One of the few things I miss about Denmark – apart from my brother and his family, and the proximity to the sea – is the relative honesty. I am not saying everybody in Denmark is pure as the driven snow, and that there are no bad apples, but growing up, I was practically brainwashed to believe that lying – for whatever reason – Is. Not. An. Option. Period. It just makes life easier when you can, on the whole, believe what others are telling you, and vice versa.

Not that making life easier is a thing in Germany. Just look at the garbage disposal system designed to be as cumbersome as possible – a small thing but a daily annoyance. The door to the general garbage bins binds, and has done all the time I have been living here, to the point that I am sometimes unable to open it, even when doing the shoulder-and-all-of-my-not-unsubstantial-weight-on-it thing. To dispose of paper/carton and bottles in separate bins, you have to drag the bins out in order to ease the stuff in, and then push the bin back in. Although I am old, I am not that weak yet, but I still ask myself almost every day what country and which century I am in when things are designed to be so difficult to everybody other than the youngest and strongest.

Anyway, that was a side track. So I was not overly used to being lied to, and I am also blessed with a healthy skepticism, but I have still been lied to, often in small matters which I have noted and forgotten, and often in matters that I did not see at the time, just realised later, and either added them to my mental list of people who are mendacious and unreliable, or brushed them off as not important . I will use the example of the renovations next door to make my point.

Far be it for me to glorify Denmark (after all, there are many reasons I am not living there …) but had that type of renovation been carried out in Denmark, I am quite sure that:

• They would not have told us that the part of the scaffolding which is almost ON our balconies would be there for six to eight months, when they obviously knew it would be at least four times that amount of time;
• They would not have told us that our balconies would not be affected, when in my case that could not have been further from the truth (the other balconies, all directly underneath mine, have been suffering from lack of light and the claustrophobia of having the scaffolding there but they have not to my knowledge been constantly plagued by thick layers of dust, rubble falling on to balcony and furniture, cigarette burns on one of my chairs, a severe reduction of sunlight compared to what they normally get, etc. etc., all chronicled in this category of posts. Now for almost two years and counting.
• They would not have muttered about financial compensation just to appease us temporarily, unless they actually intended to pay it, which, as there has been no mention of that since the meeting where it was told to us verbally (that is the other thing here: whatever you do or say, make sure there is no documentation ……) early in 2019, that was obviously also just to make us go home without asking uncomfortable questions. Not that it matters since nothing will bring back two, soon-to-be three ruined summers. I know that to many, a balcony is not that important, but it is to me, and as I have mentioned before, it was one of the main reasons I bought this flat. Had it been smaller, or not on top and normally flooded in light, I would probably not have bought this flat.

I now know why there is so much distrust and suspicion in this society. It is because everybody knows that they and everybody else lie whenever that is the most convenient solution in the moment. Just something to get used to.

Schön & Sever, Cresco Capital Group, Victoriahöfe, GBP Architekten