freelancer tells

a simple man and his wife

cycling is our religion now.
Dear friends and readers.

In Switzerland, there are now people who are vigorously demanding that our Swiss-German language be replaced by English. To me, this is bordering on bigotry, not madness.
Soon I will be flying to India to work on my next story, which takes place in Goa, where there was a similar language dispute because some people wanted Marathi to be made the official language instead of Konkani. It was a revolution, and my story will be in that environment.
For all English-speaking people here in Switzerland, I'm going to rebuild my website into a German and an English section so that the church stays in the village. In the spirit of my father-in-law, who said that he would prefer the church tower to fall over instead
the wine bottle on the table.

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cycling with four wheels is what I like

You may call it religion.
But it is my hobby.
I call it donkey.

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A freelancer tells

I'm of advanced age and I have still a Japanese in my head
My memories go back deep into the past. There, however, dark figures appear, reminders that like to plague old people. I shake off such thoughts like a duck shaking the water and look back at the spring of life, when everything was in positive light.
When my wife and I look back on the day we got married, it's a long time ago. We are Swiss citizens. And if we look at a statistic that tells us how many Swiss now marry a foreign partner, that's about half of all marriages now, whereas in our country only a few marriages were made with foreign partners. One of my acquaintances at that time was Jerry. He married a Japanese woman, which was not a sensation, but nonetheless extraordinary. Looking back even further, I see myself, as a twelf-year-old boy standing on a edge of the forest, at an altitude above the Rhine. From this height there is a wide view that passes over into the land of the Swabians.
I was born when Hitler came to power, as they said at the time. Adolf led his people into war. As a child, I clearly felt the fear of the adults, who were afraid of the invasion of German troops.

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A radio operator needs headphones and a morse key

My cousin was a radio operator
in the Swiss military

My aunt's son, my cousin, who I grew up with, was a radio operator in the Swiss military, and when he came home on holiday on Sunday, I sat next to him and marvelled at how he could tickle and write Morse signs off the radio. The German troops were still victorious, but then the luck of the war turned for Adolf. At night we heard high above us in the dark sky the bomber squadrons buzzing, and when we peered out of the roof gable, we saw the reflection of lightning on the clouds, which was the distant glow of bombs falling on Friedrichshafen. In the woods, we found tubers of tinfoil paper dropped by bombers to confuse the air defence. We kids were looking for chocolate, we were told, the flight crew always had chocolate with them as an emergency supply. During the day, the sky was sometimes full of martial spectacles. When a foreign aircraft entered Switzerland's airspace, the air defence team began to fire. Little clouds showed up near the planes, and one day it was no longer just a spectacle, but a real drama. A Liberator Bomber appeared in low flight. The plane was flying over the Rhine, coming from the Swabian region, and apparently being a whingeing mud. The plane flew in towards Switzerland, the small clouds circled the tired aggressor ever more tightly. A parachute opened, then the bomber's hum turned, swelled to the siren's owl, and the plane crashed into a forest. A black column of smoke rose.
When the church bells rang in May 1945, the war was over. I started an apprenticeship in the business of a photographer who sold movies and distributed postcards of landscapes from the Jura hills, the Aare, the Limmat and the Rhine Falls. I had to watch the store, customers came only a few, but I learned how to make films. In the darkroom, with a little red light, I was allowed to develop the master's film plans and the roll movies that the clientele threw us into the letterbox. I had little to do for many hours, could read books, and could keep the store that had a library attached to it. The master should have signed me up to attend the business school, which he didn't, and one day I just didn't go to the store anymore, I dropped out of teaching, and I didn't become a federally trained photographer.
But I had read many books while I was keeping the store. Including Hemingway. The old man and the sea excited me a lot, but some of him didn't catch me at all, because I too began to write stories, and when I was twenty years old, the Swiss state moved me into the military, so I still have the memory of house warfare in my head. A technique in which throwing hand grenades, shooting with machine guns and handling flame throwers is very important.
Our commander, a captain on the General Staff, managed to be taken by the Americans to Japan as a military observer at the end of the war, as a diplomat. There he experienced the final struggles of the Japanese. Back home, he organised the Grenadier troupe according to his image: hand grenade machine gun shooters crawling around the practice area with flamethrowers.

