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A Tale of Peter Morwood: Peter (And Kimmie) and the Vampire

It was Fasnacht—the Lenten Carnival!—in Zürich. Which is fun!

But Fasnacht in Zürich is not like Fasnacht in some other places, like Basel. Because Over Thataway, Fasnacht is SRS BSNS.

...And with good reason. At 4 AM on the Monday after Ash Wednesday, all of center-city Basel's lights go out on the fourth stroke of the Cathedral's bells. And the massed marching cliques—gathered in the narrow cobblestoned streets to celebrate Yet Another Failed Invasion—all light up the lights inside their incredibly detailed and topically-cartooned lanterns, and [in many cases] on top of their exquisitely themed costumes' gigantic papier-mache heads: and they all together begin playing, on flutes and drums, the Morgestraich: the Call to Arms. The sound rackets back and forth across and through the streets of the heart of town like gunfire, echoing itself and re-echoing, nearly in fugue.

If at that point the hair doesn't rise right up on the back of your neck—there in the dark and the freezing cold, with the candles and the flutes and drums marching at you, playing songs last heard in deadly earnest on local battlefields past—then I don't know what to say to you. Go take a year off and come back some other time, when your willingness to sync up with older times is in better order. It's as close to falling into a late-medieval-early-Renaissance time warp as you're going to get.

(Here's a casual pic that @petermorwood scanned in 2013 from a printed-out one of many that we took over numerous years' visits. Quite often you'd run into a whole clique who'd pulled their "heads" off and stopped to have lunch, or a drink, or a smoke, after a morning's marching.)

...But in other cities in Switzerland, Fasnacht's a little looser and more goofy. In Basel, only the cliques costume up and march. Elsewhere, protocol is more relaxed, and people kinda cosplay (as we would say now) as they please. One time Peter and I were in Switzerland's capital city, Bern, and unexpectedly wound up in a small hotel's Fasnacht party with a number of people to whom we were forced to assign sobriquets like "Seafood Lady" and "Broccoli Guy," because we never did find out their names. (Or maybe it was just, you know, all the wine we were all drinking. But she was dressed up as a lobster, and he was dressed up as, well, broccoli? At such times, what the hell can you do. ...Anyway, they were charming folks, remembered with affection.)

And one time we were in Zürich (because their Fasnacht happens the week(end) before the Baselers' one, so we would stop in there first sometimes), and that's where we ran into the vampire.

We were just a bridge or two down from where I'm sitting right now. (Google for the Hotel Limmatblick and you'll find it. That's the view out its front window that you see at the top of the post.) We had teased our friend Kimmie into coming up to Zürich with us, for the somewhat easier-going Fasnacht that they do here. ...One attraction is the Goofball Bad Marching Bands (there's a word for this, it's Guggemusik) who perform in local restaurants: and the gimmick is that they play badly on purpose, and you pay them—usually in booze—to cut it the feck out and go away. ...What's notable about these bands is that usually they're really good: not least because it is HARD to play a quarter-tone off, for prolonged periods, on purpose! That takes skill. And the bands' expenditure on the instruments alone would stun you—tens of thousands of francs' worth of very high end equipment. These folks are serious about what they do. If they’re going to be bad, they’re going to be GOOD at it.

Anyway, we’d done a couple of restaurants' worth of this, and after having heard one particularly deafening crowd of Gugge guys in the Zeughauskeller*, we were in the act of heading across the Münsterbrucke to find some smaller and quieter joint across the river to let our senses recover a bit.

That's where we ran into the vampire.

We were on the western side of the bridge, just about to start crossing, when he came flapping along toward us down the bridge's curve. He was all in black satin. His cloak (crimson-lined at the collar and hems) streamed out behind him impressively in the offshore wind from the Zürichsee. His makeup was most pale and very convincing. (Still wondering where he bought his fangs.) And, most to the point, by our body language he could plainly immediately tell that we were not local: so that he made a beeline straight for us.

And when he'd come flapping and striding down toward us, he grabbed his cloak and stretched it up about him and said (mostly to Kimmie, who was the smallest and blondest of us, and not obviously primarily accompanied by @petermorwood): "Grüzi mitenands! Ich würde gerne Ihr Blut trinken, bitte."**

Kimmie, though, being both a longtime and multilingual event organizer, was not a novice at being propositioned in a whole sheaf of modes. "Bitte? / Sorry?" she said. And then kind of batted her eyelashes at him.

Our vampire shifted gears effortlessly. "I beg your pardon!" he said, in very (City of) London-accented English. "Good evening, all! I would like to drink your blood, please."

We all burst out laughing (because ffs, how Swiss a vampire, to be so polite about it). And sure enough, Peter (with his pilot's hat on) then found the appropriate response.

"Forgive me, sir," Peter said, "but we have been drinking. Our blood alcohol levels are certainly quite high. And if you drank our blood and then flew anywhere, you would certainly get into trouble with the BAZL. You could lose your license."

Our dark-cloaked, very fangy gentleman blinked. A couple of times. Then he said: "That is most considerate of you, colleague! I thank you for your thoughtfulness. It is very much appreciated."

And then he flapped off past us, down towards the Peterskirche, away into the darkness and out of sight.

...Impossible for me, now, to come up on that side of that bridge and not see us all standing there in the dark: the river softly pouring by, the cold wintry wind, all Kimmie's curly blond hair fluffing around her as she snorted with laughter: and P. in his dark brown pilot's jacket with all the patches on it, as he shook the vampire's hand before he flapped away.

...Good times. Good times. 😄

*ETA: We actually have pictures of this (including one of Kimmie's hair bouncing up and down in the air pressure from the drummers who were right behind her in the restaurant). Now all I have to do is find out where they're stored. (sigh)

**Sorry, I probably have the plural wrong here. "Mitenands" is a usage for a group of people, and I don't think Google noted that. :(

#GNU Peter Morwood #Zürich #Fasnacht #Vampire #winter #and the light on the Limmat

"Klumpen" (2014) — book cover and spot illustrations, edited by GTA Verlag, Zürich; photographic rock texture with blue geometric line overlay

#gray #book cover design #blue #graphic design #texture #zürich #2014 #minimalism #geometric abstraction #illustration #gta verlag