One of my least favourite things about Berlin is the unavoidable hibernation over the winter. Come springtime, everyone explodes from their lairs, and during the summer you just about manage to fool yourself into thinking that life is not really so miserable: you start hanging out with people, sitting outside, enjoying prolonged barbecue sessions in one of Berlin’s many parks… But then September or October gradually but unavoidably enshroud the city in drizzling darkness and most people seek refuge indoors, where they remain until the end of April or thereabout. So you once again confine yourself to your quarters only to lose contact with everybody and emerge seven months later a cabin-fever-riddled hermit with atrophied muscles, pale, sunken-eyed, vitamin deficient, disillusioned, dazed and confused.
On the other hand I’ve recently come up with a working theory that the seven-month annual hibernation is what keeps this city together and preserves its remarkably easy-going, tolerant attitude: because during the short five months when the general population is actually able to emerge from their holes and people can even spend some free time in physical proximity to each other are not enough for everyone to start getting on each other’s nerves badly enough for armed conflicts to break out. I suspect that, as far as Berlin is concerned, any further climate change may result in riots and bloodshed.
Winter hibernation it was for us, then. After we’d returned to Berlin in the beginning of February, we promptly collected all the paperwork we had to send to Tenerife, got it officially translated into Spanish, proofread, numbered, dated, collated, initialled, stamped, signed, sealed, bound, and dispatched. Then we waited, but the winter of 2017 was one of the dreariest we’d experienced in Berlin. Our attempts at spending the time relatively productively were made extremely hard due to our constant fretting over how everything would, or would not, turn out. Going over all the details of the intricate plan and its various stages repeatedly only made everything worse, as we were unable to do anything at all until the paperwork went through. I had planned to make use of the downtime and finish my next novel and upcoming Cynicism Management album, but soon established that I had zero inspiration and subzero energy for either, so I caved in and simply postponed both of these (suddenly comparatively trivial) endeavours until further notice, rather than keep obsessing over my inability to get my ass in gear. I figured that finishing both the novel and the album by the end of this year would have to be good enough (not that anyone but myself is eagerly waiting for either), but I have yet to see whether I’ll actually manage that.
It took the mail three weeks to get to Tenerife, probably by a combination of horse, carriage, and single-masted sloop. By that time we had got seriously nervous, as the online tracking only registered the mail as “dispatched from Slovenia”, and then nothing at all for several weeks. Finally we received confirmation that the forest-murdering heap of documents reached the real estate agent’s office in Santa Cruz, only to be forwarded to the bank’s real estate department’s head office in Madrid. Back to the horse-drawn mail coach and rowboat it was, then. At this point one may be tempted to ask why we hadn’t sent the paperwork to Madrid in the first place… Well, actually we had proposed this, but had been told that the mail had to go through the Canary Islands office, for whatever arcane reason.
It took another two months or so for Madrid to digest the information. Then they demanded that we sign yet another form, but at this point they reconciled themselves with scanners and PDF files rather than resort to stamped, sealed and bound parchment scrolls, so it only took them about a week to analyse and scrutinise the e-mail.
When everything was confirmed, we were finally able to give the required three-month notice to the owner of our apartment in Berlin and book plane tickets to Tenerife yet again.
