Nook’s final walk

It was at the end of another locum placement high in the Swiss mountains, when Joana, one of the nurses, entered the consulting room. There would be the euthanasia of an old Husky and the owners were asking, if I would mind coming to their farm to put their dog to sleep….

“Of course, I wouldn’t – in fact, I would prefer to do it that way.” was my reply.

Whenever I have had the choice, I had euthanised my own pets at home and I had always offered this option to my own clients.

Euthanasias are a complex subject and an area where the human medical and the veterinary points of view are least aligned.

The right to euthanise a patient is both a privilege as well as a mental and an ethical burden. Always controversial, always a subject of debate. Always just a last resort, at the end of prolonged suffering or of a fast-deteriorating quality of life. But over the last few years, in veterinary patients, also more frequently the only remaining option, when the owner’s financial or personal circumstances no longer allow the continuation of treatment.

Thankfully, this was not the case here. Nook was old and with winter on its way, they felt that his time had come. He had received regular medication over the summer months, but now he had started to deteriorate.

So the euthanasia was scheduled for Friday afternoon, as my last appointment.

Unsurprisingly, as with all acts of clinical practice, there can be good and bad euthanasias and there has been good and not so good training to prepare for this procedure.

Likewise, some veterinarians are very good at it, while others are struggling. Not because they have done anything wrong from a technical perspective, but because they might have failed to show the right level of empathy a pet owner had expected.

When I studied in Hanover, in a class of 230 students, my training for this procedure covered just the technical aspects – the choice of drugs used, the routes available to administer the medication and the means to confirm, that a patient indeed had passed away. In addition to this, following the deep sedation of the patient, instead of a barbiturate, a drug was used, that caused a blood clot in the heart and the main blood vessels, similar to a massive stroke, to end the life of the patient.

Not an ideal solution….

How different then was the guidance I received a couple of years later, when I did a clinical internship at the vet school in Oslo, where we were just a group of six aspiring veterinarians. The session started with a cup of coffee and a sit down around a table in the social room of the small animal clinic. While technical aspects formed part of the session, the focus here was far more on the ethical aspects of taking an animal’s life, on the mental state of the owners and finally on our own mental health.

I will be eternally grateful for this session…

And yet, despite of all the preparations and the clinical training, I have had bad euthanasias and some that with hindsight could at least have gone better.

Most of these – thankfully – happened in the earlier years of my professional life and they were invariably due to poor communication or preparation on my part.

Problems arose when I had agreed to put an animal to sleep, while not all family members (often the children) that were present were completely comfortable with this decision, when I was about to start the procedure and realised that a vital piece of equipment was missing or not ready, causing an unnecessary delay for the animal and its owner or when I had failed to inform the owners in advance about what to expect when an animal is put to sleep.

With horror and shame, I am recalling some euthanasias, which we had to perform at the beginning of the pandemic, when we could not allow owners to stay with their beloved pets in their final moments, as this appeared to be the only way to assure client and staff safety. This carried on, until I realised that one of the branch surgeries I was working at, had a large, fenced in garden with a wooden bench, where the owners could take their dogs for a final walk and where they could sit down with their pets while they were falling asleep.

Eventually some of my most memorable and peaceful euthanasias were the result of this compromise.   

 

And then there were other ones, that went so well, that they have stayed in my memory, even decades later.

Some years ago, one of my patients was a small terrier, owned by a very wealthy old lady. She usually arrived in a Mercedes convertible and always wore leather gloves when driving her car. Her dog was her only companion and he absolutely hated me. Invariably, he started snarling as soon as he entered the practice.

I tried to be as gentle as possible with him, and I limited any handling to the absolute minimum, but it did not make any difference. Eventually, when he came for one of his regular check-ups, he was much calmer and easier to examine. I took this as a bad sign. A check of his weight and a blood test confirmed that he was gravely ill.

When the time came to put him to sleep, I went to the lady’s house. By then he was very weak and was lying in his bed. I only had to give him a very low dosed sedative, and he did not even raise his head. The owner and I sat with him until he had fallen asleep while the Adagio of Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez played in the background, a piece the owner had selected specifically for the occasion. While I don’t know, if it made a huge difference to the little dog, the interplay of the Spanish guitar, the English horn and the string section in this piece of music was so fitting that the whole scene will stay with me forever.

Eventually, Friday afternoon arrived and Joana and I drove out to the sledge dog kennel.

I had worked many times before with Huskies and when these dogs were kept and used as intended, I have always found them very predictable and have never had a problem with them as veterinary patients.

A few years ago, I was sitting with a dozen Huskies in the large kitchen of a colleague in the wilderness near the Swedish Norwegian border, while having a cup of coffee and talking about veterinary life…. Each of these dogs could easily have torn me to shreds and yet, once losing interest in their visitor, they had all fallen asleep.

Huskies in Troms, Norway

The life of these dogs is hard. They must endure brutal temperatures in the winter, are ill equipped for the heat of the summer and they have to run long distances, pulling often heavy weights.

Swedish Huskies

What keeps them going and mentally stable, is the social interaction with the pack, the competition with their peers and the attention and guidance they get from their musher. If all this is missing, the Husky can become a very difficult dog to handle. This is, what unfortunately happens to many urban Huskies that were obtained mainly for the colour of their eyes or their wolf-like appearance.

