Xanthous Armageddon Vroom
07.02.2009
Ahem
Continuing snow, freezing winds, sludge and ice remind us that the Swiss are far happier in cold and wintry conditions; it's what the country and its people are designed for, in a way. It's as if the rest of the year is no more than an unfulfilling non-dress rehearsal in the art of being Swiss, a condition that only achieves perfect national expression in a proper brass monkey winter. The whole country seems somehow to relax in the icy conditions and the Swiss become content at the prospect of the snow-covered sunlit uplands arrayed around them. In the snow, even the buses and trams seem to be more punctual than they are in other seasons. Baselers seem to live fuller and stand taller through these shivering days of freezing mists and swirling winds. They talk animatedly together at staff canteens all week about the relative merits of ski resorts, then as the afternoon light fails on Fridays, they scarf up their kids, cram all the bulky paraphernalia of skiing into a big car and vroom triumphantly and deliriously off towards the slopes. I imagine the routes to Interlaken, Gstaadt and Grindelwald streaming with gunnel-packed cars merrily tooting, their happy occupants yodelling with joy as they reach their snow-laden destinations . Er, no, we don't ski any more. But the children do. In the past month, Ella and Gwen have each had enjoyable school skiing trips and Jessie was invited for a weekend's skiing in Verbier with her boyfriend's family.
New Year's Eve was unusual - we went to a party at the Campbells of Storchenweg and Alli drove home, anxious about Ella's party at our house in the small hours. She needn't have worried. As soon as we arrived everyone disappeared upstairs into Ella’s bedroom as if on a pre-arranged signal, leaving us to have a nightcap amidst xanthous paper plates and empty crisp packets. Later in the month we went to an Australian wine tasting event and again Alli abstemiously drove us home.
On the perennially troubled matter of computers and the internet, a computer-repair man has in four hours put our computer and internet access bang to rights, while also removing 453 viruses. None of these had actually managed to close it down or even damage it so I am left relieved but disappointed that I did not experience the full facial of virtual Armageddon. I have only once witnessed a really amusing virus, over ten years ago at my brother's office, when the screen literally crumpled itself up and threw itself away. It was hilarious, but I feel bored to inform you dully that the family computer, internet, printer and router are all working. That is, until Mr Gates learnt of my past illegal use of his software as I tried to come clean and upgrade illegally installed software with a legitimately purchased update. This has caused some temporary IT difficulties but serendipitously I have found my best ever friend Adam through the glorious invention that is Facebook and my joy has been utterly unconfined at finding someone very important to me, with whom I lost touch nearly thirty years ago, and whom I had not managed to trace until now.
Jessie had her English friend Alex stay over the New Year holiday and they were out in Basel’s bars and clubs every night. Alex confided to us before she left that she thought the Basel scene to be livelier than that of Brighton. Praise indeed, but I feel that this is probably not the case if one is over fifty years old. On the university front, Jessie got conditional offers from Kings College London, Warwick, Surrey and Sussex and is now preparing her year off and the financing thereof. Ella is preparing her subjects for the International Baccalaureate diploma. She is interested in psychology or journalism as a possible career. She also presented and performed her special project for the Middle Years Program, a rearrangement of five contemporary songs. She distributed CDs of the five original songs and her radical re-arrangements of them. With three helpful friends, she performed the best example, a great cover version of Rise Against’s Prayer of the Refugee. It brought a lump to my throat and was a success with the audience. It finished her year of intensive work on the project. Basically, she is now as relieved as a Swiss in a snow plough. Gwen was also busy with a school scientific project about light and she also made a memorable photo album and scrapbook for her good friend Leah, who has now left Basel to return to America. I am just happy that our family has got through another year, safe and sound in wind and limb (more or less).
Yours in stark relief,
Lionel
Nonchalant Quizzical Reminiscence
02.03.2009
Ahem,
We have spent much of the month closing in on a house just across the border in France, in the village of Leymen, where the ultra-efficient Basel transport system also extends. This makes the village unique as a French bolt-hole, comprising bars and restaurants and rural Gallic va-et-vient, also providing a direct tramline into Basel, a reasonable run to the International School as well as to my workplace. This news is due to the emerging possibility that our house in England may be sold in a suspiciously synchronous development. It also means that we may, for the first time ever, be property-less in Blighty but proprietors of no less than two French houses. I think my mother, (descended, as she would say, from the Cléments of Normandie), would be utterly delighted.
I spent a week in Brussels and London on business and managed to visit several good friends from the past and the present in between meetings. Most historically I re-connected with Adam after a gap of nearly thirty years and by the end of an evening in Leicester Square full of reminiscence and rediscovery scarcely noticed that there had been any gap in our relationship. We exchanged and read letters that we had sent each other in the mid-70s, finding ourselves purposeful again in our youthful correspondence. How extraordinary it was to be able to connect so easily after such a long gap. I was entertained royally in Walton on Thames by Fionnuala, her husband Andrew, and indefatigable daughter Evelyne. In Henley I had dinner with Jane and Sue, whom I had not seen in about 20 years. On the morning after I gave a speech to a gathering of quizzical chemists on the subject of truth and reality in scientific communications, deftly illustrated by slides depicting the paintings of Seurat and Monet, and featuring the aphorisms of Aristotle, Zappa and Jung. There were no questions afterwards.
Snowfalls continued through the first part of the month and apparently the skiing around here is the best for years. Jessie went to England for a quick weekend to look over Warwick University and now feels that this is her preferred option if her grades allow her the liberty of this decision. It’s a campus university and it appeals to her for this reason. I am, it must be noted, unpracticed in having a reason to go to Birmingham, but I am sure I will get used to it from 2010 if I have to. Jessie’s gap year intervenes before this challenge: she is setting up a fascinating itinerary of work and play, starting in Brussels from August this year, continuing to New Zealand in early 2010 and possibly finishing in Southern Africa next summer. Back here, Ella performed a couple of songs with her guitar at the school’s Arts Evening and has been turning in some great results in her Middle Years Program. She finished last term with the excellent overall score of 6.2 out of 7.
The quiz night in fancy dress at the school was a bit of an anti-climax, to be honest. We had assembled a dozen high-IQ trivia specialists, capable of answering abstruse questions in all the available categories from music to mountain regions. We were confident that we would carry off the prize, while our Mad Scientists costumes and table decoration, complete with test-tubes, rubber tubing, blood-stained lab coats, dead rats and dry ice, would be a shoo-in for the fancy dress prize. On a disappointing night we were, frankly, lackluster. We underperformed, often changing our minds at the last minute from the right to the wrong answer, our best minds more nonplussed than nonchalant in answering the questions. At the end of the night we had eaten and drunk well but we had finished in the bottom half of the quiz league in the kind of position more associated with Blackburn Rovers than Manchester United. Talking of which, I went with Ella to Upton Park with tickets kindly arranged by a sportswear manufacturer and actually managed to see the Hammers win. Now, there’s a top-half result!
