It is early afternoon on Saturday and we follow a cobbled road into the Volkspark Friedrichshain. It is a driveway to the hospital, twisting one way and then the other, flanked by ornate lamps. The park was laid out in 1848 and the hospital, the first of its kind in the city, was opened twenty years later, and it is not hard to imagine a rudimentary ambulance pulled by horses, rolling clackety-clack across the cobblestones towards the brick entrance gate and the hope of the hospital beyond.

So many of Berlin’s most interesting sights are tied up in that period of rapid growth in the second half of the nineteenth century, and walking along with the park on one side and the high walls of the hospital on the other, it is very easy to picture how it might have been, the city growing rapidly, swallowing the fields and villages surrounding it through rapid growth… until the spell is broken by a gang of orange-shirted “stags”, who turn the corner pushing a stolen shopping trolley laden with beer bottles and dripping from melting ice. We will see them again, in the beer garden, and then later, a few of their number AWOL, hanging out in a bus stop and singing German football songs at the cars passing by in the street.

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Wedding, oh Wedding. Sometimes when I think my neighbourhood has no more surprises for me, another one pops up in a place where you least expect it. The Badstraße, the street that is the extension of Brunnenstraße and runs down from Humboldthain and the Gesundbrunnen station towards Pankstraße and the river where the original spa once stood, was once the main drag in an entertainment and shopping district whose cinemas, theatres, beergardens and restaurants attracted custom from across the north of Berlin. Then the Berlin Wall was built, cutting off this corner of the Wedding district on three sides.

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On a Saturday morning we took the S-Bahn north of Wedding to a suburb of Berlin that sits on the Panke River not far from the Berlin-Brandenburg border. I had read about Karow as being home to a series of ponds, small lakes and wetlands that are popular with the local birdlife, but that exploration would have to wait for another day. We were there to catch the Heidekrautbahn or the Heather Train to Groß Schönebeck, the town at the end of the line and on the edge of the Schorfheide, one of Germany’s biggest forests and a place we had been once before.

This time we were going to stay overnight at the cabin of some friends, shoot bow and arrows at makeshift targets in the woods, and cook dinner on an open fire that would keep us warm as we drank beer until the early hours. And that is what we did, but first we had to get there and it was time for one of those funny little trains that operate on the branch lines of Brandenburg to take us north to the edge of the forest.

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