The Photographs You Spare Us

Keeping every photograph is easy. Choosing which ones deserve to stay takes judgement and a willingness to let go. Delete the failures, question the mediocre, and stop preserving twenty versions of the same moment. Your best pictures deserve room to breathe, and your friends deserve better than an endless scroll through everything you could not bear to delete.

How Much Dinner, How Much Theatre?

Two evenings of exquisite food in Franschhoek taught me that pleasure does not necessarily increase with the number of courses. Between premium wine pairings, Wagyu supplements and a diminishing appetite, I began to suspect that the most elusive luxury in fine dining might be knowing when to stop serving it.

The Missing Ingredient Is the Fair

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.

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.