Pussy Galore in Baden

The rain continues; all night now and into the morning. We leave Zurich's cafe Schwarzenbach around 10.15 and it's still pouring. Norbert has an umbrella, I have a soft hat advertising Splugen. Today we are walking the Limmat river to Baden; we cross so that Norbert can show me what's still known as "needle park."

Zurich was famous for its hard drugs problems in the 1990s. Two of the villages near where Norbert and Beat grew up had quasi epidemics. Those comfortable suburbs where there is everything and nothing to do.

The problem was all over Zurich, very visibly, and petty crime rates were soaring as the addicts tried to make money to feed their habit. The police were stretched, and the government didn't want to know, it wasn't a good brand image for Zurich or Switzerland. The police decided on a new strategy, crack down hard on the addicts everywhere - except needle park. Soon it was the safe haven. And once the addicts were there it was impossible to ignore them. The government - the entire country - had to accept there was a problem. Nowadays there are many schemes to help addicts, things have changed, we move on. We cross the Limmat again. People swim around here, there's a throw-clothes-in-plastic bag, tie, jump thing that seems wedged in all Zurichers' imaginations.

We sit; I IPAD. A message arrives from Portia. She's standing in the security line at Heathrow to fly to Los Angeles:

So I'm 3rd in line for xray. Ahead of me, already thru, is a tall,thin man waiting for the conveyor belt to deliver his things. They're asking questions about the bag he has sent through. He looks perplexed, doesn't know what they're talking about. Time passes. We don't move. A security guy in a bright yellow vest, like a construction worker would wear, comes to study the xray. People are calm, barely watching, but I'm fascinated and don't take my eye off the scene. Nearly 10 minutes go by, a long time to stand still, while they study the xray.  All this time they make no move to touch the bag. It stays in the xray. Our side of the conveyor is crammed with the next lot of stuff to go through.  

A young official comes to announce that our zone is closed. As people grumble and scramble their way into the other queue, I notice an armed policemen - just one, but with a machine gun. He crosses behind the security check without even looking around, then goes thru a door by those new machines that can see thru your undies. We're all being drawn away from the area. I'm the last to get my stuff from the bins on the conveyor belt. As I'm picking them up, I hear one of the women at security say, "he's got something hidden in a false bottom of the case."

And that's it. Couldn't see or hear anything further.


This seems to me a very modern moment. Separated by hundreds of miles, and shortly by thousands, we can still communicate, instantly, our fears and our joys. Once, let us say 50 years or so ago, when daily BOAC flights to New York began, this story, or it's security variant, would have been remembered weeks later, once home. Or maybe it would have been written by letter. Now it is instant, terrifying, and then ok when 15 minutes later the On The Plane message arrives. An entire cycle over in less time than it takes Norbert and I to walk from Beat's to the Needle park.

We pass a youth centre, it was once another cause for concern - young people, poor young people, having a place to be. We walk on, I ask Norbert why Switzerland's neutrality was accepted in the Second World War.

We grew up with the story, it would have been too difficult to invade; the men would have gone into the mountains, guerilla war. It would have been like Tito's partisans in Yugoslavia, only even tougher for the Germans.

I too grew up with war stories, was "taught" in the 1970s the truths about Ireland.

Norbert points out the boat club. Once a year we send a hot soup to Strasbourg, down the river, the thing is it has to arrive hot. The Strasbourgers send something back, but we're not quite sure what. Fraternity on the Rhine, and all that. Good history, continuity.

"We lost our innocence about the war in the 1980s," Norbert says. "The stories started coming out. The deals that were struck with the Germans, the people who were sent back, the Jews, the quotas....The money in the banks, of course....The journalist who broke a lot of these stories killed himself. He just couldn't cope."

I wonder about the stories to come out of England from 2001 onwards. How many more to come? The rain still pours and we're out into the suburbs now, riverside. Norbert likes Berlin, likes its easy restlessness, its mutability. I think about the seemingly immutable Berlin, East and West, of the 1980s. Things do change.