Yours with multiple choice (save the US spelling, mandated by Microsoft),
Lionel
Mad Scientists Team at ISB Quiz Night 2009
Whiff Suite Raspingly
06.04.2009
Ahem
I wouldn’t call it Thelma and Louise exactly, but it was kinda cool as a filmic road trip narrative. True, we were actually middle aged blokes and not battered women scenting freedom. True, it wasn’t a 1966 Thunderbird convertible but a large boxy white hired van. True, we were neither in rebellion nor on the run, in fact our wives knew exactly where we were, but there was nevertheless a heady whiff of the open road as my neighbor Marc and I set off on a 3,000 kilometer drive across western Europe (well, France) with a very full load one frosty Thursday night at 11pm. We drove fast and hard 900 km south to the Tarn-et-Garonne and the Gers to disgorge the van’s contents in our respective houses (for we are neighbors both in Basel and in Gascogne), then we gunned it to Marseille, some 600 kilometers away to the east, to visit the house of another Basel neighbor, Paul, who had kindly offered a couple of excellent, albeit unwanted, pieces of furniture. On the next morning after a reviving overnight involving food and wine chez Paul we heaved the furniture into the van and pushed on back to the Gers. While in Mansonville I rather fortuitously and spontaneously made the arrangements (in direct consultation with the Mayor) for the appropriate siting of the main drains connection on our property and I also made my obeisances to those who look after the house, which now has significantly more furniture in it than before, including our battered old three piece suite, bought over twelve years ago, that has been through much in the way of children, dogs and assorted sofa-sleepers and so now thoroughly deserves its quiet and dusty sun-stream jubilee.
Alli, Ella and Gwen were in England for a week and saw friends and relations. Getting ready for an imminent move of house we ordered a three piece suite from England but having sent the old suite into retirement and what with delivery delays and dozy receptionists we are not yet in possession of the replacement. Neither are we yet in possession of the proceeds from our house in the UK or, consequently, the house we are after in France as the chain broke down a few days ago. We are back to hoping that someone buys someone else’s house (repeated) so someone else can buy ours.
My 52nd birthday occurred and we all went out to dinner. Jessie composed a special piece of music for me and recorded it and other compositions and pieces that she had composed and played on a CD. The composition, one of three that she is entering as her contribution for the International Baccalaureate, is utterly brilliant and, having bored others with it too much at first, I now play it secretly when no-one else is around. The same weekend I went with Jessie to see Wagner’s Der Fliegende Hollander at the Basel Theater with the Basel Symphony Orchestra. The stage concept was bold, involving some re-writing of the plot itself, thus some way away from the original, but it was enjoyable, challenging and involving. Alli and I also celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary – what a result! What a journey! What a partnership! Er, I forgot the card. Long story. But it really does not seem that long since we walked together out of a church into a bright, windy Norfolk morning as husband and wife.
Basel’s Fastnacht has been and gone and very largely we all missed it, although Jessie, who stayed in Basel while the rest of us were away, went again to the opening Morgestraich and was often in town during the three days. Ella and Gwen had seen the local parades in Oberwil the weekend before. They also went to see the School Play Bugsy Malone, which featured good performances from many of our neighbours’ children. Gwen has been winning swimming medals in the School Gala, coming second overall in both her races. Jessie went for another weekend’s skiing in Verbier and has taken her Mock Diploma exams, obtaining encouraging results. Now it’s back to revising for the big ones in May. She also appeared in a very entertaining evening of dance, song and acrobatics, with others in and around Basel who study with the LT dance group. I am back to biking to and from work as the weather slowly improves, and I even managed to mend my own gears after I had carelessly left the bike outside over one of the coldest nights of the year when the temperature was so low that the gears actually froze and would not when thawed assume their previous settings.
In Oberwil and everywhere else in the vicinity the local council prohibits bonfires in gardens, and instead offers – for a fee – to render all your garden brush, twigs and branches into wood chippings if you stack everything neatly by the side of the road on a given and pre-arranged day and attach a ticket to the scrub. So I spent much of one weekend engaged in a major clearing of the garden ready for the startling spring growth. A couple of weeks earlier Alli had daintily and painstakingly done a similar task on the finer aspects of the edges and margins, pots and cuttings, lawn, borders and steps whereas a week later I sweatily chopped, huffingly sawed and raspingly hacked my way through whole hedges and bushes galore, ending with a not-so-tidy pile three meters high, eight metres long and two metres wide, ready for reduction to a small mound of chippings no more than two metres square the following week. It’s a prim conclusion but it sure beats driving off the edge into the Grand Canyon.
Yours in free fall
Lionel
La Hune, Spring 2009
Diabolo Pointillist Queue
30.04.2009
AhemThe Ferrette Morris Dancers danced at the village market in Oberwil, performing in the Cotswold Morris tradition, and Peter the Squire, a good friend of mine, bawled out the traditional call (from Horace’s Odes) to the bemused Swiss villagers: “Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero” which is, more or less, “Enjoy today; believe not in tomorrow”. For this and other less intellectual reasons, I am always tempted to join. I have the build, I drink the beer and I could grow the ponytail. And I have always wanted to dance with other men with bells on my feet and waving an inflated pig’s bladder around my head.
Ella went to Tunisia with the school football teams for an international tournament and the girls’ team won it outright, with Ella scoring in both the semifinal and the final. I had to pick her up after midnight from Basel railway station after their plane to Geneva was delayed. Even then, many of the team were stranded on the way to Basel after not getting out fast enough when they were supposed to change trains half way between Geneva and Basel. But Ella was one of the few who did. As I walked with her past the other waiting parents, I knew that they knew that I knew that they had another 40 minutes to wait to pick up their son/daughter. Ella was not feeling well through much of the Easter holiday weekend but recovered sufficiently to spend a few days in England with Nanny and Grandpa and to see her English friends. Jessie went to Oxford for some extra courses to help her through the looming IB exam. On the way there she went round Queen Mary`s College, London and loved the place, installing it as an second favorite venue for when the exam results are made known (Kings College being the first choice). Meanwhile, Alli and I took Gwen and a couple of neighborly offspring to Europa Park, a non-Disney theme park in Germany. The children also had an Easter egg hunt in the garden, where Alli and I have spent many hours this month. There is another parking bay-size of branches and saplings to be reduced to chippings. Gwen made the most of the sunny Easter and became proficient at the diabolo, a juggling prop consisting of a spool which is whirled and tossed on a string tied to two sticks held one in each hand.
Tequila, the Collie we look after when its mistress, a special needs school teacher, is away, has been here a lot. Not an entirely reliable dog, she is plagued by weak hips and hind legs. She also chases shadows and light reflections on the walls, floor and ceiling, which is a tough psychosis for a dog in a house with brightly polished tableware and big windows halfway up a hill with a low-lying sun early in the year. For the first year in the five that we have been here in Switzerland, the spring has woven the whole area with a profusion of Easter flowers, especially primroses, cowslips and snowdrops. The forsythia that at this time of year dots the hedgerows now liberally splashes them in a warm canary yellow. Whole fields are embroidered across with spring flowers like pointillist tapestries.
