My Career In PR

In November 1981 I took a job as PR Assistant with a well-known Swiss firm. This was an executive position, albeit on the lower rungs. The man I replaced left to go into journalism; he probably knew already what I was about to find out and got out while the going was good. They obviously thought that they could save money by employing a woman, presumably at a lower salary, and by not giving me my own secretary: I shared my boss’s PA. He was a highly intelligent man with a wry sense of humour, good at delegating, and the atmosphere in the department was very congenial.

It appeared to be a cushy number: although I had to be there early (by 8 am), I dozed on the hour-long journey into Zurich, and once in my very smart office (supplied with potted plants and artwork of my choice when I moved in) I sat at my desk with an invigorating cup of coffee and the quality newspapers of the day. A gentle awakening that suited my metabolism very well.

The point of the newspapers was to allow me to find any reference to the company, and to keep an eye on its public image, as well as following its performance on the stock exchange. This turned into a pleasant perusal of whatever items caught my attention when I realized after two days that somebody else was doing this arduous task a couple of hours prior to my arrival. Around 9 am I would take delivery from this anonymous angel of a packet full of cuttings which it was then my job to paste neatly onto sheets of A4 paper, photocopy several times, collate and distribute to the Big Bosses on the floor above my office. Privately, I thought of this as making scrapbooks, and marvelled at the salary I was being paid for such menial work. I’m sure the scrapbooks ended up in the bin by midday.

In spite of the unequal pay scales, the company was quite generous to me, and since computers were just beginning to replace typewriters at the time, I was sent off to do a course in word-processing at the end of my first week, with the promise of my own dedicated computer to follow as a replacement for my golf-ball typewriter. Never having been a good typist (pick-and-peck is still my style) I was overjoyed at this: goodbye Tippex!

The second week I was given a few documents to translate, and then sent off to do a tour of a recycling plant and to visit some of the actual manufacturing sites so that I could have an idea of what the company was all about. I was also allowed to write a short article and participate in leading a staff training exercise at a posh hotel just outside Zurich. Back in my office the third week, I was entrusted with organising a trilingual press conference. This was exactly my cup of tea, being familiar with this kind of thing from my previous job.

How lovely to have a word-processor to prepare the documentation, and be able to put into practice all the little tricks and gimmicks I had just learnt! The printer was a state-of-the-art monster, with a daisy-wheel (anyone remember those?) and encased in a thick felt cover to reduce the decibels when it was operating. I was also actively engaged in the conference itself, another enjoyable aspect of my job, as I liked meeting and interacting with people.

However, the main news item sprung on the journalists was that owing to a sudden slump, 400 jobs were going to be cut. I learnt the term “natural wastage” and felt sorry for the other employees who would be affected by redundancy. Following the two-day absence for the press conference in my fourth week, I returned to find the offices very tastefully adorned for Advent, with a huge decorated tree in the main foyer and Christmas music playing softly in the background. In contrast, the mood was not so bright. Each department had its “Gruppenstab” or staff group, and numbers were being reduced. Heads of department were told how many employees they were allowed to retain, and it was up to them to decide which jobs to cut. The PR staff was to be halved. My position vanished.

“We don’t want to lose you,” I was reassured. “We’ll find you another job at the same salary.” This was Switzerland, remember? And 1981. Swiss women had been granted the vote just ten years earlier, and it was to be another ten before the last canton accepted women’s suffrage. It transpired that in the whole of this vast company, I was the only woman on the executive scale! My salary at the bottom of that scale was equivalent to the top of the secretarial scale, covering all the other women employees, so I was offered the job of PA to the Vice-President of Technology with effect from January 1982.

What was I to do during December? Well, as one of the chosen few to have done a word-processing course, I was deemed to be an expert. Nobody called my bluff. The company was intending to provide all its secretaries with word-processors instead of typewriters, so I was made responsible for testing all the various brands and word-processing programs available at the time, and recommending whichever I thought best. I was removed to a new office, and supplied with various brands of computer and programs. They were actually all much of a muchness and still in the teething stage, but in the end I made my decision and recommended IBM.

