My last full day in Berlin, an afternoon adventure with someone who takes rather splendid photographs herself of derelict amusement parks and summer berries… to Pottsdam, and a vast gallery pockmarked occasionally with bullets and shrapnel from the war. gute aussichten – junge deutsche fotografie was mostly quite engaging, some beautiful photography by recent graduates who understand what they are doing and have an artistic sensibility. I returned to the photos of Kazakhstan peasants because, well… it is Kazakhstan. The sheen of metallic playground toys in sepulchral gloom also. A documentary essay of a hotel or guesthouse in former East Germany, near Leibniz I think was well partial to my taste for decay.

But innerwald, a series in the Tropenhaus in the Zoologisches Museum, Bauernhof by ___ oh such a delight. I wanted to lick and scratch the dirty, warm glass, smear the moist dirt a little, humidity and fecund growth, then trace with my eyes for a long time the trails of what unknown sliding, perambulating creatures, threads like unravelled cells. And the monstrous shadows, an ogre looming over a bed of hay, a clutch of twigs caught mid-startled shock in the light, geraniums that seem most unfriendly, the penumbra of a bison’s fur and horn.

Certainly to visit Berlin’s Zoological Gardens upon my return.