We all (minus Gwen) saw and enjoyed Bob Dylan at the St Jakobshalle in Basel. It was the second time for me (and for Ella) although, as I keep reminding my family, I queued for around seven hours one hot day in Oxford in the late 1970s for a ticket to his forthcoming concert and did not manage to get one. This experience put me off both queues and Dylan for some time, although queues have never been my forte. The afore-mentioned Europa Park and previous theme park experiences tell me that my time-tolerance for queues reduces by around five minutes per year and that the level stands currently at around 40 minutes - tops (and that’s only if I am with Gwen or anyone else around the same age). At this rate I will not be able to wait in any queues of any duration whatsoever when I reach 60 – which is probably about right. An early childhood memory I have is when I was told by my mother that as a special treat we were all going to visit Kew Gardens. I whispered to her that I didn’t want to wait in queues all afternoon.
Jessie has now finished school. I simply can’t believe it, and think that somehow we must have missed out a few years while she was growing up. I am beginning to understand that this is, generationally speaking, an entirely normal parental reaction. But it is difficult to think that she will not be around in the house much more from this summer, what with gap year then university. Ella and I went on a flying overnight visit to East London to stay a night with the Tallis Locks of Forest Gate which was fun, and to watch West Ham lose against Chelsea, which was not.
David Hall, our friend, has died after a long struggle against cancer. The news brought us all down and it distresses us still. He was wise, courageous, witty and decent. His whole family have been very strong these past months as his condition varied and declined. The quiz that I wrote and circulated last Christmas was first conceived to help him pass the time when he was in hospital, but such was his love of research and discovery and learning, he never needed these as he used much of the last period of his life indulging his boundless spirit of enquiry, expertly deploying the internet to perfect his understanding of everything from Swiss tax rules to electrical engineering, music history and computer software. There was a memorial service in Aesch, at which his wife and sons displayed great dignity and strength amid a huge turn-out. His elder sons Tom and Sam, accomplished musicians and writers, played a tribute to their father that was witty, acute and appropriate. The service came to a fitting end with the Beatles’ Here comes the sun, from Abbey Road.
RIP David Hall
Lionel
Peter Sandbach and the Ferrette Morris Dancers performing in Oberwil, 2009
Nude Plethora Thugs
30.05.2009
Ahem
Residents of the Appenzell Innerrboden canton of Switzerland voted overwhelmingly in their last open-air annual assembly to ban nude hiking. Naked hikers have become a feature of the region since the practice was naughtily publicised by German web sites. But such hikers will from now on be fined 200 Swiss francs if caught with their pants down and their shirts up while trudging up or down the mountains within the canton. This was very much on my mind as I joined seven other men for a weekend’s hiking – not in Appenzell but much further East in Engadin, a region next to the Italian and Austrian borders in the Alps. I am, technically, an interloper among them, as the men are all “hausmen”, the male version of housewives. They are a hardy and virile lot and I found it hard to keep up with the blistering pace that they set. And that was just the drinking. We set out from Scuol and walked over the surrounding snow-topped sunny mountains for the best part of two days, visiting the Romantsch villages with those unusual names: Sent, Vna, Ftan, Ardez and Ramosch, taking occasional meager refreshment from one or other of the three-star restaurants that dot the lonely hiking trails, and resting our weary bones at the swimming spa complete with solarium, massage and sauna that we found quite by chance close to our mean and Spartan hostel. While all this clothed hiking was going on, Alli and Gwen were being feted in Luxembourg by the Miles, where they received brilliant hospitality and welcome. Jessie and Ella were studying conscientiously at home, one assumes.
Jessie celebrated her 18th birthday on the 9th May. Eighteen years! I am speechless with paternal pride. Our celebrations were a little subdued – she has spent much of this month taking the all-important International Baccalaureate (IB) exams which have restrained the celebrations for such a significant milestone. She received some generous presents, especially from uncles, aunts and grandparents. Her main birthday party is in June, just a couple of days after her graduation on the 5th. Nevertheless most of her best friends, also doing their IB exams, came round for dinner and a chinwag. For the first time, it rained on Jessie’s birthday. The weather during the month has wavered in super-tropical turvy fashion between cold winds, heavy spaddering rain and bouncing hailstones to white heat white light at 34 degrees. But by the Ascension holiday the exams were all over and for Jessie school was out. She is now in Alicante, a well-earned R&R in the sun along with many of the rest of her grade.
By the sound of it, the throated frogs have now arrived and we eagerly await their migration and settlement in our pond. This time of year always reminds me of Aristophanes’ bizarre play The Frogs, in which the following exchange has somehow over the years stuck in my memory; XANTHIAS: ”O holy noble daughter of Demeter, I just smelt roast pork—how sweet a smell that is”. DIONYSUS: “If you keep quiet, you just might get a slice”. (this seems to lose something in translation). Two red squirrels now reside in our pine tree and can be seen and heard chattering on the oft-cut grass. There has been a plethora of sparrows flying around the garden, frenzied in their mating, nesting and feeding. A madly speeded up version of our own lives, I suspect. There are also many more crows than usual, stalking around looking cross, askance, angular and displaced. It reminded me of Ted Hughes’s observation: “Whatever the colour of Englishman you scratch, you always come to some sort of crow.”
Speaking of which, I went to England and got forcibly booked into my second least favorite hotel on the planet, the absurd and posturing The Coppid Beech, whose name conjures visions of a half timbered straw-scattered old barn staffed by yeomen and yeowomen with a kindly, warm wrinkle-cheek welcome but which in fact is an ugly 60s concrete block staffed by traffic wardens, plonked on a traffic-strewn roundabout between Bracknell and Wokingham. The next day, I was in London’s oldest pub, the Lamb and Flag in Covent Garden, a suitable antidote. It used to be known as the Bucket of Blood because of the bare-fist fights that happened there. John Dryden was attacked by thugs in the alleyway by the side of the pub and nearly died. And all he ever said was “At whom are you looking?”
Gwen was in the Grade 4 concert at the school about the history of music, playing a dancer, a lawyer and holding up a poster for the Beatles. She has also been making regular visits to the swimming pool and swam for the school in a Zurich schools swimming competition. She also completed a sponsored swim at the Roche pool in Basel, doing a champion 50 lengths. 50 lengths? I doubt if I could manage ten without putting me plates down. It also cost me dear as in a fit of affectionate generosity I signed up to be parted from a small fortune in the act of it. We had a dinner party to thank our neighbors for helping me to take and transfer furniture down to La Hune last month and we also went to some friends for a barbecue in the next village, where we were, uncharacteristically, the last to leave.
Is that the time?
Lionel
Lawrence O’Doherty and Jessie on her birthday, 2009
Graduation Trailer Whoopee
01.07.2009
Ahem
What a month to witness, savor and remember! What a gurgling gaggling bubbling reverberating stream of sheer hyper-super-activity it all was! In thirty days we filled and packed a whole album shelf of freshly made memories: we entertained multiple relatives, friends and hangers-on; Ella took and finished her school exams; Jessie graduated from school altogether; Jessie and I led a collective teenage visitation of La Hune, our holiday home in the Tarn-et-Garonne; Alli and I sold our house in the UK (on its own a rare and unnatural achievement) and we started the process of buying another in France; Jessie had an 18th birthday bash near the zoo; Alli received a gratifying result from some hospital tests; Ella went hiking in the Vosges, we wandered amongst commedia players in a Jura village, dawdled by the Doubs, walked along the Wiese, sauntered around the Sundgau and ambled through the Alsace with varying permutations of relatives, animals and friends.