I had a ten-day break over Christmas and New Year, and then returned in January to take up my post with the VP Techno. This was a self-important little man, who held a PhD and visited an obscure American university once a year to deliver an hour-long lecture. On this basis, he insisted on being addressed as “Herr Professor”. I discovered that in the previous twelve months, he had had six different PA’s. I disliked him on sight.

On my first day as his PA, he fussed about the number of sugars and quantity of milk I was to put in his coffee (he couldn’t do that himself, I even had to stir it for him). I then spent the rest of the day going through his Christmas cards and sending New Year greetings to anyone he had overlooked, as well as connecting him by phone to those he considered important anywhere in the world. This networking was all in anticipation of the World Economic Forum in Davos, which he was due to attend in February. The next week, in addition to his private correspondence, I was also tasked with writing letters of application in English and French for his recently-graduated daughter, and translating her CV. Nothing at all to do with company business. He also wore elevator shoes.

Truly the most difficult thing for me was getting into a secretarial mindset: it struck me forcibly that secretaries and PA’s who had been with the same boss for a long time had a relationship very much like a marriage. They were faithful, loyal, submissive and utterly devoted, prepared to wipe the man’s nose if necessary. My puffed-up superior’s feet of clay were all too obvious to me, and I had scant respect for him. Moreover, instead of a word-processor, I once again had a fancy typewriter that was giving me headaches. On the train going home in the evening, I could feel a hard ball of rage and frustration in my solar plexus. I was still in my three-month probationary period, so after two weeks I gave in my notice and looked for another job.

All the same, I am very grateful to that company for all the benefits accrued in those three short months: not only the very steep learning curve as I discovered my limitations, but also the computer skills I gained, and the enjoyment the PR job gave me. I think that could have been the ideal job for me if it had lasted. Best of all, I got ten days’ vacation in the middle of it and for some reason they doubled the amount of money in my works pension fund! An experience I would not have wanted to miss. I also learnt to understand Swiss German!

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Praying For A MONSTROUS CROW

Tweedledum and Tweedledee
Agreed to have a battle
For Tweedledum said Tweedledee
Had spoilt his nice new rattle.

Just then flew down a monstrous crow
As black as a tar-barrel
That frightened both our heroes so
They quite forgot their quarrel.

Lewis Carroll

 

Two ugly fat men, noted for their silly hairdos and megalomaniac personalities, revel in world attention as they compete in throwing their toys out of their prams.

Of course, once nuclear conflict actually starts, there won’t be any admiring audience left. But that doesn’t matter to a megalomaniac, who craves attention NOW and damn the consequences.

Where’s that tar-barrel-sized crow got to?

End Of An Era

This is a tough post for me to write but I need to do it.

I started this blog in September 2011, exactly six years ago, pushed by an indeterminate urge, a sense that I was at a sort of crossroads and it would be interesting if not useful to keep some kind of record. I never intended this to be a journal, just a place where I could muse and ramble and ruminate on all the things that catch my short span of attention without boring my interlocutor to tears. Readers can skip the boring bits, whereas listeners just doze off. So a blog serves a useful purpose.

In the event, it has been a lifeline during a period in my life that I could not have anticipated. And now, that period is drawing to its close and I am embarking on the final phase of my life. At least, that’s what it looks like from here: what Germans call “Lebensabend”. I hope that I am sailing into a beautiful sunset.

My parents’ house, which has been home to us all for the past eight decades, has been sold. I flew the nest in the early sixties, but then in December 2011 my mother needed my assistance and I returned – initially for three months, thinking I’d set up some kind of care system for her, and then, when I realised that wasn’t going to materialise, my three months turned into four and a half years. This blog fortuitously coincided with that time span so I don’t need to repeat here what I have already published.

This is the one place I have always returned to no matter where I was currently residing, the house my parents moved into, a young couple aged just 24 and almost 22, in April 1938 even before the plumbing had been connected, so that they had to use a tap in the garden for the first few weeks. They could have bought it for £200 but they rented first, unsure if they would stay. After the war, they bought it for about £700 as sitting tenants.

