Author: Martin

I’d like to tell you about my medical adventure on Wednesday, December 10, 2025.

First things first: I’m fine again!

On Tuesday evening, as I was getting ready for bed, I noticed that I was experiencing pain in my lungs when breathing in. The fuller the lungs, the more painful; no pain when the lungs were empty. That same morning, upon waking, my right shoulder had been unusually sore. I almost always sleep on my left side, so that my wife, who lies to my right, is less disturbed by my snoring. I found it strange that sleeping on my left side would cause pain in my right shoulder. Over the course of the day, though, I forgot about it — until, as I said, that evening when the lung pain on breathing in suddenly appeared. I told my wife about it and asked her for a back massage with particular focus on my right shoulder. She duly gave me a vigorous Thai massage. That was pleasant enough in itself, but brought no relief from the pain when inhaling.

After a while in bed, unable to find any rest and tossing and turning repeatedly, I decided to retreat to the sofa, so that at least my wife could get some sleep. I myself barely slept that night. And when the breathing pain was still there in the morning — if anything stronger than the evening before — I decided to have the matter looked at by a doctor.

I got an appointment with my GP at 1:30 p.m. and arrived punctually by bus. He listened to my situation, ran a blood test and an ECG, and told me that pneumonia could already be ruled out based on the blood results. A heart attack seemed unlikely based on the ECG either. Further diagnostics would be necessary, such as a CT scan, for which his practice was not equipped. For that, I should go to the nearest hospital. He wanted to make a quick phone call to discuss the matter and would then let me know exactly where to go. I should wait outside. Ten minutes later he called me back in and told me he had arranged with the Triemli — a large city hospital in the west of Zurich — that I should present myself at the emergency department as soon as possible, to have the CT scan done there, along with any further tests that might be needed. We then discussed exactly how I would get there.

Unfortunately, when the medical assistant had taken the ECG and I’d had to remove my shoes — because she also needed to attach electrodes to my legs — one of my shoes had broken, and I had planned to stop at a cobbler on the way home to have it repaired. I therefore told the doctor that I had imagined taking the direct bus, a journey of about 25 minutes, and stopping along the way at the cobbler’s, which was right on the route, to get my shoe fixed. The doctor became almost agitated and said no, he didn’t think that was a good idea at all — I should go straight to the emergency department without any detours. He could call an ambulance for me, but that would be very expensive. He recommended that I spend the money on a taxi instead.

That was when I realised he was taking this seriously and clearly felt it brooked no delay. I myself didn’t feel the situation was quite so dramatic — I could breathe perfectly well, and if I only breathed shallowly it was almost pain-free; it was only breathing deeply that hurt. So I promised him I would take a taxi and left the practice.

Out on the street, I first tried to book a ride with Bolt, a ride-hailing service similar to Uber. Several drivers in the app declined the fare, however. I had installed a Zurich taxi app some time ago but had never used it, and the app wanted to register me through a lengthy process before it would process a ride request. Just then I spotted a taxi directly opposite, outside Altstetten station. I walked over, knocked on the window, and asked the driver if he could take me to the Triemli. He said yes, and I got in. The journey took about 15 minutes and cost Fr. 30.–, and he dropped me right at the entrance to the emergency department.

There I had to wait five minutes before anyone had time to attend to me. After I had described my case, I was placed in a wheelchair and taken through to the treatment area at the back — although in my humble opinion I could perfectly well have walked there myself, I was not permitted to do so. There I had to remove my upper clothing, put on a hospital gown, had blood taken again and another ECG recorded. After a doctor — a resident — had questioned me thoroughly about my symptoms, and after a wait until the CT scanner was free, I was sent in and slid back and forth through the tube several times. Then back to the treatment area.

I was then given the diagnosis: various things had been investigated. Heart attack: no. Aortic ectasia (abnormal widening of the main artery) unremarkable. No inflammation. Airways clear. No pleural effusion (abnormal fluid accumulation between the lung and chest wall lining). No pericardial effusion (fluid accumulation around the heart). No pulmonary embolism (blockage of a lung vessel by a blood clot). In short: everything possible had been examined, and all “dangerous” causes had been ruled out. There was therefore no immediate need for major treatment. The recommendation was simply to treat the symptoms for now with painkillers — specifically, paracetamol.