Not so at the farm.

When we rolled on to the yard, we saw the whole family, parents, children and a pack of probably 40 sledge dogs of all ages waiting for us.

The Huskies were kept in social groups in their open pens, where they remained, until they were allowed to come out by their owner. All were well socialised and the children walk among the dogs freely.

After satisfying the interest of a few puppies that were not yet used to the kennel rules, we started to prepare ourselves. A large blue tarpaulin was laid out on the ground near the house and Nook was called to join us.

Slowly, very stiff but with a wagging tail he came out of his pen, greeted us, and inspected our bags. He was thinner than most of the other dogs and he clearly was no longer as well muscled as the younger Huskies. The owner told us, that he had never been a leading character, but that he was – even in old age – well respected in the pack and that he had always been a very good sledge dog.

When Nook and everyone around him had settled on the tarpaulin, I gave him his sedation. I had chosen the thinnest possible needle, and he did not even seem to notice. We then continued talking. The owners told me about the challenges of running a sledge dog business in the Alps, while I reflected on some of my experiences with these dogs and with their owners in the north of Scandinavia, including my first single- handed caesarian section on a Siberian Husky, who’s owner had traveled over 200 kms through the tundra to get help from me – a 4th Year veterinary student with just a temporary license…..

Not only the dog, but also all the puppies were fine in the end.

Eventually, Nook had gone to sleep, so that I could place an i/v catheter and give him the final injections. He passed away peacefully in the middle of the yard.

We then placed him into a crate, and the owner started to call one group of dogs after another to come forward to inspect him for the last time. For the owners this was important and I observed it in utter fascination.

Most of the adult Huskies walked up to him, sniffed for a brief moment and then lost interest, others backed away from the body with signs of uncertainty and possibly some confusion and fear. The puppies and the juveniles jumped around the cadaver of the old dog expecting some sort of game. None of the older male dogs tried to mark on or near the cadaver and none of the Huskies howled.

When the procession had ended, we collected our equipment and before leaving, I said to the owner:

“This was probably the least stressful way for him to go. He was among his family, and he didn’t know what was due to happen to him when he walked up to us.”

“Oh, he very well knew….” was the knowing reply of the musher.

Of course he did I thought….

 

 

Wedged between two emperors

 

The weather forecast had been too good and with no other commitments that day, I had grabbed my hiking gear, had jumped into my beaten-up BMW and taken the motorway heading south…..   

With the border to Tyrol just a few kilometres away, what beckoned was the massif of the two emperors – the tame and the wild Kaiser. In between the two, the much smaller Feldberg and the sheltered Kaiserbach valley, as a buffer, a cushion, to keep the two apart.

Away from the chronically congested motorways that were crossing Europe’s mountainous heart, here remained an island of calm, a reminiscence of a time when life was slower, when the days were ruled by the movement of the sun and the passing of the seasons.

Four lanes turned to two and then then just to one, with the occasional cattle grid that shook the car as I drove across them. Brown dairy cows, ruminating sedately on the fields to the left and to the right, and eventually even in the middle of the road. The car slowed down, the world around me slowed down.

Arriving at Griesner Alm, I stopped and took with me only the few things required for a few hours of hiking on a very forgiving trail in the Alps at the end of the summer: a light jacket, a water bottle, a cap against the sun and a pair of gloves for the exposed sections that were secured with steel wires.

The path criss-crossed its way gently, but unrelenting up the southern flank of the Feldberg for about 2500 feet, while the sun appeared to have forgotten that it was already autumn in Northern Europe.

After a couple of hours, I had reached the ubiquitous cross on the summit. A minor achievement compared to the effort required for the far more demanding trails on the other side of the valley, where only the most resilient vegetation was able to cling to the bare rocks. That Kaiser was well and truly wild….

What followed, was a not too challenging ridge walk, with an emperor on each side and an uninhibited view across the Northern Alps, followed by a rapid descend to the Stripsenjochhaus, a well-maintained mountain shelter, resting on the slim saddle between Stripsenkopf and Karlspitzen. The gloves in my pack came handy on the sections, where steel cramps and thick cables connected to the rock were used to mitigate the risk of sliding, especially when the conditions were less favourable.

The generous distribution of managed cabins in the Alps remains unrivalled in the mountainous regions of the world and a glass of cold beer and a simple meal at the Stripsenjochhaus seemed a fair reward for my efforts today.

With this being the end of the hiking season, the refuge was less busy now and having secured a comfortable place in the afternoon sun, there was no better thing to do, than to continue with my literary excursion into the criminal underworld of Norway’s capital, while enjoying the output of the cabin’s Italian espresso machine and watching the shadows of the rugged outcrops of the mountain’s north face growing longer and longer.

Bright red and white way markings and the occasional, unofficially erected cairn were now lining the trail back into the valley, and with the trailhead already in sight, the use of a map became superfluous.

The trail passed through sections of earlier rock falls, emphasising the fragile existence of the buildings and the peaceful scenery of the valley below me. A constant threat, but not one to worry about today….  