This little house has always drawn me as if I were attached by an elastic umbilical cord; it’s where I was born and grew up, where my parents lived – forever it seemed – and where they both wanted to die; where they left their mark as they painted, decorated and furnished it over the years; the home I left and returned to when my mother could no longer manage on her own; the ancestral home for my daughter, her children and their families. And now it’s going to be home to someone else.

This is a home that has always been full of love, a happy, hospitable home, with WELCOME! not only on the mat but pervading every room. “…in need of some improvements but holds much character…” says the estate agent’s blurb. I pray that the new owners will make the necessary improvements without losing the character, that they will feel and respect the spirit of this place, the gentle and generous genius loci, and I pray a blessing on them, that they may be as happy and contented as all those who ever lived here have been.

I am relieved that the new owners are people I have known for several years, good people, kind and caring. I feel I owe it to our long-suffering, big-hearted neighbours to ensure that someone decent comes to live next door. And even though this sale marks the end of my own official link with my childhood home, I look forward to returning some time to see how they are getting on.

The bond between this place and me will, I think, endure: after my birth the midwife gave my father my placenta to bury in the garden! No wonder I feel the pull of the umbilical cord!

 

And a ? in a Pear Tree

You can tell, even after 44 years in God’s most beautiful country, that I’m still an ex-pat Brit by the fact that I sit outside with a cup of hot tea (with milk of course) at four o’clock on an afternoon when the thermometer has climbed to over 32°C. My American friends like glasses filled with ice cubes and a few dribbles of Coke or ice tea, the Swiss ones are enjoying a chilled beer or Most (cider or apple juice) but me, no – a cuppa cools me down just as well.

And so here I am on my little patio with the mountains watching over me, enjoying the sunshine, the peace and the quiet, drifting away on the stream of consciousness, as random thoughts and ideas come bobbing about like flotsam and jetsam.

Yes, it’s officially forty-four years since I came to live in the Confederatio Helvetica. And I am still not a Swiss citizen. That’s a long story, and I’ll leave it for another post when my brain isn’t melting like ice cream in a sauna. This is not a time for deep thoughts, though they occasionally try to intrude, nor for any Weltschmerz as I try to avoid reflecting on what’s happening outside my own little bubble.

No, today I’ll relax here and gaze at the old pear tree in the garden opposite, peaceful and proud. It’s probably as old as I am or more. It was here before the houses were built, when this little neighbourhood was still a field (or possibly an orchard) called “Sunnefeld” which is dialect for – oh, you guessed! – sunny field.

The owner of that tree has no idea what variety the pears are, but he does know they are good and, kind man that he is, he’s willing to share them with the neighbours. He handed me a good half dozen over the hedge one day last week. He was picking them off with a net on a long-handled pole, which enabled him to reach at least halfway up the tree, and also across the road and over my hedge to me. Very handy. At his age he probably wouldn’t get far if he tried to climb the tree.

This morning as I was sitting outside drinking my coffee I heard a sort of Morse code tapping and there was the woodpecker head-banging away on a high branch. How do woodpeckers escape brain-damage, when they hammer away so hard? Or do they eventually die of concussion? I googled this, and found an answer here.  Fascinating stuff.

Woody was followed by some crows, parents with juveniles making a racket over their pear-eating lesson, which then made way for a raven, whose acrobatic attempts to cling to a thin twig while pecking at a ripe pear just above his head were worthy of the circus. A raven is a big bird and it was a very weak perch. Each thrust of the beak made him wobble on his twig, and I was sure he was going to have to let go and flap like a humming bird while attacking the fruit. But no, he kept his balance and finally dislodged the pear so he could finish his breakfast on the ground.

There was also a dainty little squirrel that scrambled lithely up and down the tree, though it showed no interest in the pears. Our squirrels are small, neither red nor grey as in the UK but a very dark brown, almost black, and sometimes stray into our gardens from the park nearby.

And silently observing all this along with me is the pear-tree owner’s incredibly handsome cat, who has more sense than to venture onto trees – she seems to know about the pitfalls of attempting the descent and would never expose herself to ridicule – but nevertheless keeps close watch on potential prey.