We have lunch in a nunnery, of course. The Kloster Fahr. Fish on Friday, I joke. And cider. Later the rain stops and Norbert shows me where he played important high school soccer matches, and wrote match reports for a sports mag, rushing by engined-bike, I'm not sure what, perhaps a Swiss thing, to hand his copy to his editor on a Sunday afternoon. He's been taught a new massage technique, he has sessions on Mondays just before he plays football. If they go well he is Messi, if not just messy. The technique involved pushing into the pain with your fingers and then "thinking" the pain "soft". It can be very emotional, Norbert says.

By four it's raining again, we had sun for lunch, , we've lost our river and we're tired - and Baden is nowhere in sight.

Baden, Norbert says, is where upright Swiss Protestant Men came for hundreds of years. A canter down from Zurich, horseback or carriage. They came to stay in fine hotels, promenade in the park for show, then go off to prostitutes and gambling.

Ah, that old one. Of course Tommy has got very heated about the ladies of the Baden bath houses, and it seems he was not wrong. Protestant work ethic to Prostitute, as it were.

We are so lost Norbert knows where we are. We are close to the autobahn. In fact to the first over-road shopping mall built in Switzerland, the famous Raststahe at Wurenlos. We are wet and we ache. We buy iced tea and poisonous sweet drinks and wander though shops offering Armani and Swiss watches. It is surreal, if that phrase still means much. "When I was a kid and I saw the Raststahe I knew we were almost home," Norbert says. Today we have no such assurance.

We find the river, and hope that it is the right one, and just as nerves are fraying we bump into a gaggle of graffiti artists, who've taken the train, "ah, from somewhere" to cover a series of underpasses with paint in a town near Baden. The girls and boys work with great solemness; we are quickly cheered. Near now: a high school with large hilly grounds. Tonight it is decked out in thirty or so sound stages, "nightclubs", bars and restaurants, in cardboard mostly. It is Swiss Glee, meets Las Vegas via The Prisoner. Everyone looks so happy; the designs were done last term. Now it is the beginning of the new, two days of build, and tonight the show. [The downpour began about an hour later, we were somewhere else, but it did rain all night. At one point we did raise a glass to those poor kids.]

Baden may be famous for its industrial muscle and wealth as well as its baths, but the last few kilometres along the river are a nightmare of ups and downs from the riverbank. And it is truly pouring now. Whoever designed this bit of the route was a sadist. On the outskirts, a large building, built by the founder of ABB, once: tonight it is a wedding party, all crisp lines and perfume. We're so beat we can't even summon the spirit to crash it, though in another life...We find a bar, collapse, and realise it will be hard to ever get up again. Until I realise that Norbert is the odd man out at this busy bar: everyone else is English.

It is enough to propel me off to find our lodgings, though it hurts to walk there.

The youth hostel - yup, my first for about 42 years - is fantastic. On the river and with swipe card and clean and I am soon wondering where is the flatscreen and the pay for view porn. Norbert and I chill, dry out, change. He's got a friend who is directing a play here, in a temporary theatre close to the old railway station. A Greek guy, who is a genius and a professor at Edinburgh but has lived here in Baden 45 years, has loaned his office out to be the theatre.

It is almost intriguing. Norbert leads the way back up the hill, into the suburbs it seems. It is raining hellishly, as though we are being washed in preparation for purgatory. And then we are there: oh no. A temporary wooden structure, a few tables out, eight or so people. We start talking, they hush us. Food? Please food?

Yes, but quietly. The other side of a wooden wall actors rumble about; there is some screaming, but that may just be the inside of my head. Was it sausage? Who cares, the wine began to numb things.

When the play ends Norbert and I are at least cheered, if not a bit pissed. A flock of Saturday night theatre folk emerge. I light a cigarette, dream of beaches, and the next thing I know our entire trestle table has been taken over by elegant women of a certain age. All I can say is that 1) they are all friends, 2) come from many countries & 3) first met here in Baden in 1964 at the typing pool of ABB, one of the engines of the Swiss economy. I mean Big Engine, let's say Turbines. The girls' lingua franca is English.

