Category Archives: 2008-09

Ahem As the days suddenly became shorter to help spin the year to its conclusion, Gwen distinguished herself for the second time by running the Basel Stadtlauf with many of her friends and hundreds of other Baselers at different levels, ages and distances, through the city one cold Saturday evening after dark. I was in […]

Ahem The great year-long French house purchase saga has been successfully concluded. We have taken nine tenths of the law of 13 Rue de la Scierie, 68220 Leymen, France. For over a week we have now been waking there every morning having gone to bed there every night. It is true that the final act […]

Ahem Just before it started to get cold, I spent five nights in Marlow at a scientific conference, sequestered in the stuffiest of stuffed English hotels, the Compleat Angler, although its position by the big weir on the Thames is admittedly rather impressive. I spent a discreet weekend there once over twenty-five years ago but […]

Ahem We are creeping forward steadily on the house purchase. The results of my medical, reported to you all last month as satisfactory, in fact generated a ruling from the bank’s insurance experts indicating that, on balance, I would not last another twenty years. A trifle harsh, I thought, even for being undeniably overweight. I […]

Ahem So there I was, dressed only in swimming trunks and a balloon, floating on my back down the Rhein, the opening bars of Das Rheingold playing around in my head as the late afternoon sun winked from the fast moving current. Wagner’s Ring Cycle begins in the source of the Rhein, where three Rheinmaidens […]

Ahem You may be amused or possibly worried to learn that I have participated in my first serious run for 25 years when I turned out in company garb for Basel’s annual Firmenlauf. Over 1,600 runners got going on a six kilometre trail through woods and a big adjacent park, the Grun 80. Six kilometres? […]

Ahem What a month to witness, savor and remember! What a gurgling gaggling bubbling reverberating stream of sheer hyper-super-activity it all was! In thirty days we filled and packed a whole album shelf of freshly made memories: we entertained multiple relatives, friends and hangers-on; Ella took and finished her school exams; Jessie graduated from school […]

Ahem Residents of the Appenzell Innerrboden canton of Switzerland voted overwhelmingly in their last open-air annual assembly to ban nude hiking. Naked hikers have become a feature of the region since the practice was naughtily publicised by German web sites. But such hikers will from now on be fined 200 Swiss francs if caught with […]

Ahem The Ferrette Morris Dancers danced at the village market in Oberwil, performing in the Cotswold Morris tradition, and Peter the Squire, a good friend of mine, bawled out the traditional call (from Horace’s Odes) to the bemused Swiss villagers: “Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero” which is, more or less, “Enjoy today; believe not […]

Ahem I wouldn’t call it Thelma and Louise exactly, but it was kinda cool as a filmic road trip narrative. True, we were actually middle aged blokes and not battered women scenting freedom. True, it wasn’t a 1966 Thunderbird convertible but a large boxy white hired van. True, we were neither in rebellion nor on […]