With so much entertainment, I really don’t need to move from my patio, which suits me as long as the temperatures remain in the thirties. Maybe one day, I’ll actually see a partridge in that pear tree. Meanwhile, I’ll just sit here and enjoy my tea.

These Boots Were Made For Walking

… And that’s just what they did, many kilometres of tramping up and down and round and round these mountainsides. I don’t even remember exactly how old they are, but I think the colour combination of purple and green was probably popular for Alpine hiking gear in the eighties or nineties, so they have lasted well.

I reported just over a year ago, on my last trip on the Hohen Kasten, that I thought this would be my last attempt at a hike. I’m still not much fitter than I was then, but this week, together with a couple of old friends, I took the cable car and ski lift to around 2200 m altitude and managed to walk a panoramic trail of 4 or 5 kilometres on another mountain. The views were fantastic, and it was well worth the effort.

I confess that I let them take the high road (over the peak) while I took the low road (more or less level) but when first one boot sole came loose, then the other, and finally both fell off, I have to admit to feeling relieved that I wasn’t having to scramble down a steep stony path. And I was also thankful that my boots had a layer of some kind of material between the dear departed commando sole and the cushioned insole, so that the last kilometre back to the ski-lift was not quite as painful as it could have been. I now understand what it means to be down on one’s uppers.

The heifers grazing on the high pastures always look rather surprised when humans suddenly appear, and will occasionally walk along with you which is a little unnerving: are they going to charge? Can I run away fast enough with my battered boots?

It was a giggly group of grannies who hopped off the ski-lift at the halfway point and rolled up at the mountain inn, gasping for a glass of cold refreshing cider. My unsympathetic friends found my disaster a great cause of merriment, and accused me of deliberately sabotaging my boots as an excuse to avoid having to walk. Really! And I was feeling so proud of my achievement, even if it did take me nearly 2 hours to complete a one-and-a-half-hour hike.

I disposed of my poor dilapidated boots when we finally disembarked from the cable car and returned home.

And how pleased we were later on, as we realized that we had picked the coolest day for our outing: the rest of the week was far too hot for hiking and we were lucky enough to have a swimming pool as well as the lake on the doorstep.

I’m quite happy to admire the mountains as a backdrop nowadays, without feeling the need to conquer them.

Name This Child

“Hallo,” came a voice over the fence as I was hanging out my washing (oh, the delight of clothes that have dried in the sunshine, absorbing the scents of freshly mown grass, thyme and roses). “Haven’t seen you for a long time,” she added.

I was surprised, actually, that my neighbour still recognised me after almost six years. It always unnerves me slightly when this happens: what is so peculiar about me that I should make such a lasting impression? Our contact had been slight, though it was usually when I was hanging up my washing so perhaps I was simply a bit of déjà vu for her. Anyway, she remembered my name.

I put down my pegs and walked over to her, making a fuss of the little black Labrador that suddenly appeared at her side shoving his nose through the palings. I explained why I had been away for so long, and then, rather embarrassed, confessed that I had forgotten her name. I expected her to tell me her family name. This is Switzerland, we have only exchanged small talk over the fence, and know nothing about one another really, so this seemed to me a classic case for the formal “Sie”. However, she smiled and said: “Hortensia.”

Telling a person to call you by your first name in Swiss German is an invitation to use the informal form of address, “du”, and although it’s common enough among young folk, it is not so usual among those of a certain age and older, as we are. So I feel quite flattered in a way, in spite of our having lived next door to one another for twelve years. That’s nothing in a Swiss village: you can be here fifty years, and still be strangers.

I responded with my Christian name, sealing the fact that we are now “duzis”. I have never met anyone called Hortensia before, and I was secretly wondering if she liked her name when she informed me that her daughter was also Hortensia. So presumably she does. You wouldn’t saddle your baby with a name you disliked, would you?

