot with a cast fit for an Agatha Christie novel. This week one of the world’s largest fish tanks exploded in a Berlin hotel, ejecting swarms of exotic fish into the foyer and onto the street outside.

For anyone who isn’t aware of what I’m talking about, the Aquadom aquarium, a vertical cylinder in the courtyard of the Radisson Blu hotel at Berlin’s Alexanderplatz, collapsed in the middle of the night.

The power of the explosion must have been enormous. The explosion unleashed a million litres of water and was registered on a nearby earthquake seismometer.

I spent Friday morning interviewing people at the scene. One man who owned a penthouse in the same building told me he’d been ripped out of his sleep by the sound of twisting metal. His first thought was that the ferris wheel at the Alexanderplatz Christmas market had collapsed. It was only when he looked out the window that he realised the soun…