As spring emerges in Paris and the basketball courts begin to fill again, Luca Howes reflects on his own relationship with the game.

On one of my last days in Berlin, my boss asks me to translate the word “cusp”. We are looking through the poetry collection I produced at work and, in a piece yet to be translated, which reflects on the beautifully curated children’s book Manchmal male ich ein Haus für uns: Europas vergessene Kinder (Sometimes I paint us a house: Europe’s forgotten children), I refer to someone being on the “cusp of sleep”. I ponder and eventually offer up “Grenze”, which translates as “border”.

In Berlin, the past division of the city seeps into every concrete curve. As I walk with my dad beside the remains of the wall, I think of the past. I think of my own, of the city’s. I think of barriers and division between past and present, life and death. And I wonder if, like the Berlin Wall, hastily erected to solidify separation, the barriers we enforce between life and death might not also be too firmly cemented.

Middle East and Africa Editor Josh Moreton reflects on a year spent in Egypt and the lessons he’s learnt.