Early in the morning, just before the end of the year, I took my punching bag down to the basement. The stairwell was deserted, my settlement as if deserted. Everyone had gone to the mountains.
One of the shortest days of the year seemed the right time to revisit perhaps the really big questions.
Who are we? Where are we from? Where are we going?
I myself came out of my apartment, where my punching bag had been gathering dust for a long time and casting a somewhat eerie shadow. For two minutes I puffed tiredly on him and that was the end of my boxing career. My kids later briefly clung to it. Later, the dark thing just hung behind the door like a drunken burglar.
New Year’s Eve offered to get rid of this birthday present, a nice misunderstanding. In the basement I met my neighbour, the only one for miles around. He pointed to the bag, smiled knowingly, and recommended the Internet.
Why all those punching bags?
Unfortunately, there is nothing superfluous than such a leather monster. Hundreds – I discovered – are auctioned on online exchanges. Factory new goods. In all variants. For a sandwich. Additions are coming in daily these days from people like me digging through old and new presents after Christmas.
As the punching bag market seems to be developing, I will soon have to pay extra for someone who takes this 31 kilos of ballast away from me.
So everything is sub-optimal for me. And there are questions: why do people get so many punching bags that they want to get rid of as soon as possible? Do we feel the need to urgently ventilate towards the end of the year? But are we missing the necessary punch for that?
Cast the devil out of the old year
If you are looking for a sport that embodies the opposite of the Helvetic nature, it would be boxing. You stand in the ring half naked, one on one, with little to nothing to lose. Muhammad Ali, the greatest man of all time, also had the greatest mouth of all time.
And in the most famous boxing film of all time, Sylvester Stallone plays an underdog who beats bloody sides of beef: Even less Swiss is “Buzkaschi”, an equestrian game from the steppes of Central Asia, in which everything is allowed, including the use of riding crops, and in which it involves fighting each other at a gallop over a goat carcass.
Although: on closer inspection there is certainly a robust component lurking in the character of the Swiss people. For example, when it comes to casting out the devil from the old year.
Everything runs parallel
In our country, for example, there are pagan customs that are mainly about distribution. To drive away evil spirits, people in Schwarzenbur BE passionately beat off the old donkey (not a real animal, but costumed misadventures). And the midsummer celebrations in Interlaken degenerated into such unchristian brawls that the authorities had to resort to violence to restore law and order.
Of course, the internet has not yet responded to my punching bag. Maybe there’s just too much going on. Many things are happening at the same time. Between the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis, between the death of Vivienne Westwood, that of Pelé and that of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. And then those bizarre subtropical winter temperatures on New Year’s Eve. In addition, Cristiano Ronaldo is moving to the desert. But Boris Becker is back. Everything runs parallel.
With this article, reporter Tobias Marti (37) says goodbye to Sunday Blick. He has written nearly 400 articles for SoBli over the past five years, mainly reports and articles. Whether in Chemnitz in Germany (“East Germany’s struggle with neo-Nazis, economic misery and Merkel’s hospitable culture”), at the trucker festival in Interlaken BE or attending the hotel school (“Where snots comes hosts” ) – he always hit his own note with his sharp pen. Unforgettable are Tobias Marti’s report from the kitchen of the Gstaad Palace and his text from April 2020 about his own corona disease.
We would like to thank him for his efforts and wish him all the best for the future!
Gieri Cavelty, editor in chief
As soon as I wrote this sentence, Vitali Klitschko declared among the rubble in Ukraine: “Nothing comes for free in life. You have to fight.” It is the annual balance sheet of the mayor of Kiev, who has guided his city through the war in the past ten months.
We live in a dangerous, hectic, confusing world. You don’t even have to box.