Werner’s Magenbrot is soft, beautifully glazed and thoroughly inconvenient to complain about. It tastes wonderful. But buying it at the supermarket has quietly removed something I remember from childhood: the wait for the fair. Apparently, I have reached the age where easy access to good gingerbread counts as a disappointment.
Category: Childhood
The Time Capsule Has a Repeat Button
Radio around Zürich offers plenty of stations and remarkably little escape. Radio Zürisee tried something different by retreating into the 80s and 90s. A good idea, until the same safe classics start circling endlessly. The charts may be repetitive, but at least they change. Nostalgia on permanent rotation is simply repetition with better hair.
The Quiet Shape of a Father
Three years after his death, I finally found the words to write about my father. Not as an engineer, though he was a brilliant and respected one, but as a quiet, dignified man whose love of nature, steadiness, and way of looking at the world shaped my own life far more deeply than I understood at the time. This is a remembrance, and in its own way, a thank-you.
When we said: “We’ll get Max!”
As children, we did not need comic-book superheroes. We had our own. In our corner of the Zürcher Oberland, the ultimate name was Max Wolfensberger, a figure of almost mythical strength, borrowed from the adult world and transformed into childhood legend. Only many years later did I discover the real man behind the name, and with that discovery came not disillusionment, but a deeper tenderness for both him and the beautiful innocence of those early years.