For our lodger dog Tequila it was also a dramatic month, with two major operations on her leg and hip, the vet opting to leave one of her legs simply to trail behind her but also to leave her a couple of weeks’ short of dog-painkillers. She passed a weekend with us in evident agony. There followed a couple of days of despair when she seemed even to lose the will to live, and we did not see her for two weeks after she went back to the vet. But by the end of the month she had returned and seemed even to have started a recovery, despite still not having much use of her hind legs.
Ella finished her exams, the equivalent of O levels, marking the end of the Middle Years Program. She is expecting her results imminently. After finishing, she promptly went off hiking in the Vosges with school-friends from her grade as part of a Duke of Edinburgh-type Outward Bound scheme (the bronze award) and came back to pronounce that although she had enjoyed parts of the sojourn she still had no understanding of why people hiked and camped as a conscious leisure choice.
The first weekend of June was a memorable one, with the official graduation from the International School of Basel of Jessie and the concurrent visit of the Nick Miles family (without Helen) of Graz to witness the event, as well as Gwen’s sports day at school. Jessie’s graduation (5th June) consisted of a formal ceremony, a dinner and a magnificent celebration in music and pictures in which she also performed in a brass band as well as on the piano with her close friends Kate and Jenna. Jessie also had her delayed birthday party on the following day, of which we did not actually see much. As barely tolerated parents it was our lot to be granted a couple of drinks and kept to a corner for the allotted time of around half an hour at the start of the proceedings. The party was a highlight of the social season, one of the events of the days of their (and our) lives. As well as the munificent Miles of Graz, Jessie’s friend Jenny Talbot came from England as did David Massey, whose choice of sleeping habits, venue and timetable earned him the soubriquet the Body in the Basement. Gwen had a busy weekend, going to a rock-climbing party in Weil-am-Rhein in Germany. We forgot that she also had a party on the next day and so she and I instead took Bonnie along the banks of the Wiese, starting from Lange Erlen. This happy dog-strewn stroll is becoming a Sunday morning family tradition and always features a long and unruly procession of happily tail-wagging dogs of different shapes, sizes and tempers.
The Sunday night after Graduation saw the beginning of a week in our French holiday house for myself, Jessie and fifteen of her friends and two other dads. I drove Jessie and five of her friends down in a journey in our car that took around five hours longer than it should have done. It was a very tough trip, as I had elected to drive through the night. The tom-tom had been turned down to avoid waking the sleeping pulchritude of teenagerhood in the back of the car through the small hours, but this led to my missing an important turning, and the wee machine then could not comprehend that we did not want to go back to an unexpectedly barred route. Once off the motorway we erred around the countryside in the vicinity of Vichy in the middle of the night, six teenagers sprawled asleep in the car, Jessie bravely half awake in the front seat, trying to keep me company as, bidden by the tom-tom and, stupidly map-less, I turned into smaller and smaller roads until my headlights nightmarishly revealed that I was attempting to climb a rocky cart track (with high grass growing in the centre of the road) and was losing speed fast as the trailer with all the cases bumped around behind me. I stopped the car, feeling more than a slight sense of panic, and told everybody to get out while I made sure that the car actually made it to the crest of a hill that would reveal, for all I knew, a complete dead end and nowhere to turn around.
Luckily this proved to be a turning point of a different type, and from there the roads became a little easier to negotiate in the black night. The tom-tom gradually but slowly brought me back to a recognizable route, although I had a bad shock at one point as a wild boar suddenly lumbered out across the road and was hit by the car, I shouting out with shock and thus again waking the teenagers from their sprawled beauty-sleep. Looking back I could see no body in the road or by the verge so I motored on, satisfied also by the evidence of a pristine bumper that nothing life-threatening had occurred. A couple of hours later in the early morning, and, the trailer suddenly suffered a flat tire, blowing out as we travelled at high speed along the motorway just an hour from our destination. My plug spanners could not cope and we were rescued by a break-down service. It was another three hours or so before I managed to drive my polite young passengers to La Hune at long last to start their valedictory week together. The other Dads with their loads turned up just four hours or so later in their gleaming air-conditioned vehicles after an easy trouble-free run having started out early in the morning from Basel and so were well rested and quite irritatingly perky.
It was an interesting week for us Dads – we felt like old faithful retainers in the servants’ quarters while the privileged youth in the manor house opposite made whoopee, or whatever it was they were doing. We got together occasionally, mostly while ferrying them to and from the shops, local towns, the honey museum, markets and other local attractions. We did not know how the week went for our daughters and their friends outside the evidence of the subsequent thank you letters and comments, but we Dads also made sure we had a good time so we ate and drank well even while one Dad was on a permanent search for internet access and a mobile phone network. We occasionally stole into the manor house unseen to steal wine and cakes while the whoopee was at its height.
We have sold our house in Sussex, England, and therefore the way is clear to buy the house of Alli’s dreams in Leymen, France. Her wish is ever my command, more or less. There are, as I have sagely remarked, still some bridges to be crossed before these dreams are realized, such as the owner’s sudden memory lapse about our verbal agreement on the sale price, the variable strength of the pound sterling, and an unexpectedly high price tag on the fixtures and fittings. But we walked around the place once more last week and it is getting difficult to stop imagining ourselves in the house.
Amidst all this we attended an excellent school concert featuring performances by both Jessie and Ella and which finished with a flourish by the exceptional Big Brass Band coached by Mr Cervenka who gave an emotional speech at the end of the concert praising his students, including Jessie, whom he had well taught over the past five years. Our wanderings around the Basel area were prompted by the visit of Alli’s parents, who, as ever, left our house in better shape than when they arrived. Notices are now stuck on assorted house fittings to warn the casual passer-by not to use them as they are precarious. Better precarious than broken. The month ended in a sequence of sustained Scrabble playing, although the perplexing absence of the words “bra” and “oik” in the two-volume 2,700 page Shorter Oxford Dictionary threw me into existential uncertainty. Now bereft of the guiding star I may as well use Websters as a more accurate guide to vernacular English.
Aeriously yours,
Lionel
Jessie’s ISB friends in Auvillar, 2009
Jessie and Ella, Basel, 2009
Briskly Vainglorious Bower
06.08.2009
Ahem
You may be amused or possibly worried to learn that I have participated in my first serious run for 25 years when I turned out in company garb for Basel’s annual Firmenlauf. Over 1,600 runners got going on a six kilometre trail through woods and a big adjacent park, the Grun 80. Six kilometres? I used to warm up doing six kilometres! Not any more. I found the going very tough indeed right from the start thanks to my large weight and apparently leaden feet and although I never stopped I was often going very slowly indeed. In fact, so slowly was I going at times that a few people actually walked briskly past me as I puffed on. After finishing I was so horrified by the implication of my experience that I bought a pair of running shoes the very next day, have done a couple of shorter subsequent runs and swims, and have started to enquire about performance-enhancing drugs. Today I resumed my bike to get to and from work.
