linda huber

Category: Life in Switzerland

  • The first of the summer visitors!

    Last week I had the first visitors of the summer when some cousins came to N.E. Switzerland for a few days. It was their first time in the area, so I showed them all the best sights. Here are some snaps from our tours: First of all, I met them in Zürich, where you could…

  • The Easter Bunny in Switzerland…

    Chocolate eggs aren’t big in Switzerland. They do exist, all sizes and fillings and wrapped in a variety of colourful foils. But the main (chocolate) event here is – bunnies.   They also come in all sizes and designs, from gorgeous and golden… to unwrapped (and even more mouth-watering)… to the kind you buy in…

  • The lost pen…

    Last autumn, on the way home from Zürich on the train, I found a pen. It had fallen between the seat and the carriage wall, and presumably its owner hadn’t noticed because I was able to fish it up quite easily. It was a Paper Mate, but not one of the gold-plated kind so I…

  • 2015 – The best of times and the worst of times… (a mimimalist’s version)

    This time tomorrow, 2015 will be a thing of the past and we’ll all be watching the New Year’s Concert from Vienna. It’s been a year of ups and downs… Best moment: Holding The Attic Room for the first time. Second and third best moments: Holding the audio version of The Cold Cold Sea and…

  • Close Encounters of the Malware Kind, or: How to Kill your Computer…

    Tuesday morning started off like any other Tuesday morning here in N.E. Switzerland. By eight o’clock I was at my desk overlooking the woods, sorting through the new emails, deleting the junk ones, saving those that had to be answered. First on my main email account, then on gmail. Then I turned my attention to…

  • Rhinoceros Graffiti…

    The building site along the road is busy – and noisy – these days. They’re pushing hard to get the roof on before winter, so for six days a week we have banging and hammering in the background. Not to mention a horrible whining noise which is apparently the machine that compresses concrete. Part of…

  • Toilet roll holders, and other tricky moving-house decisions…

    If I had ten franks for every moving-house decision I’ve made in the past two and a bit years I could retire tomorrow, and go and live on a lovely tropical island and write books and watch the sun go down with a Marguerita by my side… In 2013 we downsized from a big old…

  • Switzerland… The Rhine Falls

    It’s a murky autumn day here in N.E. Switzerland – the leaves are falling and we can see Lake Constance from the flat again. Ours is the second largest lake in the country, vaguely fish-shaped, with Germany along the northern bank, Switzerland to the south, and Austria in the east. The Rhine flows into the…

  • Sun, sand and… sculptures!

    It’s been an amazing summer here in the top right corner of Switzerland (once we got past June…) Here on our glorious lake, we’re able to enjoy all the summer advantages of this very international – I can see both Germany and Austria from my flat – region. Here’s a two-minute video showing the area…

  • Bats in the attic…

    Attics are constantly on my mind these days, in the run-up to publishing my third book, The Attic Room. Our old house had a lovely attic room – sloping wooden roof, small and spidery window, dark corners full of old boxes containing Great-grandma’s crockery… It was the perfect place to keep all those things we…