I received an intravenously administered dose of paracetamol, along with a prescription for the same medication, redeemable at a pharmacy of my choice. The test results would also be forwarded to my GP, who would arrange a follow-up appointment with me.

With that, I was allowed to leave the emergency department and took the bus home. Before leaving, I managed to beg a length of medical tape from one of the nurses, which I wrapped around my broken shoe so that I wouldn’t shuffle too badly with every step. That was at around 8:30 p.m. By 9 p.m. I was home. I had thus spent the entire afternoon since 1 p.m. attending to my health. I took my broken shoes to the cobbler near me the following day; he repaired them in two hours for Fr. 25.–.

I can say this: when a 63-year-old man visits his doctor complaining of chest pain that occurs when breathing, it is taken very seriously — both by the GP and by the doctors in the emergency department. Everything is set in motion, the great diagnostic machinery cranked up, to find out what might be going on, even if it turns out in the end that there is nothing requiring immediate treatment. Perhaps it is psychosomatic after all, brought on by the months of unemployment I have been going through — but that is a story for another time.

At the follow-up appointment, my GP said everything looked good. He would like to refer me for an ultrasound of the aorta, since a slightly enlarged aorta had been detected. This would not need immediate treatment, but if it were to change, it might. The idea was therefore to take a baseline measurement now and a follow-up measurement in a year’s time. If there was no significant change by then, the matter could be set aside.

No sooner said than done. A week later I had my aorta measured by ultrasound. In a year’s time, we’ll see.

For now, I’m relieved that nothing serious is the matter and that I can simply manage it with paracetamol.

A short story by Martin Christen

As a teenager — I must have been around 17 at the time, right in the middle of my apprenticeship as an electromechanical technician — I broke my leg skiing. Ski vacations were a non-negotiable family tradition. My mother loved them so much that she scrimped and saved all year long, for herself and for the whole family, so that we could spend two weeks in Lenk, in the Bernese Oberland, during the February school break. We always stayed at the same place, “Chalet Bambi.” My parents had built a good relationship with the owners and booked there every year. For as long as I could remember, winter meant ski vacation at Chalet Bambi. Every morning, our parents sent us to ski school so we’d learn properly, and after a few years we were good enough to head out on our own — and we made full use of that freedom. As a teenager, I turned it into a personal challenge: how many times could I race down the slope at the Betelberg, ride the gondola back up, and race down again in a single day? My brothers and I made it a competition. Well, one fine day, as I said, at seventeen years old, I was bombing down the slope as fast as I could and had to funnel into the waiting area at the bottom of the lift. It was already late in the afternoon, only a few people were waiting for the next gondola, and I came in at a pretty good clip. As I tried to steer into the queue, I still had some speed on me, had to stretch out my leg to keep my balance — and wham! My leg caught a post. Crack! it went (I didn’t hear it myself, but that’s what people told me), and my right shinbone was broken.

I was immediately attended to by the lift staff. Since I was already at the valley station, no rescue sled was needed; instead, they arranged a ride to the nearest doctor, who in turn put me in an ambulance to the nearest hospital, about half an hour away in the small town of Zweisimmen. In the meantime, the doctor in Lenk notified the owners of Chalet Bambi, who in turn informed my parents that something had happened to their son.

At the hospital in Zweisimmen, my broken leg was operated on and I received a steel rod. Afterward I stayed a few days in the hospital until I was well enough to be transported, and then my parents took me home from vacation. I was informed that I would not be able to work for three months — I’d have to rest at home until the break had healed enough for me to put weight on the leg again. Any kind of work at my apprenticeship as an electromechanical technician was completely out of the question.