"Ladies," I say, in British Timberlake, think Senorita, "Good evening."
At this point a lot of husbands appear and in German ask us to move, then to move up.

We are not moving an inch.

Vicky seems to be team leader, the orchestra leader and joker. When she came to Baden in 1964 she was already married to Tom. In fact they came, from Holland, because there they couldn't get a place to live. In Switzerland they got jobs, a house...and I suspect, then some.

Tom sits down next to me. He's well preserved and fun. He is an actor, he says. He's just been in the play, which sounds metaphorical and happiness heavy, or not. He lights up: I smoke when I act, he says. He's drinking a Sex on a Carrot.

I can wait to find out what he really is.

To get things going I suggest to Tom - an observation that is not without quite a lot of foundation - that his wife is very reminiscent of a character in a James Bond film with a Swiss connection. I sense Norbert tensing: he has seen this sort of thing before.

"Pussy Galore." Vicky looks rather pleased.
"I thought you were going to say Mrs Moneypenny," says Tom.

As if.

Tom has a story about Mrs Moneypenny, but we are finally up and running. Norbert and Vicky are nattering away about all sorts.

"I've done business in 76 countries for ABB," Tom says. He trained as an engineer, these days he has "communications businesses" - which I think his daughter runs. Tom's father was a journalist, in Holland. There were problems in the war.

Tom tells a story about working for Onasis, then for the Vietnamese Leadership, three years after the end of Vietnam War. Then Libya. Hard in Libya he says. He talks about all sorts of things. "Do you remember the Fifth Man? You know, after Burgess, MacLean, Philby and Blunt [the English spy ring for the Soviet Union]?

Cairncross, I say. John Cairncross.

Yes, that's right, I had a couple of Camparis with him in Provence. He was with a young opera singer. Very young.

Tom and Vicky lived in Jamaica for a while; Brazil. There was a whole new world to be built in the 1960s, all over the world. And when they'd helped do that Tom and Vicky came "home" to Baden. It all feels like Ayn Rand has Rewritten Mad Men for a European Audience. It is breathtaking, so the wine helps dull my amazement.

A young man with floppy hair comes over to introduce himself: he did the publicity for the play. He's a friend of David, the Director - who Norbert met in Beat's bar back in Zurich. Soon, I am sure, we will all be connected by Facebook.

The young man sticks out a hand. "Hello, I am Ferris Buhler," he says.
OK.
I did in fact say: "And I am John Hughes."
Of which I am sneakily proud, even if Ferris doesn't smile.
Andy Buhler, PR, was in Los Angles recording the audiobook to his self-help book, when a "guy" said he wouldn't get famous unless he had a better name. Now Andy is Ferris, and he never has a day off.

Ferris explains what is wrong with traditional marketing strategies, and talks about - well, actually I tuned out and went back to Pussy Galore who is cracking gags, organising female pilots to take out Fort Knox, and...well, having fun.

"This is my wife," Ferris says, introducing me to a young dark haired woman. "We met on Skype. She is from Vilnius, I said: come to Switzerland. She came. We have a child now."

Norbert and I must have blagged and smoked cigarettes from all known brands and types. In the Youth Hostel Morning, stumbling for Breakfast, my cough is so volcanic its ash could close down European Air Traffic Control.

Our Ladies and their Rich Husbands leave for what Norbert and I imagine to be Castles, and I'm not sure we're not entirely wrong.

She was quite a woman, Norbert says. We speculate on her age, then say a silent prayer that we are as hot as her at that age. As I snuggle under a thin duvet on the bottom rung of a bunk bead listening to the rain howl down on the river, I raise a toast to Pussy Galore of Baden. Tom Coryate, I am sure, would have enjoyed meeting her too.

I Belong to the Beat Generation

Beat has a theory about travel. Beat is a winning Swiss-German combination of Eric Cantona, the French footballer turned actor-intellectual, Falstaff, and Anthony Lane, the New Yorker film critic. He runs a bar, the Andorra, named after the play of the same name by Max Frisch, something of a hero in these Zurich parts. We only have Frisch and Durrenmatt, he says, you have hundreds of writers.