Well before sunset I had returned to my car. With dusty boots, an empty water bottle in my bag, but with recharged batteries for the next rainy days ahead….    

The gospel of Padre Guilherme

 

It had been a long, scorching summer, but now the first signs of autumn had arrived in the valley of the Maas in Wallonia, just a few kilometres north of the French border. Some much-needed rain had arrived, and a thick layer of clouds hung like a lead curtain over the river and its banks for most of the day.

Making the short journey from Namur to the Abbey of Maredsous, I followed the meandering road that criss-crossed underneath the arches of an old, now abandoned railway line. Signs warned about meeting traffic and motorcycles appearing from nowhere.

A slight mist rose from the wet ground, and water was dripping from leaves that displayed a darkish green colour, the sign of maximum photosynthesis just before fading and dying of the effects of long periods of dehydration or during the first nights of frost.

A sounder of wild boars was crossing the road with the piglets scrambling for cover, followed by their mother. While travelling in a densely populated part of Europe, this was still remote countryside.

Leaving the car parked on a slope in the middle of a soggy field, I was praying for another gate at the bottom of the perimeter, to have any hope of leaving at the end of the night without the help of a tractor.

Passing a herd of massive Charolais, that were enjoying the still lush grass in the remaining light of the day, it was now just a few steps before the dark stone facade of a huge building appeared in the middle of the forest.

The Benedictine monastery of Maredsous, while renowned for its brewery and its cheese making, did not strike me as a particularly welcoming place. Its remoteness combined with the deep hanging clouds added to the sensation.

And yet, not less than 20 000 other people had also made the journey into the Belgian countryside; to witness one of the strangest spectacles the catholic church has to offer these days – a performance by Padre Guilherme, the official DJ of the Pope !

Once the sun had disappeared and the walls of the abbey were illuminated in a constantly changing glow of purple, silver or blue, the stage in front of the building virtually exploded in a barrage of laser light, sound and artificial smoke. A huge, generator powered sound system provided a visceral sensation with every beat. Even a deaf person would have enjoyed it.

Then, the most unlikely of Techno music creators entered the stage: short, bald, bespectacled, middle-aged and dressed in black with a clerical collar, and fitted with just a set of expensive Sennheiser HD 25 headphones giving him the credibility to start, rather than to shut down the event, Padre Guilherme stepped on to the stage and into the middle between two tables holding the mixer and the sound decks – the obligatory tools for his kind of sermon.  

Following a few words of welcome, pointing out that the night belonged to the enjoyment of the moment, rather than to cell-phone screens, while being recorded by thousands of devices, the humble padre started to burn off wave after wave of techno beats, combined with constantly changing images that included a giant dove, scenes from colourful church windows coming to life and only the occasional video clip and soundbite from a previous or the present pontiff. A subtle way of indoctrination, that was unlikely to raise an eyebrow of the techno fans of different faiths, of which there were many in attendance, or of the sizeable number of fake nuns and priests that had joined the party.

The congregation at the event was as uncharacteristic as the man himself. Instead of a gathering of chemically fuelled, mydriatic millennials and Gen-Zs, revellers included everything from children well past their usual bed time, groups of students that were unlikely to be regular church goers, stereotypical music festival travellers, dressed in their weatherbeaten, once colourful outfits or wearing souvenir T-shirts of previous concerts sometime in the last century, to grey haired retirees, that had finally found an excuse to join their children or even their grand children at a techno gig, without running the risk of being turned away by the bouncer at the entrance door. All of them enjoying the light show and the music, while being sustained by the monastery’s signature beer and cheese.

Towards the end, the padre was joined by a quartet of singing monks, and by the abbot, who appeared clearly out of his comfort zone, still puzzling how a humble priest from a Portuguese back water had managed to gather so many people at his monastery in the middle of the forest.

The rhythm of the amplified basslines and the drumbeats were still pounding through the trees and the laser beams created a green and white pattern in the leaves against the night sky, when I left the scene, buoyant with the clear certainty, that this would not be my last encounter with the Pope’s DJ.

Across Electric Avenue for breakfast

 

Then I just saw sand and Darren’s legs in front of me, Ex-Army, chiseled chin, Afghan war veteran, seriously fit…..

This was the section I had not been looking forward to, but now it was only a question of pushing hard, hanging in there and reminding myself that this was Pembrokeshire and not the Brecon Beacons…..

At some point there would be an end to the deep sand and the uphill trail.

“I was soo looking forward to doing this run with you guys!” Catherine had said a least a couple of time since we had embarked on our sunrise outing at the National Trust compound in Stackpole and once again, we whole heartedly agreed that this was an exceptional way to start the day.

At first light, a forest track with hardly any elevation had led us along the west side of the estate’s large pond, that provided a haven of fresh water, shade and food to otters, fish and various kinds of waterfowl, just a few hundred meters away from the open sea, where the Bristol Channel met the Celtic Sea.   

This was Coastal Britain at its best. The Salt Path in a nutshell….

Crossing a small bridge, that was the temporary residence of a family of swans, with the cygnets still fast asleep, we headed south towards Broadhaven Beach, a large stretch of white sand with sheer rock cliffs on both sides and a church shaped rocky outcrop further out at sea.