My mother, always practical-minded, decided that her son, who was now going to spend three months at home, would make good use of the time. As a mechanic’s apprentice I was obviously useless for any physical work. But she, the tireless worker that she was, could always find something useful to do. In my case, she decided I should learn to type. That was quite out of the ordinary for a trade apprentice at the time — the kind of thing you’d expect from a commercial apprentice, what we called a “KV-Lehrling.” The boy from the house diagonally across the street, who was the same age as me, happened to be doing exactly that kind of apprenticeship. My mother told me to head over to the neighbor’s (on my crutches) and ask if he had a typing course and whether he could lend me the materials. Said and done. We had a mechanical typewriter at home, used occasionally for formal correspondence. It was around 1979, and mechanical typewriters were simply a matter of course back then. Ours was the kind with those long, moving type bars for each key, which would fly toward the paper when you pressed a key and strike the letter through the ribbon onto the page. I had barely paid any attention to that machine before, but now I was forced to come to terms with it. My mother figured that fifteen minutes a day would be plenty. If I kept it up for three months, I’d get pretty far by the end. And indeed. What started out slow and hesitant — especially learning the strange, seemingly illogical layout of the keys — gradually took on a logic of its own and began to flow into my fingers. I also came to understand that the key layout was designed so that most German words could be typed without the type bars jamming. I had to untangle more than a few of those jams.

By the time I was well enough to go back to work, my typing skills had advanced quite nicely — I could type several paragraphs fluently without making mistakes. Mistakes, back in those days, were a real ordeal. Either you had to throw away the sheet of paper and retype the whole thing from scratch, or you had to use correction tape or Wite-Out to cover the wrong letter and then strike the right one over it. If you didn’t notice a typo until a word or two later, it was usually too late to fix it cleanly. So you really had to type error-free from the start. That required total concentration.

When the three months were up, I set the typewriter aside and went back to my life as a mechanic’s apprentice. Mom’s verdict: it’s like riding a bike — you learn it once and you can always pick it up again when you need it. The only thing was, I had no idea yet when that would ever be.

Not long afterward, my father came home with an Exidy Sorcerer. A personal computer — our very first! He had been following all this new computer business for a while, had even subscribed to the American magazine Byte, and had been admiring the ads for the latest models. Where he actually bought it, I have no idea — there were hardly any computer stores in our area at the time, if any at all; those places were strictly for enthusiasts. I’ve described my first steps with that first computer in another story. But right away I noticed that my typing skills were already paying off — I could just rattle off a computer program and type it into the machine without breaking a sweat. My father himself never mastered the touch-typing method as well as I had.

As it turned out, my father’s Exidy Sorcerer was the turning point in my career. I did finish my apprenticeship as an electromechanical technician, but while still in the program I had already begun moving toward computers. For instance, I got myself one of the first programmable calculators, a TI-57, on which I proudly typed in and played sophisticated programs like the moon landing game. I also remember always having that calculator with me in trade school, with the TI-57 manual sitting on my desk right next to the Kuchling formula handbook that I was required to use for school. My homeroom teacher was a gruff but good-natured older man. He watched my antics, and one day he walked up to me, picked up both the TI-57 manual and the Kuchling from my desk, and announced loudly to me and all my fellow electromechanical apprentices: “Why does the Kuchling look so much less worn than this calculator manual, my friend? It should be the other way around!!!” — and laughed out loud. It was clear that while he would have preferred me to be poring over the required textbook every day, he also found it entirely acceptable that I was using the technical manual for my calculator so thoroughly.

And so it became increasingly clear that my apprenticeship as an electromechanical technician would not be the end of my education — I wanted to study computer science. Since my grades at the end of school hadn’t been good enough to transfer to the Kantonsschule, which would have been the direct path to university, I took what is called the “second educational route”: an entrance exam to the HTL, the Höhere Technische Lehranstalt — a technical college. I passed that exam and, in 1985, graduated with the degree of Dipl. Informatik-Ing. HTL.

Throughout my studies, my typing skills earned me more than a few advantages and more than a few astonished looks from classmates and professors alike. My fingers just flew across the keyboards, and my written assignments were always the first ones done.

Later, as the internet slowly came along and you could get online with a dial-up modem, I discovered a website where you could practice and test your typing skills online. I enjoyed doing that regularly, and at some point I entered a competition where many other touch typists measured themselves against each other. I didn’t come out at the very top, but I was well above average — and I was pretty proud when one test certified my typing speed at 600 keystrokes per minute. That was faster than many a professional secretary.

