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: Lifestyle
Since When Is a Decade a Musical Genre?
I grew up with the eighties and nineties, but apparently failed to notice that my musical taste was supposed to stop there. Radio has decades of extraordinary music at its disposal, from soul and funk to pop and rock. Yet choosing the next record often seems to involve checking its birth certificate before anybody bothers to listen.
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.
Dress for the Life You Intend to Post
On Zürich’s Bahnhofstrasse, success requires neither money nor achievement, just a suit, a photographer and somebody else’s luxury car. A Saturday shopping trip becomes a front-row seat at Generation Instagram’s auditions for a life considerably more impressive than the afternoon spent manufacturing it.
Zürich Needs a Traffic Plan, Not Another Coat of Paint
A new study finds Swiss cyclists crash at roughly twice the Dutch rate, with tram tracks, junctions and public transport stops among the trouble spots. Zürich can build a cycle tunnel beneath its main station, then leave everyone competing for the same contested metres above. The city needs better behaviour, better junctions and rather more ambition.
Tesla Can Plan a Charge. It Should Learn to Plan a Journey.
Tesla’s Supercharger network makes long-distance electric travel remarkably easy. Its Trip Planner is less convincing. By optimising relentlessly for charging speed, it can turn a journey into a sequence of brief, inconvenient stops while burying better options in a confusing interface. Tesla understands batteries brilliantly. It should spend a little more time understanding travellers.
A Word in Albania’s Defence
Albania is not the easiest country to travel through, but perhaps that is part of its appeal. Beyond the erratic driving and uneven infrastructure are dramatic mountains, clear seas, excellent food, surprisingly good wine and, above all, remarkable warmth. We went for a wedding and came home with a much broader affection for the country itself.
Travel Broadens the Mind. Getting Home Tests It.
A magnificent wedding in Albania was followed by a journey home seemingly designed to test patience, infrastructure, border control, traffic planning and basic faith in humanity. From Tirana queue warfare to Zürich bureaucracy, cancelled Ubers and supermarket inspections, the day became an escalating comedy of inconvenience, until someone else’s travel disaster made mine look almost civilised.
Hi-Fi Has Put the Screen in the Wrong Place
Touchscreens have become the fashionable face of modern hi-fi, yet most sit metres away where nobody can comfortably read or use them. Smartphones solve part of the problem but remain personal devices. A better answer is a shared, dedicated remote: tactile controls for everyday functions, a screen for browsing, and access anyone in the room can use.
Zurich’s Quiet War on the Car
Zurich’s Rämistrasse and Universitätstrasse have become a lesson in how to discourage cars without formally banning them. Poorly coordinated lights, repeated zebra crossings, permanent stop-and-go traffic and cyclists treating tram tracks as an overtaking lane turn a major route into a daily exercise in frustration, all while motorists face the strictest enforcement.