The Beach was still deserted. The morning sun threw a warm light on to the sand and our bodies produced long, distorted shadows with endless legs and minute heads.

I had never seen the Welsh coast like this – the ground bone dry and parched by weeks without any rain, the grass burned and only the hardiest shrubs and fern providing a few islands of green in some sheltered pockets on the ground.

Still, it was an outstanding morning run.

Having survived (just) the steep section with the deep sand, we soon reached Saddle Point, an ideal spot to look at the Stackpole peninsula ahead of us and the calm and sun-drenched sea of the Channel to the South.

Here the track had levelled out and akin to running on the top of a table mountain, we were now following the coastline, with constantly new rock formations and stunning, yet inaccessible beaches appearing hundreds of feet below us.

We passed a deep hole in the ground and gave it a wide berth on its northern edge, when we noticed a narrow path that was running like the icy rim of a glacial crevasse just above its deepest point and the top of the cliff on its other side. Just for a moment we toyed with the idea to try it out, but thankfully dropped it.

Little did we know at the time, that just a couple of hours later, a young man, one of two brothers, would take a different decision, slip and had to be airlifted to the nearest hospital.

At the time of our run, he might still have had breakfast or might even have been asleep with not a single scratch on his body and a weekend of sea and sun to look forward to.

What a stark reminder to cease the day and to enjoy life while you can…..

Passing the narrow bay of Raming Hole and following the track along the rim of the peninsula, we headed north again and after a short while arrived at Barafundle Beach. Enjoying the first rays of sun light so early in the morning, sheltered landward by a row of dunes from the wind, it was not difficult to understand why this stretch of fine white sand was considered to be one of the best beaches in Wales.

Still devoid of any day trippers with their parasols, cool boxes and cyanotic French Bulldogs, and with a single sailing boat complementing the post card scenery, this truly was a coastal Arcadia.

Running across the beach along the thin blue line of firm ground, between deep dry sand to our left and the equally soft, sea water drenched ground to our right, teasing the waves to catch our shoes and soak or feet, we arrived at a long flight of stairs on the other side.

This time it was my turn to take the lead and to keep a steady pace all the way up to a small stone arch, that would not have looked out of place on an Aegean island.

Covering a final stretch of the coastal plateau, we arrived at an old boat house that had been converted to a sea front café.  Here hundreds of hummingbird moths had made the local bee population redundant and were busy pollinating the Red Valerian that was growing on top of the wall of the old cottage.

Crossing an empty car park, where in just a few hours urban holiday makers would start fighting over any empty space, we now found ourselves on a wide farm track that over the next two kilometres crossed a number of fields with large herds of Friesian cows on each side, separated by not more than 4 mm of steel wire and a regular charge of 4000 painful volts on each side.

Cruising along this electric avenue, we eventually arrived at the eight-arch bridge, that was crossing the pond where we had started our run. The canopied forest on the other side could have passed as a displaced bit of tropical rainforest and I would not have been surprised seeing a toucan or a couple of macaws flying over the treetops, as we crossed the pond.

Now it was just a final push up the uneven, dry-stone wall flanked road to the estate and to an English breakfast in the heart of Wales.

Six-hundred meters to a Swiss Rösti

 

Marianne was right – of course she was… – I did not make it in an hour. Not even after 1 ½ hours was I able to step into the small guest room of Berggasthaus Tierwies, a mountain cabin, that was resting precariously above the Schwägalp plateau in Appenzell.

With my last consultation finished right on time at 6 pm at the clinic in Nesslau, and with no emergency duties, I had changed and had picked up my backpack and my hiking boots for a sun set hike and dinner at the cabin.

Marianne was the clinic’s receptionist. The sort of absolute fitness nut that seem to grow somewhere on trees in the more remote regions of Scandinavia and the Alps, who outside of the clinic are only seen on a mountain bike, on various sorts of skis or dressed in long distance running gear for a few short moments before disappearing behind the next hill.

When telling her about my plan, she had frowned and doing some brief calculations, had summed up her verdict with a laconic: “It will be pitch dark before you are back at the plateau. Shall we prepare for no vet tomorrow morning ?….”

Despite all preparations, I did not reach the trailhead near the lift station, that was currently being repaired, before 7 pm. From there I could already see the cabin right on top of the steep rock face and just 600 altitude meters were between me and my dinner.

The first section was easy enough, a brisk hike along the last stretches of grazing pasture dotted with colourful alpine flowers, where grey Appenzeller cows were gathering the fuel, that made their milk and by that the resulting cheese so special.

Crossing a Bergschrund, I reached the rock face and when the first steel cables next to some exposed way sections came into view, I secretly congratulated myself for not having left behind my £ 1.99 DIY gloves.

While this was not a technical route, the extra security the cables provided, helped to lower my adrenaline level. Both Lake Constance to the north as well as Lake Zurich in the south-west came into view, while the sun was relentlessly nearing the horizon.

After an hour, just 450 altitude meters were covered, but I already felt, that I had earned my dinner. And yet, there was some more climbing to do, before the 2000m mark and with that the cabin was reached. Reassuringly there were still a few other hikers on the trail, even if most of them where already on their way back down to the valley.