We went to dinner with our good friends the Barnes of Biel Benken, who as usual treated us like royalty (in a country – invariably republican - where royalty is popular). Sitting outside in the Barnes’ garden in the warm evening with a fine Meursault is an experience difficult to beat and the excellence of the wine induced me almost to forget to be hungry, although perhaps I should not draw attention to this as Alli, admirably, has decided to give up all alcohol for six months (with an exception later made for our holiday). This decision followed the news that I had successfully agreed the terms for the purchase of a house just over the French border in Leymen. Following a meeting with the eccentric notaire the previous week, I went to see the vendor one Saturday morning to eliminate the sizeable areas that had not previously been specified and we thrashed the whole thing out in three hours in a psychological negotiation that felt like five-dimensional chess. The deal includes unusually high-quality fixtures and fittings, electrical items to be installed, a water softener, kilometers of shelving and even some impressive works of modern art. I texted Alli as I triumphantly left the house and she promptly announced the fact on the vainglorious Facebook, eliciting congratulations from some of our friends before, exhausted, I had even arrived home. We aim to move by 1st November.
Ella passed ten days in Britanny with a French family, spending time in Dinard and St Malo. This helped to improve her French language skills in preparation for her French studies for the International Baccalaureate diploma, the two-year course which starts in a couple of weeks. Her major subjects will be English, Psychology and History (although Geography may still be a possibility). The Morrisby psychology test that she took recently to assist her career decision indicated that her best choices could be journalism or psychology. These professions seem related, anyway. And talking of matters academic, Jessie has won her Diploma for the International Baccalaureate with flying colors and has been researching the best universities to choose. The applications can wait until she has had the benefit of her gap year and can re-apply with the same grades. Later this month she departs for San Francisco to see Lawrence, her boyfriend. She then starts her gap year with a full time holiday job in a law firm in the Turks and Caicos Islands. In other words, everything for Jessie is either onwards or upwards (and probably both).
We all (except Jessie, who has been at home looking after the dogs, saying goodbye to her boyfriend and her other friends) snatched a week of relaxation in our house in South West France, La Hune, and although the time was short we managed to do much of what we normally did over longer periods in other years. We also hosted Oliver and Sophia, our nephew and niece, while their Dad and Mum had to work. We visited the Honey Museum in Gramont and the markets in Auvillar, St Clar and Valence; we had dinner with the Verdiers and the Thouins; we made extensive use of the swimming pool. At the Thouins (our neighbors both in Oberwil and the Lomagne) we gathered under a leafy bower to the back of the house while the wind swept, dipped and whipped around, tossing the trees and waving the leaves while we drank cool aperitifs below in the shaded calm. We celebrated Ella’s 16th birthday by going to dinner in Auvillar, sitting out on the terrace in the golden sunshine which reflected off the old walls of the town. Ella has been using her main present for some weeks already, a digital camera of quality, and she has taken some excellent photos with it, including one of Jessie and Lawrence partially obscured by lilies. Gwen had her ears pierced in the same jewelers in Valence d’Agen where all the girls have been similarly initiated. She also swam hundreds of lengths of the pool during the week, far more than I did. It paled by contrast to Jessie who, almost as an afterthought, swam four kilometers in one go for a charity in Basel. She came back complaining only of sunburn.
We have just come back from enjoying several days full of fun, activity and new experiences with the Miles of Graz, staying in their impressive lakeside residence in southern Austria, near Villach in Carinthia at the Faaker See. This is the ancestral terroir of Helen, our sister-in-law, who spent her childhood holidays there and where her mother was born and grew up. Copiously informed by Helen, who has just become an official professional guide for Austria, we visited local castles and churches or went on rambles in the mornings, then to reading, swimming and sunbathing by the lake in the afternoons. The Faak lake with its clear, constantly renewed turquoise water provided much of our leisure, for there boats available, but there were also great views to be had from the mountains (part of the southern limestone Alps) and valleys as well as from the house itself where the sight across the lake was memorable. One morning we went mushroom picking in the woods and picked enough to provide a starter for dinner. On another night the Miles made an Austrian speciality, the Kaiserschmarn, quickly despatched. We also visited Villach where there was a festival marking the Villacher Kirchtag, and we saw the Ossiach Collegiate Church, location of the tomb of the Polish King Boleslaus. We were constantly entertained by the Miles children, Eve, Joe and George. We also had to contend with many dangers, real and imagined, from the regional ticks in the woods to protective cattle on our mountain paths. But the sight of lean and mean “Uncle” Nick, collar gripped tight with one hand, the other quivering taut with slipper, focusing with malice on the destruction of what was purported to be a hornet (but was very nearly the Ikea standard lamp), will stay long in the memory.
Yours with a smart thwack,
Lionel
With the Miles in Southern Austria around the Faaker See, 2009
Rheinmaiden Pantaloon Fair
01.09.2009
Ahem
So there I was, dressed only in swimming trunks and a balloon, floating on my back down the Rhein, the opening bars of Das Rheingold playing around in my head as the late afternoon sun winked from the fast moving current. Wagner’s Ring Cycle begins in the source of the Rhein, where three Rheinmaidens are playing in an innocent state of nature. Enter Alberich the Nibelung (dwarf) from beneath the earth. The story, like the Rhein itself, then undergoes several twists and turns (especially as it passes through Basel), but I am digressing because Gwen and I, as well as Jessie with her friends and our neighbors, took part in Basel’s Rheinschwimmen, a crazy annual tradition in which thousands of Baselers troop down to the Rhein after work on a selected day in August, take off their clothes, stuff them into a watertight bag, pick up a plastic duck and a balloon, then wade into the river and let it bear them gently but firmly for about 2 kilometers through the heart of the city and under the echoing Mittelbrucke, then they all wade out, line up, pick up armfuls of freebies from local companies and carry on going home as before. At the end of it, we all got a medal and a certificate. Alli walked along the bank, pushing my bicycle, festooned with all our socks, shoes, towels, bags and other bits. All right, the Rheinschwimmen is not quite the Ring Cycle, but I have to say that it was a great pleasure (and a long-standing ambition achieved) to be gently but firmly borne along one of the great rivers of the world. Afterwards, we all went out for dinner at a sushi restaurant in town.
Our progress towards buying the house in Leymen, France is tortuous and a few potential problems remain. But we are still on course, so far, for a move across the border in a couple of months, but our fingers remain crossed. One hurdle was overcome when I had a major medical and was told that I was in most respects in good health. Another looms in the shape of the ever-collapsing UK currency.
It’s a pity that the UK never got its promised “barbecue” summer, but we certainly did. Most of the month featured high temperatures, blue skies and bright sunlight. We hosted several barbecues, two of them featuring hordes of teenagers (friends of Jessie in the first instance, of Ella in the second). Another barbecue featured our new neighbors, who hail from Macclesfield, and our friends the Kellys, who hail from Brisbane. Ella’s barbecue was a long delayed birthday party. She and her guests went into town after the dinner then came back en masse at 5am to wake everyone in the house, albeit briefly. That said, Alli and I were impressed with their general demeanor. The youth of today? A lot better than yesterday, we thought. Ella has also previously spent some relaxing time in England with her Nanny and Grandpa and was able to indulge in some British shopping.
