They Thought I Was Dead: Sandy’s Story

68 Autumn 2011

Below the headline it read:

Our breakfast arrived, and, with both of us dressed in our white tunics, I ate the mushroom omelette and bowl of fresh berries I’d ordered in almost complete silence, deep in thought, while Bruno munched happily on his cereal, intermittently humming a tune I could not recognize.

Within minutes of finishing his breakfast, he was whisked off to a kindergarten class with ten other kids his age or thereabouts. Soon after, I was collected by Julia Schmitt and delivered to a room where, she told me, I would be given the overview of the aims of the Association of Free Spirits.

Dutifully clutching the notebook I had been told to use for all I took away from the lectures I would be attending during the coming days, I joined around thirty others, right across the age spectrum, seated at desks in tiered rows in a small lecture theatre. Many of them were wearing headphones for the simultaneous translation into English, French and Spanish on offer. Not one of whom, in my brief glance around the room, I felt I had anything in common with.

On the stage stood a plump woman, probably a little younger than myself, with a tangle of frizzy hair and bright red glasses, who greeted us like the full-on, brainwashed eagle-eyed zealot for the International Association of Free Spirits she turned out to be.

I donned the headphones on the clip in front of me and selected English. And after a short while, wished I hadn’t.

She talked for just over two hours without drawing breath, followed by Q&A, spouting an interminable diatribe of, in my view, totally vacuous New Age claptrap, accompanied by a PowerPoint display that alternated between happy-looking residents of the schloss, meditating, running and doing all kinds of other happy stuff, and diagrams of algebraic formulas, purportedly showing how the paths to the levels of spiritual enlightenment could be accessed through the shedding of all our erroneous preconceptions about human value systems.

These diagrams totally lost me. And the stupid-looking woman annoyed me with an intensity that increased, in a direct algebraic formula that I invented while I sat there, with every minute she spoke.

The session began at 10 a.m. and finished at 12.30. Judging from the rapt applause all around me, everyone else had taken something of serious value away from this. I stood up, feeling only that I wanted two and a half hours of my life back.

The printed programme Julia Schmitt had handed me indicated I should return at 2 p.m. for the afternoon session, following lunch, which I could either eat at a table in the Refectory, or take from the cafeteria to eat in the grounds.

I chose the latter. A thunfischsalat in a polystyrene tub and a mineral water, which I carried on a tray out into the gardens, and ate, seated alone on a bench beside a large lake. At one point, as I sat there in the glorious sunshine, a heavily bearded man who could have made a great department store Santa Claus, also carrying a tray, asked me something in German, in a very polite voice. I’d no idea what he wanted.

‘Sprechen Sie Englisch?’ I asked him.

‘Ja!’ he replied with a big smile. ‘Would you mind if I sit here with you?’

‘You can sit where you like, but I’m leaving!’