We chatted for a while as I finished pegging out my clothes, and she updated me on the latest garden news: she no longer has any hens, they all died of old age, as did the Labrador she used to have (I had noticed that this one seemed not only smaller but also quieter than its predecessor) and that the hedgehogs still frequent the gardens at night, probably nesting and hibernating under her shed. I was pleased to hear this, as hedgehogs seem to be dying out. And the crows have a nest in our other neighbours’ fir tree, which is why our dawn chorus is less enchanting than it was when the blackbirds inhabited it. I presume that the name Hortensia is somehow connected with the Latin ‘hortus’ meaning garden, so I was mildly pleased by the context of our conversation.

As I returned to my other chores, I ruminated on her name. Hortensia, I vaguely recalled, was an ancient Roman matron famous for giving a speech in front of the Senate, as well as another name for the hydrangea plant. Interesting: you wouldn’t name your daughter Hydrangea, would you? Oh, well, maybe nowadays you would. Nobody would blink any more.

I went back to my laptop and the family tree I’ve been working on. Aptly enough, it’s one of the German lines, featuring ancestors with evocative names we rarely hear nowadays like Apollonia, and the Three Wise Men: Melchior, Balthasar and Caspar.  I say apt, because there before my eyes was grandfather Ernst Friedrich Adolf Richard Traut. No, I can’t see any of my granddaughters wanting to name their babies after him.

And as I began browsing through a new family tree, compiled by a distant relative, I saw that Ernst FAR Traut (no, definitely; nobody would give their child those initials nowadays, I hope) apparently had had an older brother, Martin Traut.  No middle name, I noticed. Had he been jealous of his younger brother, blessed with not one but three middle names?

Click, and there’s Martin’s son: Moses Hugo Karl Adolf Bertold Otto Traut. Surely that can’t be just one person? Oh yes, it is, and there’s even a photo of him. He looks normal enough, thank goodness. But I can’t help wondering whether his father had indeed felt short-changed, and given his son a different name for every day of the week to compensate for his own meagre moniker. Or did he have a number of rich uncles he was trying to flatter? I don’t know if this side of the family had Jewish connections, but if not, Moses was not a fortunate name to bear in the Third Reich. Maybe he dropped it and used one of his alternatives?

I’ve been reviewing the Trauts. They seem to have a penchant for resounding names: Emilie Ernestine Friederike, Karl Friedrich Wilhelm, Maria Elisabetha Thekla, Anna Ida Lina, Karl August Ludwig Martin, Ernst Gottfried Bernhard and Ida Dorothee Augusta. But none of them can match Moses.

Incidentally, Moses Hugo Karl Adolf Bertold Otto Traut married Lina Ella Olga Leipold. Their children all had short names.

Floating Fairy Flies Again!

Twenty kilometres as the crow flies in just over one hour, and maximum altitude 1300 m above sea level. Air temperature around 25°C. That’s for those who need figures first.

No statistics can convey the deep peace and joy that comes with a ride in a hot-air balloon. Yes, there are those loud roaring bursts of flame now and then, but tranquillity is the watchword, as you dreamily drift over the landscape in your own little bubble.

This was among my birthday presents last year, as my family decided I may not be capable of struggling into the basket when I get to 80, so my round birthday gift came (symbolically) 5 years early. There was too much toing and froing last year for me to be able to arrange my trip, which has to be at pretty short notice since it all depends on weather conditions being as close as possible to ideal.

The call came last Tuesday: “Can you be at Lommis airfield for 5 am on Saturday?” Of course I can. Then, after I put the phone down, common sense kicked in. Lommis is about 120 km from where I live. I no longer have a car, and trains don’t run at that time of day. Darling Daughter and Son-in-Law live close enough to Lommis, but … they were in Lucerne.

Number One Granddaughter flew to the rescue: “You can stay overnight with us.” The Balloon Pilot offered to pick me up from Granddaughter’s home, but the great-grandchildren decided they would like to come and see Granny float off into the blue so Granddaughter kindly offered to drive me the ten-minute distance to the airfield. In the event, the great-grandkids were securely in the Land of Nod at 4.30 am on Saturday, so it was only my Granddaughter and I who left just before sunrise.

