Category Archives: 2014

Ahem The fortnight before our extended Christmas vacation in New Zealand was backpacked with incident and action. My myriad internecine bank accounts, loan agreements, scrip and credit cards had to be carefully calibrated with the fine checks, filters, gears, brakes and balances that are now characteristic of my new gossamer financial identity. Advent was recalled […]

Ahem It was great to welcome Ella and Sam here for a few days. They spent some quality time at home playing Monopoly, throwing darts and tasting whiskies with our neighbor Jeff (after watching the plucky Spurs edge it against QPR). They also went to Basel, the Herbstmesse and ice skating, and one sunny morning […]

Ahem It’s all happening here in the southern Sundgau. One cat-black night was disturbed at 3am by sudden thudding explosions, a power cut, urgent voices, and the lazy reverberated drawling of the Leymen village siren, waking up the village as well as surrounding farmsteads and houses across the border. Was it an axe-man on the […]

Ahem I was looking northwest across Basel from the Hinterhof Dachterrasse, after being prompted to view the sunset. There were several tall cranes cornering building sites and some jagged rectangular office blocks with golden windows but I had to agree that a great sunset makes almost any urban (or rural) view look good, and the […]

Ahem There was a pleasing symmetry to this month as it was precisely bookended by the 60th birthday parties of good, close and long-standing family friends. At the beginning Alli and I went to East London to help celebrate our friend John’s birthday and to catch another view of the magnificent garden that his partner […]

Ahem The month started cold and windy when Ella, accompanied by four of her university friends, came over to see us for a few days. The weather impeded them by unleashing four straight days of alternating drizzle, hail and pounding rain, so the girls were unable to lounge around a sun-kissed pool, but they did […]

Ahem When I work from home my window on the world overlooks the meadow facing north west in this part of the Leymen agglomeration known as Ehnerfeld. From the gentle swell of the Wolfsloch meadow to the visible top half of an avenue of trees lining the moody Birsig, the undulation leads up to ancient […]

Ahem, My parents-in-law Laurie and Kay paid us an extended visit on their way back from Austria, following a flying visit a couple of weeks earlier. Both Alli’s brothers live outside the UK; in Luxembourg and in Austria, their locations providing the shape of Laurie and Kay’s itinerary at least once each year as they […]

Ahem A complicated month was this. Normally, claims on my time and attention have arranged themselves in polite symmetry to take up my availability in a sequential and mutually ordained pattern. This made it difficult to keep my work commitments, meetings, diaries and suchlike in perilous balance, and I have had to engage in a […]

Ahem, The first days of the month saw me chasing around town in vicious and ever decreasing circles, scouting for credit to cover a temporary cash shortage; discovering, not for the first time, that access to credit is getting tighter (it has always been gasping tight in Switzerland). In fact, it seems to be available […]