We also, of course, have David Hare.

There's a line in Andorra that it's a place where everyone is welcome; it seems that way from last night. And I am staying in his pad, which is playing out a bit like The Odd Couple mixed with Billion Dollar Brain. And what is there not to like about that?

Anyway, Beat's theory is this: you go somewhere, a city, for a holiday. Instead of rushing around to all the churches and museums and parks you find a cafe, a seat, and you sit down with your smoke of choice and your drink as seems fitting and you watch. Theatre comes to you, or at least you watch it pass you by. He cites the Latin quarter of Paris, the Marais. Why not?

I've been to Zurich many times, that taxi from the airport to the Swiss hotel, dinner reception, do the interview/conference thing. I don't want to do it again. Instead, my Zurich starts early with the church bells and sunlight streaming through a small eave window just to the right of my bed. I stagger to the terrace and it's about 7-ish and the morning sun is bright over the churches and the Limmat river and the hills in the distance. I'm not going that far. I'm tired, for a start, and there is a lot more walking to come.

Out of Beat's front door and onto Münstergasse, the cafe Schwarzenbach is approximately 30 cm away. I trip over table three opening my front door. I've been out late discussing Swiss graphic design, and read in bed, slept maybe three hours. I need a coffee break and a read. And, ultimately, I spend most of my day here, with excursions to Tom's churches, and in homage to Max Frisch to the Schauspielhaus where his great plays were and are still are performed. It's not far, past the church, up the antiquarian bookshop street, right past the art gallery and Thomas Struth exhibition.

I try and get to see the stage at the Schauspielhaus, but the administrator says it's just a big old red theatre, we're setting up for the autumn season. Come back in mid September.

Anyway, I have paid homage. I ask about the swimming baths that Max Frisch designed in the 1950s, when he was still an architect. Classic Sixties, she says, Though they have refurbished recently, you should see. I do my churches; wander the Kunshaus...

Back to the cafe Schwarzenbach I read and write, and watch Beat Generation Style, the Zurich world; that part which isn't glitzy or investment banky or overly pierced, that is. So I get to meet a brother-sister combo from Norfolk who are doing Europe in two months. Yesterday, whenever it was, was Prague, where there was a great bar, recommended by the people in the hostel, which was unusual because often the people in the hostels are not so friendly. 16 hrs, and now four in Zurich, before - before, well, I think, before who fucking cares really?

Two women, brown-bronze, thin, an age. Yoga teachers here for a special workshop tomorrow. Bikram? No, our heat is from "within". There's an electronic festival in Bern, I learn.

At the antiquarian booksellers I ask about Tom. Tom and his book. Because he was such a pioneer, because he was roughly 150 years ahead of the Grand Tour game, his book - dismissed at the time - was picked up by the aristo-travellers of the mid eighteenth century and often torn, page by page, as they whored their way around western Europe.

They shopped as well, of course. Mostly for art.

We search the database. Nothing.

In the afternoon I read Goethe and drink coffee. A tall black shaven haired American with a pretty Swiss woman sits down. He talks Laconic Paternalist, in slow bursts. He wants soi, accepts jasmine tea. But mostly he's about iconic Mount Rushmore Musings. His shoes are white Prada. She is in All White; blonde. He mentions his aversion to the colour blue.

There is a dissuasion about the grain available in the bread. No, we wont eat. Shall we go and look at the puppies [there is a pet shop opposite]. I know you wanna.

Rushmore walks like John Wayne.

Beat's kids are sitting in the bar at Andorra, whilst he fixes it up for opening. They live with their mum, not so far away. Lovely kids, they're a bit frightened by me. I would be too. The staff can't put out all the Andorra tables in the street until the petshop closes and there's plenty of post-work people that want to hang with the rabbits. And the puppies. Rushmore told blondie that his antagonism with his mother began with an argument about The Dog.