It was getting close to 9 pm when I finally arrived at the cabin and I placed an order for a well-deserved beer and a quintessential Swiss “Rösti”.

The sun was about to set, and the first candles were lid, when my meal arrived.

Far too much and yet too good to let anything go to waste – so after eating half of it, the other half went into my backpack, the water bottle was refilled, and I started on the descend.

Now there was not much time left to admire the intense blue of the bellflowers and the purple of the thistles next to the trail in the fast-fading day light.

My luck though, that the path was running along the north-western face of the mountain, so that the red glow that followed the setting sun, continued to provide a warm light, while the mountains on the other side of the plateau were already shrouded in complete darkness.

Most of the exposed sections were behind me when I finally had to make use of my head torch. Although the lights of the hotel on the plateau looked so near, there were still a couple of hundred meters to descend, before reaching the pasture again. Holding on firmly to another steel cable while watching some smaller stones tumbling into the abyss, I faintly recalled some advice about “never walk alone in the mountains”, but I reasoned that at this point, it once again had been far too late for that.

Back on the pasture, with just the light of the torch illuminating the path, I cut through groups of cattle that had retreated to the etch of the forest. Their massive bodies appeared twice the size in the dark and their sizeable horns and the green light reflected from their eyes failed to make me feel more at ease. Thankfully, the damp grass had a larger appeal for them, than picking a fight with a visibly lost glow worm or related, oversized insect in the middle of the night, so that I managed to pass this final hurdle as well unscathed.

Standing next to the car shortly before midnight, I noticed the full moon moving slowly around the mountain site, saturating the rocks, the fields and the weatherbeaten trees of the plateau in an argent glow, while the bells of the cows, the music from the hotel’s terrace and the laughter of the remaining guests, enjoying their glasses of wine and Aperol, made for a magical midsummer night in the mountains.

Marianne was right – I did not make it to the cabin in time, but they would have a vet for the morning consults the next day. Slightly tired but happy……

Concrete, consulting rooms and the legacy of Le Corbusier

 

Summer had returned to the Northern Alps and I had taken on some locum work in Pfäffikon, a town with a small lake east of Zurich.

Not for the first time while working in Switzerland, I found myself in a spacious, ultramodern consulting room, where stainless steel, glass, plain or just white painted concrete and a composite floor, that despite of its dark oak pattern was devoid of any organic material, dominated the room.

A black and white photograph of a jumping kitten covered the whole wall on one side and provided the only irregular feature in the entire room.  

Why is it, I thought, that veterinary clinics in this part of the world differ so much from the practices in England, where I spent the main part of my professional life?

While both in the UK and in Switzerland traditional building features like Victorian, Edwardian or here Renaissance, Baroque or Art Nouveau elements are embraced and at times painstakingly preserved, they have not found their way into the veterinary waiting and consulting rooms of this Alpine nation.

While in Surrey, in London, in the West Country or in Yorkshire, asymmetrical facades, ornate fireplaces, bay windows (often with just single glazing) or wood paneling are preserved as character features,

while in British Columbia, in California or in Australia, wooden timber structures, plush fabric seating, walls with pictures and paintings with different styles of frames, and elements embracing a regional identity, are considered essential to provide clients (and their pets?) with a warm and calming environment,

Swiss clinics emit a rather cold, but then reassuringly sterile and probably more “clinical” environment.

For a country that features some of the most beautiful forest and mountain sceneries of the planet, and a country that has a long tradition of artisanal wood construction, this seems odd at first sight, but it has its reasons.

To get a better understanding of it, I found myself on a Saturday morning when the clinic was closed for the weekend, on the platform of the town’s railway station, expecting the local commuter train, as always in Switzerland, to arrive on time.

The journey along the fields and the gentle rolling hills of the valley east of Zurich, with the towering, snow capped mountains of Central Switzerland to the South as a constant backdrop, brought me in less than half an hour to the iconic Zurich-Stadelhofen station.

Located not more than a hundred meters from the Northern tip of Lake Zurich, designed by Santiago Calatrava, the busy station featured a flowing foot bridge spanning all platforms and a basement with a long row of organic looking concrete arcs, that reminded me of a rib cage or a row of tracheal rings. Somehow this unusual station contrasted in an appealing way with the Gründerzeit and Art Nouveau facades of the nearby multi-storey buildings that represented some of the Swiss Capital’s most desirable places of residence.

From here it was just a short stroll past the Opera building to the shore of Lake Zurich and from there along the tree lined promenade, that was complimented by a number of ice cream vendors, lake side bars and the entrance to Seebad Utoquai, that was offering a more refined swimming and dining experience to local residents since the end of the 19th century.

After passing Henry Moore’s Sheep Piece from 1972 to the left, I eventually arrived at my destination. Tugged away behind a large, historic lake side villa and hidden by a row of trees, stood the ‘Pavillon Le Corbusier’.

This colourful building, that appeared like a hybrid of a Lego house and a Minecraft construction, was the final project of one of the World’s most influential architect.

Born into an artisan family in 1887, Le Corbusier initially trained as a watch enameler before entering the art school in La-Chaux-de-Fonds. He never studied architecture. And yet his building and furniture designs, as well as his ideas of urban planning transformed both interior design as well as the appearance of whole cities around the world.

