Once every two or three weeks, I wake up feeling like I have been run over by a bus, and strangely weak. Whether that is one of the many potential side effects of the hormone blockers which it has been recommended I take for five years after the mastectomy, or just a getting-old thing that would happen anyway, it sometimes means a change of plans.

I had been signed up for a 17 km walk – with Empor Berlin, led by Fritz Heiber – in a loop from Kratzeburg, involving leaving home shortly before 8.00 in the morning, and going straight to an internations.org dinner in Alt-Moabit on the way home. I had been looking forward to it (and the destination will be added to my list of places to go to some other time) but it suddenly seemed insurmountable, and I granted myself a slow morning and instead visited the Isa Gentzken retrospective in Neue Nationalgalerie in the afternoon and took my camera on a slow amble through Tiergarten on the way to dinner in Indian vegetarian restaurant Agni in Moabit (with internations.org, organised by Rakesh Singh, and the food would turn out to be very good indeed).

Tiergarten is lush right now – probably having profited from the relatively heavy rainfalls, and although parks are not really my thing, I was wondering why I do not visit more often, given the size, diversity, and relative proximity to my home. My mind was also cast back to last summer, before everything went sideways, and we had some very hot days so I took Max there very early in the morning on his longer daily walks and we saw all kinds of wildlife which you do not see later in the morning. It is a nightmare on weekends, with all the bikes and e-rollers whizzing around all over the place, even on paths which should really only be for pedestrians, but during the day on a weekday, it is quite lovely.