You remember our experimentation with the Ramly burger? Well, always prepared to do the hard yards when it comes to food research, we continued our investigations. And yes, sure enough, ordering the "special" gets you the nice eggy wrapper. See above...

My other food story of this early part of the week is the "BLT salad", which is a pleasantly light, lettuce-tossed variant on the old classic. I had this at Acme Bar and Coffee on Sunday afternoon (they serve breakfast till 5 pm...), along with a cucumber and mint soda. Nice enough, but the space was terribly hot (oceans of glass, with the sun full on it) and noisy (bare boards, reverberating horrendously). So that detracted quite a bit.

It's also been a nostalgic beginning of the week.

The death of David Bowie has provoked a number of media commentaries and tributes.

Many high-school friends were fans, but what I most remember about Bowie was seeing him perform (alongside Marlene Dietrich...) in Schoener Gigolo, Armer Gigolo in West Berlin in 1978. This was a fairly dire movie, but my excitement at being in Berlin again -- Berlin! -- made me forgive the bad plotting, and just appreciate the glamour and scandal, which seemed so terribly appropriate to our setting.

This is not Berlin (it's another B: Bamberg), but it was the year:



I didn't know then, but Bowie actually lived in Berlin at the time. In 1987, he returned to help "bring down the Wall".

My other Bowie memory is having the lyrics of Nite Flights totally stuck in my brain all through the long, sleepless night flight from Novosibirsk to Moscow... The moon was huge and calm, staring at me through the plane window. And down below was an awful lot of Russia.