And yet something from that old typewriter has stayed with me. Sometimes I notice that I still type on computer keyboards exactly the way I learned on my mother’s mechanical typewriter — hard and firm, though not every character gets the same force. An “M,” for instance, has to be struck hard, because that large, broad letter has to push all the way through the ribbon; a lowercase “i,” on the other hand, needs only a light touch — otherwise the thin type bar tears a slit right through the paper; and a period “.” has to be struck more gently still. You can see the effects on my keyboards today. Even brand-new keyboards show wear quickly, and different keys wear unevenly. There was also a colleague at work who once remarked that he was amazed: even though our office had gone out of its way to order the quietest keyboards available, I somehow still managed to make every single keystroke audible…

Yes, my dear mother was surely surprised by everything her idea of fifteen minutes of daily typing practice set in motion. That this little course would prove so useful throughout my entire career — I never could have dreamed it back then. Looking back: thank you, dear Mother, for your foresight.

A short story by Martin Christen

With a group of friends who, together, ran seminars on personal development and gender issues, we were talking one day about how we would like to attend a seminar ourselves for once, and do something for ourselves. The idea developed to go. as a whole group, to a seminar led by Angelika Kern. A seminar house was rented somewhere in the canton of Schaffhausen, Ms Kern agreed to act as our facilitator, and soon we set off for a special weekend. This must have been in 2001. When Ms Kern introduced herself at the beginning, she explained that she worked with two methods: family constellation work and craniosacral therapy. Each of us would take turns receiving a session using one of the two methods. Which method would be used in each case would be decided together, by feel. The other participants would be present throughout, witnessing each interaction. There were about twenty of us – some couples, some individuals – and we had known each other for years and were good friends. This approach could easily fill an entire weekend, and promised to bring us even closer together as a group.

It would be fascinating to report on my friends’ sessions, but then we would never reach the end. This is about me. When my turn came, I sat down next to Ms Kern so we could get acquainted and decide on the form of therapy. She fairly quickly suggested craniosacral therapy for me. She had been doing family constellation work with the previous people, so this was something entirely new and interesting. She explained the procedure as follows: I would lie down on a treatment table and relax on my back. She would sit on a chair at my head end and place her hands on my shoulders. She would then sense her way into my body with her hands and arms. I should feel free to describe at any time how I was feeling. I objected that I sometimes found it difficult to name my feelings and talk about them, but that I could easily describe my physical sensations. She laughed and said that was no problem – I should simply stick to my physical sensations. How things would develop from there would unfold by itself.

So I lay down on the table, and she placed her hands on my shoulders. She continued to explain – addressing both my friends sitting around us and me – that she was now sensing her way into my body step by step, slowly penetrating deeper and deeper. She gave a running commentary on how well things were progressing, and I reported whether I felt warm or cold in the relevant parts of my body, whether there was a bout of sweating, whether I was trembling, or whatever else was happening. At some point, she said she could feel a particular resistance. Was I ready for an experiment? I said yes. She suggested a sentence that I should repeat silently to myself several times, simply observing whether it produced any reaction or not. The sentence was: «Better you than me.» Right, so I repeated the sentence to myself several times, but didn’t have the impression of any particular reaction, and I said so. No problem, she said – then let’s simply turn the sentence around: «Better me than you.» I turned this sentence over and over in my mind – and, wow! I took off like a rocket. I couldn’t understand what was happening to me, but I was suddenly seized by an overwhelming grief. I began to weep, tears running down my cheeks, I cried out and writhed on the table. «Better me than you!» The sentence felt simultaneously terrible and absolutely true. A deep truth that touched my innermost being. The sentence tore me apart. Of course! It was logical! If someone had to suffer, then it should be me – not my neighbour, not my fellow man, not my loved ones, not anyone else – me! And I could not bear this realisation. Suddenly, years of grief poured out of me with a force I could never have imagined.

