Monthly Archive for July, 2009

The River House, known to most as the old Motor Tax Office, has been empty for almost three years now. There are grand plans to replace it with something bigger and bolder, but those plans are on hold. The economy has provided a reprieve. The building awaits the wrecking ball with an ugly splendor and is being reclaimed by the drunks and junkies of the north inner city.

It is my feeling that it should be listed, protected, treated like a Georgian bathhouse. River House is a tacky declaration of modernity. The least it deserves is a slow and public death.

Continue reading ‘Down by the old Motor Tax Office’

Once upon a time – it was during the holidays and wasn’t actually that long ago at all – I found myself staying at a pension near Lucerne and looking out at the grey lake. The weather was dull and I thought: ho-hum, I thought, they can’t be having much fun down at the races today. It may not have been horse racing at all, it may well have been showjumping. I don’t know much about these things; anyone who has seen me riding understands. It’s pacifism. The horse’s head, that’s up the front somewhere …that’s all I know. And so I will never get to pen one of those exquisite society novels, the sort where the poor little servant is meant to forget and lo, does forget, where it is he belongs. Class struggle? You just leave a man a rented tailcoat hanging on his back stairs and watch him forget all about class struggle. But anyway. Lucerne.

There I sat, watching the little dining-room gradually fill up with guests coming down for their tea. There was Frau Otto from Magdeburg, a woman who looked like Protestant morality itself. Morality had a daughter … it was difficult enough to imagine that the mother went through the motions required for having a daughter; it was impossible to imagine same daughter going through any kind of motions at all, not that you would have wanted to. Then there was a business type called Zuegli who hailed from some part of Switzerland which, if the pronunciation was anything to go by, was apparently located somewhere in the larynx; there was a pious lady from Geneva who was so refined that she socialized scarcely even with herself; there was an old Austrian aristocrat who bore some resemblance to the Emperor Franz Joseph and treated the staff accordingly … and then in came Frau Steiner.

Continue reading ‘The crooked hat (Der schiefe Hut), by Kurt Tucholsky’