The Benediktenwand near Llengries in Bavaria

Saturday – another Groundhog Day. Every day since mid March the sun has shone, the wind has blown and the lockdown has continued. We seem to be getting our weather in multi-week chunks now. For six weeks in February and March we were battered by various storms rolling in from the Atlantic every three days. Trees were uprooted and fields were flooded and then along came Corona and the weather stopped. We are living in a slightly greener version of Southern California. I wish it would rain. Continue reading →

I walked to the bakery this morning to pick up some fresh rolls and pretzels. Nearly everything is closed in Germany on Sundays, but bakeries are considered essential and so allowed to open. Picking up bread every day is a pleasant ritual. We eat less bread than we used to and we also have friendly neighbours who often get there before us and leave a bag with fresh rolls hanging on our front door handle. All this means is that my daily bakery walk has become more like a weekly pilgrimage. Continue reading →

No hi-tec electronic chips on the ski pass back in 1985

In my last post, I described how a group of young Brits survived the first 3 weeks of the 1985/86 winter season working as waiters in a Swiss ski hotel. It was a scary baptism of fire but by the end of it we had become reasonably competent waiters. Slowly fear left our lives and we started to enjoy ourselves. Continue reading →

There’s not much new to report about Germany this week. We are in our fourth week of lockdown and people are behaving well. I was mildly amused to read a headline this week in the news magazine, Fokus, asking why the politicians had failed so badly to deal with Covid 19. At the same time, I read in the British press how Germany is doing everything right. I guess it’s the nature of modern journalism to look for the negative first. But as there’s not much else to write about Germany, I decided to take a trip down memory lane to my time in Switzerland, working as a waiter after leaving school in 1985.

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