Jessie's last night in Switzerland featured another party to say goodbye to those of her friends still left in Basel. She has been conscious of the significance of her impending departure from Basel, and had been doing a lot of typical Basel activities, such as the Rheinschwimmen and last visits to notable Basel landmark sites, events and restaurants such as the Acqua, the Noohn and the Atlantis roof garden, before she left us at the end of the month. I drove her to the airport at 5.30am for a London flight on the way to San Francisco to see her boyfriend Lawrence and prepare for the start of her gap year. We will next see her at Christmas after she returns from her gap year job in a law office in the Turks and Caicos Islands. Watching her disappear through the gate at Basel airport was a salutary moment. She has passed from one clear stage of her life to another. I too felt that I had entered another age, as Shakespeare described in As you like it. The only question was, which age? The one (the fifth) of the “justice In fair round belly, with good capon lin'd”? Or maybe it’s that of the “lean and slippered pantaloon” (the sixth)? Given that the former is round and the latter lean I think probably the former. School has started for Ella and Gwen and they have new challenges, but neither whining there nor “creeping like snail unwillingly”, in fact quite enthusiastically. Ella is already enjoying the new subject of psychology. For me, going back to work was more like “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything”.
Gwen, neighbor Puck, Bonnie the dog and I had another long walk by the Wiese river in Basel on a recent Sunday morning. This featured Gwen and Puck wading down the mostly shallow river and getting soaked in the process. Then Bonnie rather comically fell into the rushing current while picking her way across the stepping stones, provoking peals of laughter from the girls. Bonnie, not a keen swimmer, paddled unsuccessfully against the flow to get back to the stepping stone from which she had slipped, but after making no discernible progress had to be rescued by Gwen, paws paddling even as she was lifted out of the water. A day earlier, I had gone with Jessie to a Van Gogh exhibition in Basel, which concentrated on several early paintings from before he went to Paris, and on the paintings in the last phase of his life, when he was in Auvers. At the end of the month we went to the much truncated food fair, the Agrogast in Hagenthal in France. A shadow of its former self, the fair has split into two, with the more successful part (Degustha) moving 50km down the road to Mulhouse. We still managed – obviously - to come back home with some high quality wine, cheese and fish.
Yours from the high table,
Lionel
Jessie and Lionel in 47 Hohlegasse, 2009
Risque Vegetarian Snorkelling
01.10.2009
Ahem
We are creeping forward steadily on the house purchase. The results of my medical, reported to you all last month as satisfactory, in fact generated a ruling from the bank’s insurance experts indicating that, on balance, I would not last another twenty years. A trifle harsh, I thought, even for being undeniably overweight. I decided to challenge the ruling and in so doing found myself mired in what I am now calling Frenchmanship. After some research in the procedures of the country that invented human rights I called on all possible influences, colleagues and pistons to change the ruling and took my case to the Chairman’s Committee of the Credit Mutuel, now 80% owned by the French Government. I argued my case in less than fluent French, and was ultimately rewarded with success. I now have a temporary and exceptional immunity from French assurance deces et perte totale. Now I have to concentrate on staying alive for the next 20 years and lose a lot of weight in the next twelve months. Dead easy, I’d say. The last hurdle in our year-long saga of property transaction is that we have to find another family to take over our rented house in Oberwil tout de suite.
Ella has excelled herself with the very high score of 55 in the results of her Middle Years Program (roughly equivalent to O levels). The all-time best school result is 62. She also won two special commendations, for Humanities and for Music, at the Middle Years’ Program version of the Graduation ceremony, at which she also played the guitar in two stage performances. The ceremony displayed the somewhat erratic organizational skills of the school and light relief was unintentionally caused when the balloons in a great archway of balloons by the side of the stage suddenly exploded one by one every twenty minutes or so during the speeches and presentations. Ella put together the show’s introductory video for the audience of several hundred parents and relatives. The Headmistress took the stage after the video show looking, I thought, shaken rather than stirred by the chef d’oeuvre, which had featured various of Ella’s classmates in a cornucopia of compromising positions. Possibly to forestall future contentious litigation from enraged fundamentalist parents, the headmistress pronounced somewhat ruefully: “well, that WAS a surprise!” Alli and I were seated behind a newly arrived parental couple who had not appreciated the artistic irreverence of Ella’s collage of photos and music . Ella was rightly undeterred. On the music front she went to Zurich to see Cold Play (for the first time) while I made plans to see Eileen Rose (for the fourth time) in Northern Italy by Lake Como.
The school also organized a friendly barbecue for new parents at which Ella was a helper. I wandered around feeling oddly like an old hand, meeting friends old and new alike, and bumping into the redoubtable Clive Smit, over in Basel for a weekend before a work project in Zurich. Gwen came 5th in the School long distance run and promptly qualified herself to represent the school in an international race in Lausanne next month. She has also completed a very successful school project on traditional African dancing and we were able to look at some of the tapes that her Grandad so painstakingly recorded of traditional African dances when he was in Nigeria in the 1950s.
Alli celebrated her birthday on the 7th, receiving some thoughtful presents and flowers from friends, neighbors and children. Her main present, she said, is the afore-mentioned house. On the Saturday previously I cooked a full family evening meal (in many years I have seldom been allowed into the cooking area) which was pronounced a success. It also featured meat, which has been largely eliminated from the family table these days. Gwen has been a vegetarian for several weeks now, and I am only eating meat on occasional Saturdays (or when it would be rude not to). It’s far too complicated to explain why I am doing this, but in part consequence I am losing weight and feeling better by this approach. Alli’s culinary skills have been tested by the new situation and although she and Ella still crave fleisch, she manages to cook meals as delicious as ever with pulses, vegetables and beans. It must be something to do with her addiction to Masterchef and Market Kitchen. It all brought back memories of the late great restaurant Uhuru in Oxford’s Cowley Road, where I ate every week for a year in the mid 1970s as a student, enjoying dishes such as Non-Violent Shepherds Pie and Leaf Wellington.
During walks, Bonnie, on seeing other dogs, often rushes up to them as if she is going to attack them violently. In humans this behaviour is seen as highly aggressive, like the proverbial horseman galloping right up to the castle walls, but dogs, generally speaking, turn no hair and see this behaviour indifferently, showing at most surprise even as their owner is reaching for a stick. I have surmised that this “rush” treatment can be compared to an over-hearty handshake in a human, which is irritating but not threatening. Humans do not treat such a handshake as an aggressive act although, given some of the handshakes I have suffered, perhaps they should. But Alli and I sometimes have to apologise to owners who think that Bonnie is not just a bit headstrong but a complete head-case.
Over in the Caribbean Jessie has in the past month been working in various jobs, employed as a researcher into tourism, a cataloguer of widgets on a ship yard and a general errand runner for Stanbrook Enterprises. This is all good experience but somehow I would rather that she was learning about the wonders of the law in some dingy northern English or Belgian factory town where winter had already arrived instead of writing mails to us describing how she has been riding a horse along the beach or watching the sun go down from the deck of a yacht or driving a speed boat or snorkelling along the famous Cayman trough. However, it looks like that has all changed recently and radically and in the past few days she has been involved in the meticulous preparation for a genuine murder trial. She is going through witness statements, autopsy reports, DNA analysis reports, even photos of the wounds..