Julie has been my waitress all day; she's off to see her boyfriend on the next train out of the centre. She's Austrian, from Graz, like her boyfriend who is a tennis teacher. He's the same age as Federer. 28. Old. He was a pro, went everywhere, but unless you make it, that's far too old to be on the circuit. Now he teaches in Zurich, There are people who will pay big time to train their kids. They start at 2 or 3. I keep thinking of my razor, which Federer, Thierry Henry and Tiger Woods so recently promoted. It's the Big Roger on his own these days, Switzerland's finest. Henry's divorced and in New York, slumming. Of Tiger I have no clue. Julie followed her boy from Graz, pays for her own way whilst she studies literature and art history here in Zurich. I couldn't just ask my parents, so I work hard now, and I still work during term, she says. Literature is taught in English; post-colonialism, Rushdie, Achabe; there's John Milton too...

Julie had a period in Australia, loved it, the sporting life, the surf, diving. They've just been to Biarritz, for the surf.

But I couldn't stay in Australia, in Melbourne. In the end I missed the mountains.

Is it true they are alive?

Oh, absolutely. Julie has to go: she's promised to Skype her mom. In two days she will be 21.

I've bought a nice bottle of red for Beat's rooftop dinner party; now to see if it is ok. Norbert has arrived from his newspaper workshop, and it went well. Upstairs on the roof Beat is grilling the steaks. The view across old Zurich is wonderful; the wine is out; there are beers in a cooler, starters. Table clothes. Napkins.

It is hard to believe women will not be involved in our evening. But this is a Boy's Night, Zurich style. We start.

Norbert tells me about the cafe, and its shop, full of fine foods. It's been here since 1864, and it is a family thing. A long time ago, when he was making corporate videos, Norbert did a shoot. "Chocolate, do you want to know about chocolate," he asks.

Once it was a poor persons' food, for energy. And then one day Mr Lindt - Norbert points across our Zurich horizon, past the church spires, to the east - invents a machine that whisks the chocolate and he adds some milk. And he merges with Mr.Sprungli (no accents on this IPAD, sorry boys) and Makes Chocolate. It's a sort of Swiss Mad Men Moment. Chocolate goes from being the food of the poor to the luxury end.

We talk football, Beat is Zurich, solid working class team, and with a maternal dispensation, having a German mother, he also gets to win things by supporting Bayern Munich. He does a good impression of being in Barcelona the night that Bayern lost to Manchester United - 1999, I think. Another Life. Football as Religion.

Norbert tests me on my day: points at the church spires in front of us, and says: the Chagall stained glass. Ding. The biggest clock face in Europe. Dong.

Very good, he says. Roli arrives. Roli is a graphic designer, teaches at the college here, and an artist. In 2001, as part of his degree work, he walked with another designer, an Englishman, from their secondment in Barcelona, to their next in Winchester, England. Six and a half weeks. 1,284,000 steps (they had step meters in their shoes). His partner made pin-hole cameras out of the film boxes. They had a mock up art gallery, they'd unfurl in villages, ask locals to show their work. But Roli's lost track of his friend. He was a drinker. Still is, badly so. Roli doesn't even know where he is now. Somewhere in London. A loss.

I'm thinking around now about Tom's nights; his dinner chats: did he use his London after-dinner speaker skills? I know I am trying to use mine. Our night is going so smoothly, steaks followed by chicken, then Swiss sausage. Jesus I am dying. The conversation moves back to our view. Norbert says: Tom would have spent his evenings asking for advice, for information. What animals on the next bit, where to turn. What signs to look out for, what river.

Yes, dinner as Google, that makes sense.

Roli wants to talk clocks. Ok, he says, why clocks on the Church spires?

So the church owns time, I say.

Discussion follows.

In Switzerland the mountains are alive, the churches and their reach, their communication by bell, by echo - by the famous Swiss horns - denote safe. If you can hear the bell, or see the spire, then the monsters of the mountains won't come.