How quickly and efficiently the set-up and take-off all went. Excellent teamwork by the pilot and her assistant, aided by four passengers: 3 senior citizens and a delightful young man who must have wondered if he’d accidentally strayed into a Pensioners’ Outing. It turned out he was indispensable, being tall, able-bodied and strong enough when physical strength was required. He also took some great photos, being armed with a professional camera and the eye to go with it. Thank you, Andreas, for sharing so many of your shots with the rest of us.

And so, as the sun rose above the horizon, so did we.

Photos by Granddaughter No 1

Copyright http://www.artaro.ch Thank you, Andreas, for this lovely photo.

Thurgau is a relatively unknown but nevertheless very attractive canton; arable farming country with colourful rolling fields, orchards, vineyards, woodlands, smooth-flowing rivers winding through rich pastures, and traditional half-timbered houses and barns dotted here and there among the boring quadrangular modern builds. Tourists in search of spectacular scenery don’t come here: no raging waterfalls or towering cliffs, just gentle rises and falls. From a bird’s eye perspective, it almost looks flat.

Typical Thurgau scenery somewhere near Weinfelden

My last balloon trip, six years ago, took us from Kriessern across the Rhine and the southern end of Lake Constance into Austrian airspace, then over Lindau in Germany, to a remote field outside a Bavarian hamlet.

View towards the Alpstein on the horizon. The heart.shaped pool is the Märwiler Weiher.

This was now quite different scenery. In the distance, we could see the sun gleaming on the surface of Lake Constance, and gilding the river Thur below us. Cattle, sheep and goats grazed. Deer ran through the woods and across fields, kite and buzzard swooped beneath us. Perfect ballooning conditions.

After almost an hour we began our descent, alarmingly close (I thought) to the treetops and wheat fields, and scaring a company of horses peacefully grazing in their paddocks as we came roaring over their heads.

A field of sunflowers craning their necks to the east like soldiers on parade appeared to be where our pilot was aiming for, but no, we sailed over them and side-stepped an apple tree that loomed in our path.

Copyright http://www.artaro.ch Thanks again to Andreas.

We touched down, bounced slightly once, then rested on what seemed to be a specially constructed landing strip next to the road. Long grass on either side of us in this pasture, but a lengthy stretch several metres wide had been mown just where we landed, to the exact dimensions needed when our balloon sank gracefully to the ground. A man using a scythe under the apple trees on the opposite side of the road continued his work, as though balloons landing in front of him was an everyday occurrence. Perhaps it is, and that really is a landing strip. Our pilot’s assistant was waiting for us with her car and balloon trailer, having tracked our journey from take-off.

Teamwork again, as we squashed out the air and folded the balloon, rolled it up, packed it into its bag and dragged it to the trailer. Thank goodness for Andreas’ youthful strength! The burner and its mount were quickly dismantled, packed neatly into the basket and all stowed away very quickly.

Then came the solemn ceremony of the baptism of balloon passengers. This involves reciting the balloonist’s prayer, receiving a special nobility title plus certificate, and having a lock of hair singed as a token of the adventure. I had already been through this procedure twice, so was exempt this time. (I am Duchess Catherine Above the Clouds, and Gräfin Catherine Schwebefee über Fussach, which means approximately Countess Catherine, Floating Fairy over Fussach. Some fairy!)

The other elderly lady was wearing hairspray, so singeing her hair might have been dangerous, and the elderly gentleman had a large bald patch, so nothing to singe. These two were just doused with mineral water. Only Andreas had a suitably full head of hair so he alone underwent the singeing ceremony, and then we shared a bottle of champagne and munched on croissants. It was, after all, only just after 7 am so definitely breakfast time!

Then back to our starting point, where Granddaughter and three great-grandchildren were patiently waiting. (No, they hadn’t been there all the time. Mobile phones are a useful invention!) And home again, for my third breakfast of the day, this time at a more conventional hour.

Getting good at squeezing into confined spaces!

Thank you so much, to everybody who made this possible, not least those who paid for it! It was a wonderful belated birthday present, and the opportunity to spend a little time with my younger generations was a great bonus. These are memories I shall treasure.