No further questions, m’lud
Lionel
Lionel, Jessie, Gwen and Ella, 47 Hohlegasse, 2009
Leathern Burlap Algae
25.10.2009
Ahem
Just before it started to get cold, I spent five nights in Marlow at a scientific conference, sequestered in the stuffiest of stuffed English hotels, the Compleat Angler, although its position by the big weir on the Thames is admittedly rather impressive. I spent a discreet weekend there once over twenty-five years ago but now cannot remember much about it or the weekend. It suffers very badly from the English hotel disease of leaving no space unfilled, no chair uncushioned, no cushion untasselled, no furniture leg unfrilled, no wallpaper unflocked, no shelf uncluttered and no table unbedecked with heavy glossy catalogues and plumply embossed leathern writing cases. Even the obligatory molded teapot/kettle set has to be fitted into the back of a drawer behind the Gideon’s Bible.
Marlow has a jaded, fading feel. I needed to write and post a letter from a standing start and found it remarkably difficult to do so. The hotel sold no stamps. (Great. It sold balloon trips, Dead Sea algae and tangerine tisane but no postage stamps.) Her Majesty’s Royal Mail in Marlow is to be found in a Portakabin at the back of a supermarket car park at the top of the High Street. I queued for nearly ten minutes for one stamp, and when I asked where to post the letter, was shown a half-full burlap bag lying shapelessly on the dirty linoleum floor. And this was before the postal strike. On the way back, recycling opportunities proliferated from huge thrusting sturdy containers shaped like bulky postal boxes, as if mocking the absence of the real thing. It seemed to fit my general mood to be listening to Warren Zevon’s stirring Middle England anthem Porcelain Monkey as I strode back down the stricken high street in the wet rain. When I came back to Basel, it turned out that Alli had thought all along that I was in Harlow, not Marlow. But enough of my complaints about Ye Olde England. The England of the 1970s (or so) was well portrayed in two plays by John Godber and Jane Thornton, Bouncers and Shakers, put on by the Semi-Circle, an English-speaking theatre company, at the noted Helmut Förnbacher Theater located in the former customs hall of Basel’s Badischer Bahnhof. The plays portray, relentlessly, the shifting, feverish underside of Northern English nightlife. My friend Richard put in a barnstorming performance as Lucky Eric, whose first speech was genuinely memorable.
Having not immediately exchanged into Euros the large wad of pound notes that we received from the sale of our UK house, deciding instead to leave it accruing interest at the princely rate of 0.5% I viewed sterling’s freefall in September and October with less than equanimity. I took to posting a link to the exchange rate fluctuation on my computer desktop but this only enhanced my bi-polar tendencies and I was plunged into either bleak despair or blithe joy at the merest movement of even one hundredth of a percentage point, knowing that these indicated several hundred euros at a time. Eventually I changed the pounds on the 22nd inst., deciding neither to rue nor regret my impeccably awful timing. Being rubbish at currency arbitrage is one of my many congenital failings.
But this was nothing compared to the drama on the home front. The one thing we had not worried about in the whole gamme, the timing of our move to France, now became our biggest concern. We advertised to the expatriate community and Alli showed our house to many interested parties, but few wanted it, then one family said they wanted to move in straight away, then told us at the last minute that they did not. Finally, after a particularly upsetting letdown, I decided that we would act on events rather than be acted upon, so we resolved to move before Christmas regardless of whether we could find a family to take our house over before the end of our notice. We are therefore going to move in late November, come what may. And I am sure that it will. Alli has been packing cases and boxes ready for the move but a new worry now is that we seem to be unable to locate our vendor to confirm the move, sign the papers, receive the money and, above all, move out before we move in.
Ella had an excellent report from school, and seems to be getting on well with the IB course. We talk to Jessie quite regularly through a variety of means, the most recent being Skype, which I have now accepted as A Good Thing. We spent a fine day in Colmar (France) with Gwen, did some shopping, and had a delicious lunch at the Café de Paris. We bought a modern sofa (in blocks of different colors) from the deeply chic establishment Rochebobois for our house, although amazingly enough I had not intended to open my wallet. Talking of which, I see that Stanbrook Abbey, of Worcestershire, for 150 years the home of a Benedictine order of nuns, is for sale at 4.5 million pounds. Maybe we should move in there instead – it might turn out to be (quantitatively) easier and cheaper.
Yours with crossed digits,
Lionel
Just before it started to get cold, I spent five nights in Marlow at a scientific conference, sequestered in the stuffiest of stuffed English hotels, the Compleat Angler, although its position by the big weir on the Thames is admittedly rather impressive. I spent a discreet weekend there once over twenty-five years ago but now cannot remember much about it or the weekend. It suffers very badly from the English hotel disease of leaving no space unfilled, no chair uncushioned, no cushion untasselled, no furniture leg unfrilled, no wallpaper unflocked, no shelf uncluttered and no table unbedecked with heavy glossy catalogues and plumply embossed leathern writing cases. Even the obligatory molded teapot/kettle set has to be fitted into the back of a drawer behind the Gideon’s Bible.
Marlow has a jaded, fading feel. I needed to write and post a letter from a standing start and found it remarkably difficult to do so. The hotel sold no stamps. (Great. It sold balloon trips, Dead Sea algae and tangerine tisane but no postage stamps.) Her Majesty’s Royal Mail in Marlow is to be found in a Portakabin at the back of a supermarket car park at the top of the High Street. I queued for nearly ten minutes for one stamp, and when I asked where to post the letter, was shown a half-full burlap bag lying shapelessly on the dirty linoleum floor. And this was before the postal strike. On the way back, recycling opportunities proliferated from huge thrusting sturdy containers shaped like bulky postal boxes, as if mocking the absence of the real thing. It seemed to fit my general mood to be listening to Warren Zevon’s stirring Middle England anthem Porcelain Monkey as I strode back down the stricken high street in the wet rain. When I came back to Basel, it turned out that Alli had thought all along that I was in Harlow, not Marlow. But enough of my complaints about Ye Olde England. The England of the 1970s (or so) was well portrayed in two plays by John Godber and Jane Thornton, Bouncers and Shakers, put on by the Semi-Circle, an English-speaking theatre company, at the noted Helmut Förnbacher Theater located in the former customs hall of Basel’s Badischer Bahnhof. The plays portray, relentlessly, the shifting, feverish underside of Northern English nightlife. My friend Richard put in a barnstorming performance as Lucky Eric, whose first speech was genuinely memorable.
Having not immediately exchanged into Euros the large wad of pound notes that we received from the sale of our UK house, deciding instead to leave it accruing interest at the princely rate of 0.5% I viewed sterling’s freefall in September and October with less than equanimity. I took to posting a link to the exchange rate fluctuation on my computer desktop but this only enhanced my bi-polar tendencies and I was plunged into either bleak despair or blithe joy at the merest movement of even one hundredth of a percentage point, knowing that these indicated several hundred euros at a time. Eventually I changed the pounds on the 22nd inst., deciding neither to rue nor regret my impeccably awful timing. Being rubbish at currency arbitrage is one of my many congenital failings.
But this was nothing compared to the drama on the home front. The one thing we had not worried about in the whole gamme, the timing of our move to France, now became our biggest concern. We advertised to the expatriate community and Alli showed our house to many interested parties, but few wanted it, then one family said they wanted to move in straight away, then told us at the last minute that they did not. Finally, after a particularly upsetting letdown, I decided that we would act on events rather than be acted upon, so we resolved to move before Christmas regardless of whether we could find a family to take our house over before the end of our notice. We are therefore going to move in late November, come what may. And I am sure that it will. Alli has been packing cases and boxes ready for the move but a new worry now is that we seem to be unable to locate our vendor to confirm the move, sign the papers, receive the money and, above all, move out before we move in.