So what about the clocks? Surely they are to control as well; to summon, to wake, to emphasise God when - the 16th century man or woman arranges a meeting - things happen. There's more: all four of us have been to Istanbul, have all been amazed by the Muezzin call. It's a form of media.

This is what the bells did, and the clocks. The discussion goes on; much later Roli is still talking about it as Grappa leads on to taxis for him and Norbert. We haven't cracked it.

After sausage and before coffee the heavens open and a torrential rain begins. It will last all night and still be hammering down when Norbert arrives under umbrella (the tool that Tom brought home to England from Italy) at 9.30 next morning.

This is a great shame, says Beat.
We'll be fine, I say.
Yes, but what about your glamorous haircut?

Oooff.

Norbert's sister went to be a circus chef when she was 19. Now she's been running the circus for almost 30 years. She married in. Today, he thinks, she's setting up in Chur. We talk parents for a while.

Inside Beat and I talk movies over grappa. He says I have not seen the funniest movie ever made. To Be or Not to Be. Mel Brookes, I say.

Lubitsch. Says Beat. The speed of the dialogue. Beat has about 10,000 DVDs. He cites Kind Hearts and Coronets, the Front Page, the Philadelphia story. It's late and we're onto Once Upon a Time in America, and the East German film posters for it that Beat has.

I'm struck by how comfortable our boyz evening has been; it wouldn't be the same with so many men in England.

In the morning Beat decides he doesn't want to take a coffee with a Grasshoppers fan, they are too posh. Later, as we are walking out of town, and after the Youth Club has been explained, Norbert - a Grasshoppers fan, obviously - will say that rather than posh, they are a "thinkers" team. Ah, football.

Tomorrow Baden, walking for the first time with someone else. Cool.

Across the Wallensee for a Zurich Reunion

Bad Ragaz is utterly still, deader than ever, at 6.30am. There's nothing open for water or buns, and the hotel I'm staying in will no doubt put out a search party for Bambi, or anyone else involved with its miraculously people-free accommodation skills.

I'm headed for Walenstadt, where Tom took a barge across the Wallensee lake and then shimmied up small rivers to Zurich. It's about - it's always about - 25 kilometres away, and I've moved off the reassuring Rhine and so am interested in my navigating skills, and those of the IPAD.

I have to say the Swiss do Good Sign. Later in Zurich a pair of late night graphic designers will tell that despite the historic and continuing excellence of Swiss typefaces and typography the Zurich Client is likely to say: "we want whatever is in London."

The signs for us walkers, cyclists, roller-skaters and even once penguins, are great and always give the distance in time, a point that Tom notices 400 years ago. Of course the debate starts here, in a couple of days I am discussing with Norbert whether it is better to know that it is 20 kilometres to go, or four hours. "Four hours," Norbert says, "means you can know if you'll get there before dark, or the church service, or the closing of the city gates.

But what speed do the signs represent?

It doesn't matter, you learn that four hours means two hour, or six.

And so time twists its expanding universe around the valleys of Switzerland.

I'm soon in flat farmland near the river and I'm sticking hard to the banks, avoiding hills. I've found some water and old croissants in a petrol station, and I've checked out the larger suburban chalets, from which - as from the farm houses later - ridiculously small children emerge ladened with backpack, to catch the school mini-bus. My, they start early. It could be New York.

The valley I'm walking down to Walenstadt has proper stage-set high mountains, spectacular things that utterly dwarf the hill villages on the horizons. Riverside factories come and go; roller-skaters pass me, dogs growl and I see plenty of shooting ranges. On Saturday Roli tells me that anyone currently in the army, and Switzerland still has conscription, more later, has to practice shooting a specific number of times per year. In Brugg he points out a notice on a council board, giving the dates.

But I'm only aiming for the 11.20 boat from Walenstadt to Wessen, and hour and a bit of a lake ride. It's the northern most stop of the Wallensee. I feel very blond and teutonic today, though when I sit down to eat lunch at Walenstadt, because I miss my boat by five minutes, I still feel self-conscious among the soldiers, locals, Japanese tourists who've just done a car tour of "Heidiland" - the valley is even signposted as Heidiland, and when I first post this on Facebook a friend asks if I've had any goat's milk yet. Answer no: I'm on a coffee and fags diet, still.