Jerrys 2 CV in Bombay

Frido became a taxi driver in Zürich

Back in my daily life, I became a driver in a taxi company. I set aside money, and my plan was to emigrate to Brazil. Someone advised me to go to a Funker School in Northern Germany. I did so with the money I had saved, which should have allowed me to travel to Brazil. I applied for admission to Funker School. Afterwards I could hire as a radio officer on German merchant ships, drove to West Africa to bring tropical timber to Europe. Funkers were wanted people. Later, I switched to an Indian driver, and on the Malabar coast of India, we loaded tea boxes and shipped them to Arabia.
In Bombay, where we were still loading parcels, there were two special pubs not far from the harbour, which were very popular with seafarers. Once the Café Mondebar and only a few steps away, the Café Leopold. These pubs were very special decoys. There were no light girls there like in other harbour pubs, there were only smugglers and black merchants of all kinds. There were false passports for incredibly small money. And lots of foreign money that was strictly forbidden to change in India: American dollars, English pounds! Here I met Jerry, whom I knew from home. He had driven with a Citroen 2 CV over Greece and Persia to India. In Bombay, he searched for a freighter to ship his car to Japan.
Back in Switzerland, I met my wife. I realised. I had to hang my sailors' jobs when I got married. Also, it became apparent that the radio would soon become unpopular people, the Americans shot satellites into the orbit of Mother Earth. The GPS was there. Navigators and sparklers on ships and aeroplanes became redundant, such people had to sell sandwiches or work as waiters. Also gas station attendants would have been a possibility or to become a driver at a taxi company, which I had done before, I did now again.

We celebrated our hony moon with friends from Berlin
with Klaus and Heidi.

We celebrated marriage with friends from Berlin

When we got married, we were planning to live a freelance life. I tried to do it as a freelance journalist, and I had a certain body of photographs that I'd taken on the ships. I wrote stories of my own, my wife supported me, she had worked in a magazine publisher before, she knew how stories should be written to be accepted by editors. In the bathroom, we set up a makeshift photo lab and sent out so-called "features", black-and-white pictures to numerous newspapers, on which we pasted a text at the back. My wife read the texts and corrected them where necessary. The business went even better when we bought a medium format camera. With this we were able to snap 6 x 6 cm colour slides in professional quality, these met with interest. The camera was a Pentasix, made in East Germany. Actually, I would have preferred a Hasselblad, a camera from Sweden, but it was too expensive for us. We were able to stay afloat with the story sale. We lived modestly in a cooperative flat with an affordable rent.

The sleeping town

Frido and his wife Vreni Camenzind moved into a sleeping town.

I limited myself to local stories, because a friendly editor had confided in me that he appreciated news from the local area very much, because such news from agencies would hardly be offered to him.
We found that major newspaper editorials maintained their own staff of tenants solely for the purpose of providing news that no one else has.
We penetrated this domain.
In the evening, we regularly went to pubs where people from the advertising industry showed up. With audible envy in my voice, a graphic artist who actually created pretty pictures of advertising, a man from an older age, confessed to me that he himself had also tried to gain a foothold as a freelancer, as he pointed out. But he failed to do so. So he assumed that no one else would succeed, certainly not one of the years younger than himself, and I was. And another one from this cake criticised my writing as being written too much out of the gut. I was not offended by this criticism because local reporters need not have attended a university, I said. The main reason why our stories could be sold was that we offered them as a whole. Not just as a text, not just photos, but both together, my wife had said. That was her idea.
This is where Jerry comes in again. He had returned from the Far East and was now married to a Japanese woman. But the woman was not happy, she complained of her suffering. Although she was doing well economically, she worked as a saleswoman in a jewellery shop. But in the evening she had to stay home alone, Jerry didn't take her when he went to the bars. The woman wanted to divorce him, and he just said: If you divorce, you're not a real Japanese woman anymore. We lost sight of them when we went out of the city into a sleeping town.

Image Description

Offspring wants to take a picture.

We had received offspring. A boy, he didn't do very well in the city school, but he immediately found friends in the sleeping city. The teacher in his class sent half a dozen boys to us on the first day of school to pick up the newcomer. One of these school friends asked me later when he saw me in the street: Mr. Neighbour! Did you see a Japanese guy play here? Only then did I realise how many Japanese families with children lived around us. That created new contacts. For example, with that family whose father was a Japanese, the mother a Swiss. And with their two sons, Takashi and Aiko, we did a lot together. Drink a glass of wine. Gardening, excursions in the woods. They also attended the local assembly because, thanks to their mother, they had become Swiss citizens. They also took our boy to the congregation. Later, the Sprössling reported excitedly that an exciting affair had taken place during the congregation meeting. A man speaking out had fainted and sunk to the ground. The chairman called desperately for a doctor. Takashi's father was a surgeon, he had risen and made measured strides to the powerless who lay on the ground. Our son was appalled by Takashi's father's prudence. I could only tell him: Asians tick differently! During my years as a ship's radio operator, I had experienced the thoughtfulness of Indians. The African's indulgence. The Chinese kitchen. The courtesy of the Japanese, all this was familiar to me. Especially at that time, one of the guild of free journalists caused a certain stir in our city, because he wrote about motorcycling from his stomach and also demanded from the authorities that the young generation should also be taught in contemporary history, not only in memorising data from the Swiss battles.

a simple man and his wife

You may call it religion.But it is my hobby.I call it donkey.