Representing a French-Swiss reply to the Bauhaus movement, Le Corbusier became one of the architects of the UN building in New York, the designer of Cité Radieuse, the vertical garden city of Marseille, and he was one of the leading brains behind the city of Chandigarh in Northern India, a project that had a great influence on the construction of the Brazilian capital a few years later. A large number of Le Corbusier’s works are today designated World Heritage sites.

In Le Corbusier’s buildings reinforced concrete, and floor to ceiling windows were widely utilised. Decorations were limited to single patches of paint or to just a vase with cut flowers or to a single green plant. Curtains were replaced by frosted glass and cushioned seating by functional steel and leather furniture. These elements were easier and faster to produce,  and easier to maintain and to clean. Le Corbusier’s ‘no frills’ mechanical approach was summed up by the notion, that residential buildings were supposed to be ‘machines for living’.

While this novel concept helped to provide organised housing and practical furniture to a large number of people, especially in developing countries or in cities that had to be re-build after the war, Le Corbusier’s ideas remained controversial and thankfully some of his plans, like the destruction of parts of the historic centre of Paris, to then being replaced by modern buildings, did not come to fruition.

In the medical world though, combined here with the orderly mindset of the Swiss, the concept worked extremely well. Looking at the small kitchen at the pavilion, features like uncluttered, easily maintainable stainless-steel surfaces, indirect lighting and a slightly structured, dark tiled floor showed a striking resemblance to elements of my local consulting room. The simple seating arrangement in the pavilion’s entrance hall would also have worked well in most veterinary waiting rooms.

 On my return to Pfäffikon, I noticed even more features of this style of modern architecture, like ribbon windows or whole residential blocks placed on concrete stilts for better energy efficiency. Walking down the High Street towards the late Gothic church, instead of an estate agent’s office, that would occupy a similar location in the UK, I found next to a traditional restaurant, a show room entirely dedicated to concrete.

Samples of the durable material with different textures and surfaces, in different shades of grey and even in different colours and with various levels of graffiti resistance were on display in the shop window.

May be there should be a limit to how far functionality should go …..

All my patients are under the bed

 

I love books – of course I do – but over the last years I have started losing interest in new releases, unless they are written by Jo Nesbø.

With the next Harry Hole adventure not due to be released before the middle of August, I started – not for the first time – having a look around for great reads that had been published years, if not decades ago.

The basic requirements for a book are that it has to be a paperback and that it should not exceed more than 400 pages, so that it will fit into my backpack when I go hiking. Sure, e-books do work as well, but I still prefer the feel of printed paper in my hands.

It was during some of these periods of idling between last minute emergency shifts in the UK, first opinion locum placements in Switzerland and regular online consultations wherever I was, that I stumbled upon a book with a somewhat unusual title, that I knew would be difficult to be understood by anyone outside the veterinary profession, while at the same time, it immediately caught my attention:

“All my patients are under the bed”

Having myself done many house calls over the last three decades, I was in no doubt that this book was all about cats, as this behaviour was just too typical. Unless a feline patient is on its last legs, it will go into hiding once the vet enters the house, if not – which is even worse – disappear through the cat flap or window the owner had forgotten to close, despite the prior advice to do so…..

On further investigation it turned out that the narrative involved indeed a colleague offering house calls, but the author was not just anyone.

What the strange title concealed, was the autobiography of “Count” Louis Camuti, an Italian born veterinarian, who became the world’s first veterinarian treating exclusively cats (and a few more unusual creatures, people tried to keep in their apartments….).

Three days later, the book arrived in the post.

The place was New York, the year was 1933 when it all began…..

Camuti preferred to do house calls, usually with his wife as the chauffeur who had to keep the car moving, as already then, it was impossible to find a parking spot.   

The dynamic duo did this for nearly fifty years and as Camuti soon became a household name among the rich and famous cat lovers residing in the Big Apple and its vast suburbs, there was enough material of likely and more unlikely things that happened between the call to the vet and the settling of the bill.

Despite the fact that over the last 100 years (!) treatment options have improved, that we have more diagnostic tools at our disposal and that today video calls are not only used widely but at times found to be superior to an in person house call, client’s expectations and the characteristic behaviour of our patients have remained the same.

In many of today’s urban households, life still revolves around the demands of the feline resident.

The diet and the wellbeing of the cat is frequently of greater importance than that of any other family member, including the occasional dog that might share the same apartment.

As much as typical cat behaviour like purring or just providing a quiet but reassuring presence, is appreciated and enjoyed, the shredding of expensive furniture or territorial marking is in equal measure misunderstood and – understandably – despised.

And yet, the cat has remained the preferred soulmate and companion of the urban dweller.

When Camuti combined this in his narrative with some memorable episodes with Broadway or Hollywood greats like James Mason or Marlene Dietrich, some entertaining reading hours on a peaceful mountain hut or in the busy departure hall of an airport while waiting for my next flight, were guaranteed.   

Not leaving without my cat…..

 

“Less is more. “I thought not for the first time and a change of scenery was what was required.

After the third morning lecture, I felt that I had updated myself sufficiently on the interpretation of abnormal liver test results in dogs and cats – at least until the next conference and presentation on the subject…..