I sit in the harbour and wait for the 2.00 boat; a few soldiers and a couple of locals sunbathe, and the dogs try and swim as fast as the swans. No chance. The clouds do something amazing above the mountains, a blue and white zebra crossing of foaminess.

Everything is even more blue-eyed and blond and I begin to blend in. The Walensee has the same vibe as Lake Como, back down the Splugen and the San Marco passes in ClooneyLand. The boat makes a series of zig-zag steps across the lake, throwing out the most stunning vistas. Tom writes that there was a huge wooden bridge across this lake. It's gone now, and would have really been something.

We pick up more people along the way and by Wessen we are full to disembark. There is a bus to the railway station @ Zeigelbrucke, but I decide to walk: Tom took his barge down a tributary all the way to Zurich, I feel justified in taking the train from Zeidelbrucke, but I damned if I'm going to catch the bus as well.

It gives me the chance to do Cary Grant impressions down long fields of corn, whilst crop planes fly overhead. But the biggest danger, as ever, is the BMW driver on his/her phone.

I use my map app to get from Zurich HB to the Andorra bar, in the gentrified, but not Abramovitch'd, old town near to the Limmat river. Just off Limmat quay, I turn left and walk up to an old paved street, pass the club where the Cabaret Voltaire launched in 1916, pause to take a nod to Dada, and see the Andorra bar, amidst a bunch of places, fifty metres ahead. Norbert is sitting outside, in front of a pet shop, with a beer. He's fidling with his IPhone. Soon we are having a haven't seen you for twelve years conversation.

In the early years of the web Norbert ran a very cool Interactive Newspapers conference in Zurich every November. He very kindly invited me for five or six years. The first time to give a keynote, alongside a Very Grand German Publisher who'd flown in his jet from Paris and spoke a lot about his kids in the lab and the wonders of The Renaissance. The crowd asked me to slow down, it was my first public speech and I was pumped to explain why everybody was wrong.

In later years Norbert asked me to do something else: to sit at the back and then ask to hard questions that everyone else was to polite to contemplate. It is fair to say not everybody loved me. But then in those days there was this idea that newspapers could make Croesus millions online.

Norbert has a workshop with a large regional Swiss newspaper tomorrow. He introduces me to Beat, the bar owner, who has a Boy's Own Bachelor Pad opposite, complete with roof terrance with just fantastic Rear Window views and a panorama across Old Zurich and its churches. Tomorrow night Dinner Party, Beat says. He has about 10,000 DVDs in his living room and the whole apartment is a shrine to movies, Once Upon a Time in the West seeming to get most poster action, including a rare East German poster from the 80s. Friends of Beat like to play a game where he leaves the room, somebody removes one DVD and then he has 60 seconds to guess which.

He's never lost.

We all talk for hours. Beat tells us that at one of the bars down the road a tourist has asked, "Where is the non-smoking outdoor terrace."
"She was lucky not to be clubbed to death," Beat says. The laws about smoking inside bars only changed a couple of months ago, and Switzerland or certainly Zurich is still a city of Karsh Smoke Images.

We're having a sort of boy-man (of 51, Norbert and I discover we are the same age) conversation about all those topics of middle age. We've all moved some distance from 1998. Norbert lives in Berlin now, in what was East Germany. A hip area where things change from week to week. We go back to the optimism of the early days of the web, of online newspapers: the hope, the hype, the lies and the genuine successes. These days, until in fact the arrival of the "app" and the idea that with mobile internet, accessed via a paid for app, there might be hope for a financial future for online media, the reality is desperation in the newspaper world of print. Actually the Swiss still buy print in large enough numbers, the papers are regional, and local, and read and mean something.

"I woke up about four years ago turned on my laptop and thought - my screen is so flat, everything is the same." Norbert says. "There's no nuance, nothing subtle. I read many, many more books now."

