It was a baking 26 degrees yesterday and when that kind of heat hits Berlin there's only one place to head – the lakes. There are several that lie in clusters to the East and West of the city and are easily reachable by public transport. So about a 40 minute journey and I was sitting by Schlachtensee:

For such a peaceful place its name seems odd as 'Schlacht' is the German for 'battle'. However its name has its roots not in the German but the Slavic tongue, coming either from the word 'slaty' which means 'golden-coloured', the word 'solt' which means 'swamp' or 'bog' or the word 'slat' which rather mundanely refers to the woodwork in a bank reinforcement. I like to think it's the first.     

Nipples

After a long break from blogging I was compelled to write a post this morning about something that has changed my life - breast cream. 

Often having dry lips, I have nearly always carried some incarnation of lip salve with me to slather over my oral labia. Recently however I've been finding that my lips were cracking and bleeding and neither blistex nor butter could remedy the situation.

So the other night over dinner I complained of this fact to a friend of mine who gleefully produced a pot of light viscous jelly. Is that vaseline? 'Nope' came the answer 'breast cream.' Her mum had recommended it to her she said. 'Don't ask'. Sceptical, yet willing to try anything that could help, I smeared the thick, odourless stuff over my lips.

I'd been told that it doesn't take immediate effect so you have to wait, but then 'your lips will be softer than they have ever been before'. So I waited. And waited. Then I fell asleep. The next morning I awoke and, lo and behold, I had the most luscious lips that I have ever had in my life. It truly is miracle stuff. I now have my own tube of breast cream and only need to put it on twice a day as it's so effective. Key ingredient is the lanolin in it apparently. But let's not stop at the cosmetic benefits of Brustwarzensalbe because there's something interesting to be gleaned from the words themselves.

The word Brustwarze means 'nipple' and it's composed of two separate words: Brust which as is clear to see, means 'breast', and Warze which means 'wart' and sometimes 'verruca'. Its full abject effect quickly becomes clear when put into everyday situations. Let's take a breast feeding mother for example, who complains to her friend “My breast warts are really sore from little Friedrich suckling on them too ferociously”. Not nice. Or a man who intimates to his lover, “I really like it when you play with my breast warts”. No, no thank you. I've always maintained that German can be a beautiful language, but I'm afraid when it comes to all things nipples, it's best to leave the Deutsch out of it.