Ms Kern now explained – speaking almost more to my friends than to me, though of course I heard every word – that she had sensed this. It is, she said, far more common than people generally believe that a pregnancy is, right at the beginning, a twin pregnancy, but that one of the two twins quietly disappears, more or less without trace. Sometimes there is a small bleed in the early weeks of pregnancy, sometimes it causes more disruption such as cramps, and in rare cases the doctor discovers a dead foetus and has to remove it surgically. The expectant mother may not even be aware of the premature loss of the twin foetus. But in every case, this situation is traumatic for the surviving foetus. Medically, there are demonstrably increased risks of cerebral palsy or heart defects. But from a psychological perspective too, significant long-term consequences are to be expected. As could be seen in my case, she said, I was blaming myself for the death of my twin brother. Or to put it the other way around: the death of my twin brother had disturbed me so deeply that I would rather have died in his place, and thus spared him his suffering.

All of this made a great deal of sense to me. I understood exactly what she was talking about, and how it applied to me. I had, after all, repeatedly suffered severe depressive episodes in recent years – episodes in which I withdrew completely from the world, literally pulled the covers over my head, and felt that I didn’t belong in this world, that I shouldn’t really be here, that my presence, my life, was a mistake.

A twin brother! I was supposed to have had a twin brother! This realisation felt wonderful. I had always wished for a brother like that. I could vividly imagine growing up with my twin brother and sharing life with him. Having someone who simply knows everything about me and understands me unconditionally, because we are twin brothers. I drove home from the seminar in a state of elation. This realisation was something I could work with. I began to talk to my twin brother, to explain to him why I did what I did, why I felt what I felt. I tried to think of a name for him, but couldn’t settle on anything. That was logical too, since a name is chosen by the parents, not by the brother. And I slowly came to understand the longing I had always felt within me – that something important was missing from my life, something irretrievably lost. That unbridled melancholy that seized me and brought me to my knees again and again.

A few weeks later, I told my sister about it – about the seminar and the important things I had experienced and discovered there. It was over an internet chat, because she lived quite far away and we rarely made the long journey to see each other. She listened to everything attentively, and at the end said that yes, it would certainly be interesting to know whether anything unusual had happened during my mother’s early pregnancy. I should probably talk to my father about it, she suggested – our mother had passed away a few years earlier and could no longer be asked.

A few more weeks later, when we were chatting again, she asked whether I had spoken to my father yet about this twin brother story and my mother’s early pregnancy. I said no, I hadn’t had the opportunity, but it seemed she herself knew something. Couldn’t she just tell me? Not really, she said cautiously – but she could point me in the right direction. For the details, I should please ask our father. So?

So: she happened to know how my conception had come about. It was during the winter sports holiday of 1962, when the whole family – my parents and my three siblings – had been on a skiing holiday in Lenk. My parents had been particularly happy and in love, she knew this because they had been almost unreachable, entirely absorbed in each other, with no time for the children. These children were at that time 8, 9 and 12 years old – my sister the eldest, the two younger boys – and old enough to entertain themselves, so it hadn’t been a problem.

A few weeks later, back home, my mother had been deeply distressed and had fallen into a real depression. She had discovered she was pregnant, and did not want another child at all. For one thing, she was already 42 and felt too old for another child; for another, she complained that the whole circus was starting all over again. She had only just got through the worst of it with the other three – and now start again from the beginning? The same thing all over again? The depression became so severe that she made a suicide attempt. This went wrong, however, and didn’t even have any consequences for the pregnancy, so that in the end, in October, a healthy boy came into the world – namely, yours truly.

I beg your pardon? I could hardly believe what I had heard. My mother had made a suicide attempt? While she was pregnant with me? Wow! That cast the sentence «Better me than you!» in an entirely new light. Perhaps there was no twin brother whose suffering I had wanted to take on – perhaps in the end it was my mother’s suffering that pained me so deeply that I would rather have died myself than cause my mother unhappiness. If my mother was suffering so much because of me that she wanted to die, then surely it would be better to die oneself, and in doing so, end my mother’s suffering. Better not to come into the world at all. Better me than you! Looked at this way, the sentence suddenly made even more sense.