Over the last few months, I had been at several congresses, but this one was special.

Partially because it was the first congress of the Egyptian Small Animal Veterinary Association, but mainly because of the venue.

The event was held at the newly opened Grand Egyptian Museum, generally referred to as the “GEM”.

The invitation I had received a few months earlier had included not only access to the conference rooms, but also to the museum’s collection and this was an opportunity not to be missed.

Like no other advanced culture, ancient Egyptians believed in the afterlife and they prepared for it extensively.

Life on Earth was considered to be nothing more than just a transitory stage, that was followed by an at least equally important afterlife, for which a body had to be preserved. Naturally, arrangements had to be made, to be well equipped and prepared for the next phase.

Preparations could take years and in the case of the pharaohs, it could last their whole lifetime. A lot of thought was given to what might be needed or what one might like to see again on the other side.

No surprise then, that this meant that treasured family pets were buried together with their former owners. This was a line of thought, that was not unfamiliar to me, as it reflected a desire also expressed by some of my clients in England, when I had to perform the euthanasia of a much-loved dog or cat.

An animal that was by the Egyptians considered to be able to cross naturally from one world to the other, was the scarabeus, the humble dung beetle, that lays its eggs into the waste products of other animals, which then becomes the substrate for new life.

Like this remarkable insect, I crossed the open hall of the museum, guarded by the giant statue of Ramses II in its centre, and passed from the world of veterinary medicine, where the aim is to preserve life, to the other side, where the afterlife had taken centre stage.

Rather than the extensive display of the items recovered from the tomb of Tutankhamun, indisputably the main attraction of the collection, two other areas of the main gallery had caught my interest.

One was an interactive reproduction of the tomb chapel of Khnumhotep II, an overseer of the Eastern Desert.

In the thousands of year-old murals of the tomb, birds, goats, and antelopes could be seen, receiving (early veterinary ?) care and large dogs were walked on leads in no way dissimilar from a dog been taken on a stroll today. There were vivid hunting scenes, and the wildlife of that time, including various sorts of sea fish, were depicted in great detail. With the help of modern technology, these scenes were brought back to life on the walls of the tomb.

Not far from this display, another section of the GEM was dedicated to the preservation of animal bodies. The same care and attention that was given to the mummification of human bodies, was used to protect from decay the bodies of falcons, ibises, fish, baboons and even crocodiles.

While some of these animals were found in tombs together with their owners, many of them were sacrificed to honour one of the deities that were associated with these animals.

Carefully wrapped ibises had their own wooden, painted coffins and sometimes even stone sarcophagi. They were buried in places like Hermopolis Magna to honour Thoth, the ibis or baboon headed God of wisdom, magic, writing and the moon.

Whole crocodiles were carefully prepared, their body cavities filled with bitumen and oil and then wrapped tightly in several layers of linen in places like Esna and near the impressive temple of Kom Ombo in Upper Egypt, in honour of Sobek, God of the Nile, of power and fertility.

But no animal was so often preserved for the afterlife than the cat. Honoured and highly respected as the nemesis of rodents and snakes, Egyptian felines were associated with Bastet, the Goddess of home, joy, fertility and motherly love. In virtually every necropolis elaborate sarcophagi and figures of deceased felines could be found and it comes as no surprise, that the land of the Nile is widely believed to be the birthplace of the never-ending love affair between mouser and man.

As so often though, there were two sides of the coin. As cats reproduced very fast and were easy to keep, they also made for convenient objects of sacrifice to the Goddess, resulting in mass burial sites for not seldom 100 000 and more feline mummies near the temples dedicated to Bastet. An ambivalence still found today, where modern society accommodates the treatment of cats in both the best as well as in the cruelest of ways.

For me it was time to leave again the world of the dead and to return to the other side of the museum, to improve particularly my knowledge of feline medicine.

Where murders (on the Nile) are made….

 

‘How much is the fare?’ I asked, and the boat owner set his starting price at 1000 EGP, which was about double the usual price.

The temperature had just surpassed 42 degrees, and I was standing in the sun.

‘Seven fifty’ I replied, to cut the matter short.

‘Come on man – it’s a long trip and fuel is expensive! Nine hundred! ‘

‘Seven fifty, or I’ll take a taxi.” I said and made a not very convincing attempt to walk away.

‘Ok, ok – seven fifty then!’ was the somewhat expected reply and a few moments later I was on my way, riding the waves down the Nile along the waters of the first and lowest former cataract of the river in Aswan, in Upper Egypt.

I am not a great negotiator, and I am always uneasy about haggling with people in less prosperous countries. While fighting over a price is part of the culture in Egypt and generally expected in most parts of North Africa, I do not get any joy out of squeezing people who are living just above the breadline, for a painfully low price.

Having knocked a bit off the top but having met somewhere in the middle felt about right to me and I could rest assured that the skipper was left with a decent profit as well.

Before the boat ride I had stepped out of my very basic dwelling in a Nubian village, ignoring the considerable accumulation of rubbish on the unfinished building site in front of my hotel, which had attracted a pack of stray dogs that had made it their temporary home and that had succeeded in keeping me awake at night.