He's been reading about neuroscience, as have I. He talks about the stimulus to certain parts of the brain when we mirror the actions of others. "We need other people, the whole experiment we've lived through about the individual - it's failed. Or rather if it doesn't fail then it's all over for us all."

Beat has been to see his youngest son, who lives nearby with his mother. It is his first day of school. "I told him that the great thing about school is that it is a countdown to Life," he says.

In Switzerland, Norbert says, education is about making you "something" rather than encouraging the curious. But we need the curious. We need more than the flat, annihilating computer screen. We'll talk more, I'm sure. A happy first reunion.

The guys go to bed and I read Goethe's Autobiography on the IPAD. The young years; the intensely curious years. The fights with rote-learning teachers and personal tutors, the explorations of the Classics, Hebrew, art - people. Perhaps it is Goethe's particular genius to make this all seem fun. What price the Angry Birds game app now number one on the free downloads?

The light streams into my top floor bedroom at 6am, and the bells from the churches are made especially loud by their proximity, and the height I'm at. I stagger to the roof terrace and have a look around. In high rooms office work is starting by 7am. Hollywood Zurich style has replaced Heidiland and I am in a Big City for the first time in a week.

An interesting new forgetting from Croatian writer Dubravka Ugrei

who believes: 'the entire eastern European culture of the communist era' has been forgotten according to NZZ online

"The best part of this vibrant culture resulted from the rejection of communism, from critical thinking, from subversion. ... Sadly, all that has disappeared, because it is mercilessly stamped as 'communist' culture. This forgetting can be blamed to a great extent on the global market. Global culture is first and foremost the global market. And it's the survival of the fittest, in both global and other markets. Add to that a reflex hidden within each of us ? fear of being excluded. That pro-consumption reflex keeps the market going. ? And even if I rebel against it, the market will use my protest-orientation to its own benefit. ... We live in the Age of Information and the Global Market, but at the same time in the Age of New Ignorance and Barbarity."

"

Full article in German, from Zurich

A Communal Event, for Everyone

Two weeks ago the Italian press wrote that a hacker had entered the publisher's computer. It named the victims of J.K Rowling's pen. Nothing was written in English to confirm or deny that my Google Alerts found. A global discretion...and a nice moment.

"Leaks appeared in a number of other countries Friday, with papers in France, Italy, Austria and the Czech Republic revealing the fate of key characters by printing a summary of the epilogue -- some of them upside-down so that unwary readers could avoid the spoiler.

The six Potter books so far released have sold 325 million copies internationally and have been translated into 64 languages, though the final tome is set to out-sell each of its predecessors."

"Hordes of would-be warlocks, sorcerers and ordinary, non-magical "Muggles" lined up outside Swiss bookstores for the English version of the new novel, which officially went on sale across Switzerland at 1am on Saturday.

Midnight parties were held at bookshops in Zurich, Basel, Interlaken, Lucerne and Lenzburg. Elsewhere many stores opened their doors early on Saturday to meet the rush of readers, both young and old.

"There's been a bigger hype than for previous books; you feel it's special. People know it's the last one and want to know what is going to happen – whether he will die," Fabienne Schaller from Basel's Bergli bookshop told swissinfo.

"Lots of Swiss people read in English and most don't want to wait until October when it comes out in German," she explained, adding that the city also has a big English-speaking expatriate community."

"BEIJING, -- Thousands of Harry Potter fans in China swarmed into book stores in Beijing on Saturday to get the seventh and final volume of the boy wizard's adventures after standing in line for several hours from the mid-night.

Chinese book stores opened their doors for sales of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" at 7:01 a.m., Beijing time, together with the world.

More than 200 books have been sold in Wangfujing Book Store within 40 minutes. The Beijing Book Building has sold 2,301 books till 6:00 p.m. Saturday, statistics show, 700 books more than the first-day sales of the sixth version.

"The previous versions did very well here, and we expect the seventh book to create a new selling record among the Harry Potter series," said Yang Xinyuan, manager of the original version books department of the Beijing Book Building."