I now wanted to know more about this. I let a little time pass, but then sought out my father and raised it with him. He was reluctant to open up for a long time, hedged, talked about how yes, the depression was true, and that he had decided at the time to give me particular attention in order to take the burden off my mother. He wanted to take special care of me, consciously more than he had with the other three. And it’s true – I remember many trips with my father, the two of us travelling for hours by train across Switzerland, where he showed me all manner of sights, natural wonders, and special museums. As far as I can remember, these trips happened mainly during my primary school years. And later too, he introduced me to the world of technology and engineering – he was an electrical engineer by profession – but also talked a great deal about politics and religion. The latter in a way that I found particularly fascinating and undogmatic. Although a member of the Reformed Church, he could speak at length about reincarnation, spiritual worlds, and angelic beings, and was in many respects at odds with the official Reformed teaching – as I later discovered through various confrontations with the village pastor.

I kept pressing him about how the suicide attempt had actually happened. As I said, he resisted for a long time, and I could see why. He was afraid I might come to hate my mother because of it, and that this would, as he put it, do me more harm than good. I reassured him and said that too much water had already flowed down the Aare, that I was now grown up and mature enough to keep these things in perspective. I was convinced that my mother had done everything humanly possible in her life, and sometimes even more than that. I had the greatest respect for her. But this point mattered to me, and I simply wanted the truth to be on the table, so that my soul could find peace. At that, he relented and told me the following:

One day, in her despair, she had gone down to the garage, got into the car, and run the engine with the garage door closed. She wanted to suffocate herself with the toxic exhaust fumes. This takes a certain amount of time, and suddenly she apparently changed her mind about dying. In any case, she suddenly cried out for help. He himself had been upstairs in the house and heard these cries. He rushed down to the garage, opened the garage door, manoeuvred his half-unconscious wife into the passenger seat, and drove her to the nearest cantonal hospital. In this way, both she and the child within her – that is, I – could be saved. After that, it was never spoken of again; she came to terms with the pregnancy, and in time was able to develop love for the child.

That, then, is the story of the pregnancy that brought me into this world. To this day, I still go through depressive phases in which I think that I shouldn’t really be in this world at all, that I am out of place, a disruptive factor. At least, since I became aware of the cause of these thoughts, these phases have become less frequent. My psychologist recently told me that it is time for me to let go of my victim role. In the light of this story, I find that difficult. But he is certainly right. Who knows – perhaps one day I will be able to lay the sentence «Better me than you!» to rest, once and for all.

A short story by Martin Christen

It was 1980, and my father came home with an Exidy Sorcerer.

For most people, it was an unknown device – and it remained so, because there were no standards yet. An acquaintance from the village had got himself a Commodore PET, which looked more likely to become a standard, but also disappeared. The personal computer era was still in its infancy: 8080 CPUs, Z80 processors, the CP/M operating system just coming into existence. My father, an electrical engineer and always curious about the latest developments, had acquired the Exidy Sorcerer with its Z80 CPU – an exotic device, but for him and me, the gateway into a new world.

He showed me the basics of programming in BASIC, but I quickly outgrew him. Soon I was programming things he himself no longer fully understood — helped along by the fact that, thanks to a broken leg, I already knew how to touch-type. One day, I discovered that the Sorcerer’s 8-bit character set contained a number of freely programmable characters. I designed a series of them so that their sequence of images produced a little worm contracting and stretching, then wrote a small BASIC program that displayed these characters on the screen in exactly the right sequence, so that a worm appeared to crawl slowly from the bottom to the top.

When I showed my father the program, he clapped his hands in delight. He was thrilled – not just by the result, but by the fact that I had already dug so deeply into the technical peculiarities of the system that I had managed something like this as a beginner’s effort.

It was the beginning of a long passion.

After my apprenticeship as an electromechanical engineer at Sprecher & Schuh, I worked for a few months at Indumation AG, a subsidiary of my training company, which developed and sold electronics for warehouses and industrial control systems. I already knew that after my compulsory military service I would be starting a degree in computer engineering – this interlude was my first step into the professional world of computers.