Passing the local pharmacy, that had made no secret of the nature of its bestselling merchandise, I had walked down an unpaved desert road, that only camels, kids with their three-wheeled tuktuks and the most decrepit taxis dared to use. This was far from a “well off” place….

And yet, I was now about to immerse myself into a very different kind of environment, preparing myself to spend a considerably larger amount of money for a cup of coffee and a few sandwiches, that in line with the long established British institution of the “afternoon tea” had during a semi-surgical procedure been separated from its crust and cut in to easy manageable oblongs with precise 90 degree angles.

This was, providing that the simple linen suit I had purchased years ago in Nepal and the worn-out canvas espadrilles I was wearing (instead of my hiking boots…), would comply with the basic dress code.

The place had just changed hands and in the general confusion that comes along with a new management team, I was hoping that any new appearance standards had not yet been established.

The destination for my short boat trip was the river entrance of the Old Cataract Hotel, an exclusive, expensive, and well guarded address, and a watering hole for famous desert travellers right since its opening in 1900.

It was here, where Agatha Christie, who’s former house in Sunningdale I could have passed every day on my way to work, wrote one of her most famous novels : ‘Death on the Nile ‘.

For the main part of 1937, the author made the hotel her home while her second husband was working on the nearby archeological sites.

The fateful cruise that was taking Hercule Poirot and the other protagonists further up the Nile to the temple of Abu Simbel, was departing from the Hotel.

After agreeing to buy a restaurant voucher for 1500 EGP (roughly 30 Euros), I was allowed to settle into one of the comfortable chairs and enjoy the colonial atmosphere of the place.

The scarlet and white Moorish archways that got their inspiration from the Mamluk mosques in Cairo, the mahogany walled bar, that would not have looked out of place in Central London’s Clubland, or the delicately crafted lanterns with their cobalt blue glass protuberances, a material that had been manufactured and valued on the shores of the Nile already at the time of the pharaohs.

The shaded terrace, surrounded by palm trees and a well-maintained garden, where even in the middle of the day a gentle breeze, that was passing uninhibited through sand coloured canvas shades and delicately carved lattice panels, provided an ambient temperature.

    

Winston Churchill had walked these halls and enjoyed the terrace at several occasions and during his stay in 1937, he had shared the view on to the Nile and to the ancient ruins on Elephantine Island in the company of Agatha Christie.

A hidden orchestra had at the time provided the background music.

While many hotels today can easily rival the interior design, the luxury and the comfort of the furniture or the quality of the food (the sandwiches were actually not that great…..), no money in the world can substitude for the originality and the history of a place like the Old Cataract Hotel.

On the Nile

 

The Dahayiba is following the small tug at a steady, yet sedate pace upstream, as it has done many times before. The two boats, connected by a single rope, as by an umbilical cord, with no purpose without the other.

The Dahayiba, a traditional Egyptian sailing boat, is fitted with a couple of small sails – one at its bow, one at the stern – but even while making the best of the northernly tail wind coming from the Mediterranean coast, they are barely able to bush the heavy vessels against the strong current of the river. Without an engine, it took these vessels up to seven months to cover the whole distance from Cairo to Aswan.

You have to be much smaller and lighter, like the more elegant, single masted feluccas, if you want to travel against the stream, or you need the tough, diesel-fuelled heart of a tug to reach your destination in a reasonable time.

And yet, exactly because the vessel is progressing at a slow pace, it is providing you with ample time to follow the ongoings on the nearby shore, telling you one small oriental story after another.

There is the villager riding alongside the boat on his white donkey, the children waving and rolling themselves in the sand of a small beach near one of the few bridges that are crossing the river, or the grazing cattle on a water logged field, that are carefully guarded by an old man with a cane, sitting next to a banana plantation.

Whoever is travelling in this way, has brought with him a lot of time. Time to look, time to learn, time to study and to marvel at the miracle, the water of this river and its sediment has created in the middle of the desert.

Forests of palm trees, large fields of sugar cane, of barley and corn are reaching out into the fertile ground on both sides of the river, but only as far as the small pumping stations and irrigation trenches are able to carry the water. Just a few centimetres of elevation will make the difference between life and death, will make the difference between a Garden of Eden and a parched world of rocks and sands that sustains only the hardiest of plants and animals.

Meanwhile the banks of the river are a haven for large numbers of birds, and the water is full of fish.

Kingfishers, ibis, and different species of herons and of birds of prey are not difficult to spot and it is no surprise that these birds had a huge impact on the culture and the religion of Egyptian society already thousands of years ago.

But the same can not be said for hippos and for crocodiles. Once numerous in the river and the flooded fields as far north as to the river’s delta, hippos even known to have caused problems in the centre of Cairo, they have now been driven as far south beyond the Aswan Dam to Lake Nasser.  

  

It is easy to understand why this tranquil form of travelling on the Nile has helped to inspire so many books and films, regardless of the number of murders involved.

But while many authors have highlighted and detailed the uniqueness of this river, of this water way that like no other defines the entire existence of a whole nation, nothing can explain it better, than watching its shores while sitting underneath a canvas roof, sheltered from the desert sun, while being pulled along by a small tug steadily heading south.