It was my dream world. On one hand, software was being built for fault-tolerant TANDEM computers, all of whose components were duplicated and switched over automatically in the event of a failure. On the other hand, for controlling high-bay warehouses, cranes, and horizontal conveyor systems, in-house industrial computers were used – PLCs, Programmable Logic Controllers, with multiple slots for input and output modules.

During a quieter period between two projects – as a hobby, in a sense – I inserted a dozen 8-output modules side by side into one of these PLCs and wrote a small program in 8085 assembly language that linked the eight LEDs of each module into an 8×12 matrix. With this, I could display the numbers from 00 to 99, and set them counting through in sequence with a counter program.

When I showed this to a colleague, he clapped me on the shoulder: «You’ve just proved your genius as a computer specialist. Every computer science student should have this as one of their first assignments.»

I accepted the praise with a smile. To me, it had simply been what I always did: dive deep, try to understand how something works, and then find out what else is possible, what no one has tried yet.

I completed my degree in computer engineering at the HTL – a technical college roughly equivalent to today’s universities of applied sciences – in 1985. As a graduation tradition, our class put together a magazine – with photos, anecdotes, portraits of the teachers, and all sorts of episodes from our years of study. Together with a fellow student, I sat down several times to collect amusing snippets to scatter throughout it.

At some point, he said to me: «Martin, I’ve just noticed that you often make fun of yourself here. You’re writing down incidents where you didn’t come off well, and laughing about them. I wouldn’t do that if I were you.»

I was taken aback. I had never thought about it that way. I simply saw the comedy in the situations I had been part of – and felt they were worth a laugh. He, on the other hand, felt these were laughs at my expense, and that they might cast me in a poor light.

We saw it very differently. And perhaps we still do.

A short story by Martin Christen

The Lego carpet had been lying on the floor of my room for days. A landscape of coloured bricks, roads, houses, bridges – a work that was never finished, because it was never meant to be finished. I knelt in the middle of it, completely absorbed, searching through the chaos for exactly the right piece for exactly the right spot. The world around me did not exist.

When the boy from next door came to visit – which my mother always welcomed warmly – he would find the brick landscape exciting at first. We built together, added to it, extended it. But after about two hours, he would grow restless. At some point, he would ask the question that baffled me every time:

«When are we finally going to play?»

I didn’t understand what he was talking about. We were playing the whole time. What we were doing – building, designing, creating a world – was, to me, playing in its purest form. I put all my concentration into it. What else could there possibly be?

The same in the sandpit behind the house. My father knew where to get the best sand – malleable, moist sand that could be piled into mountains, through which you could dig tunnels and carve roads. The neighbourhood children would often gather at our place because of it. But here too, my favourite activity was the building itself: first a mountain as high as possible in the middle, then roads and tunnels winding around it and through it, farms in the flatlands, bridges over imaginary rivers. Building all of this required patience, craftsmanship, and artistry. I could spend hours at it.

And again, after a while, the same question: «When are we finally going to play?»

For my playmate, playing meant making up a story and acting it out with figures and cars on the finished layout. For me, playing meant creating that layout in the first place. And when it was finished – if it ever was – I no longer knew what to do with it.

As a teenager, my father gave me an electronics experiment kit. Resistors, transistors, diodes, breadboards, short cables – and a thick experiment manual with dozens of circuits. I loved losing myself in it: learning how to make a light bulb flash, how a button activates a function, and, as the crowning achievement, a real radio receiver that could actually pick up broadcasts. My father, an electrical engineer by profession, deliberately encouraged this interest. I was the only one of his four children to have inherited his technical flair.

When I later gave my stepson the same experiment kit, I noticed the difference immediately. He glanced at the table of contents, had me show him how to build the alarm system – and from that point on, wanted to use only that one function. That you could learn and discover so much more with it didn’t interest him. He saw the usefulness of one particular set of instructions. I had always seen the process, never the end product.

It had always been that way. And for a long time, I thought that was simply my nature – introverted, turned inward, happiest alone with my projects.

But then I think of my mother. She was torn, I believe. On the one hand, she did see my focus as something valuable. On the other, she was afraid I might become isolated, and pushed me to spend more time with the neighbourhood children. Ronny, who lived a few houses away, was not to her liking – too doubtful an environment. In my teenage years, she prevented me from going to evening parties with classmates. The only party I was allowed to attend was that of an unpopular classmate, the headmaster’s son, where I ended up being almost the only guest.

In this way, she stamped me as a loner – and in doing so, at least in part, made me into what I was supposed to be.

To this day, I don’t know exactly where the line lies. Was I introverted by nature – someone who finds happiness in stillness and in process? Or did I become so, because the world around me kept pushing me into that role?

Perhaps that is also the wrong question. Perhaps I am both – and the one has grown so deeply into the other that they can no longer be separated.

A short story by Martin Christen

I no longer remember exactly when it happened. Sometime in fourth or fifth grade, when Mr Miller was my teacher and I was nine or ten years old. The year is blurry, but the feeling from back then is crystal clear, as if it were yesterday.

In those years, my parents liked to go hiking in the autumn. The Binntal in the canton of Valais was a wonderfully wild region, where I found beautifully formed stones: simple quartz, fist-sized pieces of white sugar dolomite coated with golden pyrite, and black, foot-sized chunks whose surface was covered all over with gleaming, elongated crystal cylinders – probably jordanite. To a mineralogist, they would have been unremarkable specimens. To me, they were treasures, each one with a story that only I knew.

The following spring, I built myself a small wooden hut at the back of the garden, right next to the sandpit, and played «shop» in it. My display consisted of the Binntal stones, carefully arranged like genuine valuables.

One afternoon, Ronny turned up. He lived a few houses away, in the parallel street – an only occasional playmate. Rumours surrounded him: his parents were divorced, his stepfather strict, perhaps even too strict. For us children, this was a flaw we didn’t understand, but parroted nonetheless. Still, I was glad he came.

Ronny looked at the stones and asked questions that flattered me. And at some point, he pulled a stopwatch from his pocket. A mechanical model with a flip cover and two buttons, which when pressed made the hand run or stop. I was fascinated by the thing. We quickly came to an agreement: two of my finest stones in exchange for his stopwatch. I spent the rest of the afternoon timing everything that came to mind.

After about an hour, my mother came out onto the terrace to offer me an afternoon snack. Almost in passing, she asked where I had got the stopwatch. I told her truthfully about the trade. She frowned, said that couldn’t be right, took the watch from me without a word, and went inside. I shrugged and went back to tending my shop.

At dinner, she announced that she had been making phone calls. Two stopwatches had gone missing from the Bärenmatte gymnasium – one in Ronny’s possession, one in mine. Mr Miller had confirmed they were missing from there. My objection that I had simply made a legitimate trade was brushed aside with a tight smile: «You can claim all sorts of things.» She would hand the watches over to Mr Miller that same evening.

The next day, Mr Miller likewise refused to hear my version of events. The punishment: Ronny and I were to spend the spring holidays «planting saplings» for the village forester. My parents thought this was a splendid idea. Resistance was futile.

So on the first day of the holidays, I turned up at the forester’s at seven in the morning. He was surprised to see such a young worker, but had been informed and gave me light tasks. For two weeks, I worked from seven until five, with a generous lunch break, but I wasn’t used to such physical labour and came home exhausted each evening. Ronny never showed up. Not once.

On the last day of work, the forester bid me a warm farewell. He hadn’t had such a hardworking young man for a long time, he said. He knew it had been a punishment – but because I had worked so hard without complaining, he would pay me the usual wage. However, since I was a minor, he would send the money to my parents with a letter. My heart leapt. Perhaps the undeserved drudgery had been worth it after all.

A few days later, when I came home from school, my father and mother were sitting at the dining table and asked me to sit down. Mother had an envelope in her hand. The forester had praised my work highly, she said – and was paying me a wage of around 170 francs. But now they had a problem. It simply could not be that I should profit from a punishment. Besides, I would have no use for so much money. They had decided to donate it to a good cause.

I swallowed hard and went to my room. That felt bloody awful. Not only had my mother refused to believe the truth about the trade – I had also been the only one who was punished, and now I wasn’t even allowed to keep the wages I had honestly earned.

It was a second verdict. Harder than the first, because it came from those who should have protected me.