Ella had an excellent report from school, and seems to be getting on well with the IB course. We talk to Jessie quite regularly through a variety of means, the most recent being Skype, which I have now accepted as A Good Thing. We spent a fine day in Colmar (France) with Gwen, did some shopping, and had a delicious lunch at the Café de Paris. We bought a modern sofa (in blocks of different colors) from the deeply chic establishment Rochebobois for our house, although amazingly enough I had not intended to open my wallet. Talking of which, I see that Stanbrook Abbey, of Worcestershire, for 150 years the home of a Benedictine order of nuns, is for sale at 4.5 million pounds. Maybe we should move in there instead – it might turn out to be (quantitatively) easier and cheaper.
Yours with crossed digits,
Lionel
Bonnie by the Birsig, October 2009
Tatterdemalion Hooting Savannah
04.12.2009
Ahem
The great year-long French house purchase saga has been successfully concluded. We have taken nine tenths of the law of 13 Rue de la Scierie, 68220 Leymen, France. For over a week we have now been waking there every morning having gone to bed there every night. It is true that the final act of sale has not yet been signed, but surely sureté will come. I am nearly positive of this. Alli had continued tirelessly to show prospective tenants around our Oberwil house but unfortunately we had to move stock and barrel leaving the rented house still rented (to us), although the landlord did relieve us of one month of the excess charge. For at least three weeks beforehand, Alli had packed all our belongings determinedly into boxes and taped them down definitively as evidence of intent. The worrying hiatus on which note I finished last month’s Ahem was resolved when it transpired that the owner had been in hospital for a week with his foot, as the English would say. But this was mere bathos compared to the Boschian horrors that were to await us in the febrile dénouement of the affair. One of the tatterdemalion array of characters who owned random bits of our prospective house went bonkers just after agreeing to remove his objection to the sale but just before signing this agreement into notarized fact. The notaire and the seller went off to extract his signature from his hospital bed, where he was recovering after crashing his car. This was because he had lost all his money gambling in Strasbourg, and had driven down the wrong side of the motorway in search of a cash machine after having left and forgotten his wife at a petrol station. Then the crucial meeting at the notaire's office nearly collapsed from the start when the estate agent who did not show us around the house two years ago turned up to claim her disputed and not inconsiderable cut, much to the seller's discomfiture; and to mine, after the seller asked me rhetorically if I might care to pay it. I, who had 12 hours earlier been retching on a pavement in Mumbai, demurred. The meeting stumbled on with the seller threatening the estate agent with a whispering campaign to besmirch her local reputation. It then transpired that the notaire had not sent the crucial document previously to the seller for review and that the seller could not confirm the sale until he had satisfied the French authorities that he had not profited from the sale, which on all counts he had not done. If a purple warthog had then entered the room on its hind legs and solemnly introduced itself to all of us in fluent Tagalog I would not have found the meeting any more odd than I did at that moment.
The move the following Monday was a 15-hour marathon starting at 7am. Later in the morning, when the house was supposed to be empty, we arrived there to find the seller and his wife still mopping down the floors, their possessions still in every room, their food in the fridge and their clothes rattling in the washing machine. Later, after an entertaining two hour wait at the French border to fill in dozens of quadruplicate forms for customs officials who had never known the urgent thrill of humor, I ceremoniously led a crazy convoy of five removal vans around Mulhouse airport slip roads and roundabouts (that did not exist on the tom-tom), then on a highly circuitous route towards Leymen, and finally on a major local detour on rutted muddy country lanes across ploughed fields in the medium drizzle in order to get in front of the house itself, since Rue de la Scierie was all up with severe road works, and literally nothing - lorry, van, car, bike, pedestrian or even dog - could physically get into the road, a cul-de-sac, from the village. Since moving in, the ultra-modern fridge, cooker, hob, outside lights, electrical circuits generally and gas supply have all gone on the blink, one way or another. We have neither telephone, TV nor internet despite having ordered it from that happy people company France Telecom several days ago. In addition, the seller's detritus of job-lots of machine tools, IT equipment and DIY materials, most still in their original packing, have not yet been removed from the two large double garages; the swimming pool is green and uncovered and the pool house restoration is undone; but in truth we can shrug off these local difficulties for the greater good. We are enormously relieved to be where we are, and not a little proud that between us all we have managed to stay determinedly on course to own the house of Alli's dreams and my delusions. Leymen is a place of rolling hills, forest walks, majestic dawns and peaceful sunsets, with three good restaurants, a bar-tabac, a boucherie, a boulanger, and direct tram access to central Basel. We are staying. Come what may. And judging by the events of the last twelve months, it probably will.
Jessie has been enjoying herself more and more in the Caribbean but we can feel her frustration at not having witnessed some of the extraordinary developments as sketched above. We look forward hugely to seeing her on the 13th December, back with us for Christmas before she goes on to New Zealand in the New Year. The long-awaited Jonas Brothers concert in Zurich, an early Christmas present for Gwen, was cancelled at almost the last minute due to one of the brothers’ throat infection. We saw the news just before I was to take Gwen and her friend to Zurich by train for the concert. Gwen, who had excitedly prepared for the concert by making a T shirt and a poster, was briefly disconsolate but cheered up after neighbors took her to the Michael Jackson film in town. She has also swum successfully for the school team, helping them to a famous win in a schools swimming gala in Gstaad. Ella has been taking the events calmly and in her stride, and has been scoring well in her higher level subjects at school. We attended a meeting there to help her choose her special subject essay to be written over the course of the next year. She will probably be choosing a subject from early twentieth century history.
I spent Halloween in Canada after attending a conference in Washington DC. It was great to see my second cousin once removed Kate Moss, with her boyfriend Tom (now fiancé) and her father. She and Tom will be getting married in England in March next year. I stayed with her family in Toronto no less than 36 years ago on a half term visit from Milton Academy in Boston, where I was studying as an exchange student from Westminster School. We talked about our shared family on my mother’s side (she knew far more than I did), and it was surprising to see that in the past few generations our antecedents comprised not only Jessies, but also Ellas and even Gwens. And Alli and I thought the names we gave our children were different. It just shows, as my mother would often mysteriously observe. Kate, Tom and I had drinks at Kate's flat with her Dad, then we ate and talked in a small French bistro, sampled malt whiskies at a couple of midtown bars then participated in a pub quiz amidst the hooting Halloweeners of Toronto. The following day I flew to a wind-swept Saskatoon in Saskatchewan in the Canadian savanna prairies to meet local farmers. Jet lag pursued me relentlessly through the entire visit, and I was uncontrollably sleepy during the visit as well as for several days after it ended. In Washington I had even fallen asleep while trying to watch Jonson’s The Alchemist at the Shakespeare Theatre. The following week, while Alli was filling and preparing hundreds of packing cases, I flew to the Philippines and then to India to visit various company sites and projects. In Goa I had the best vegetarian Thali I have ever eaten. I came back from India groggy and delicate of stomach straight into the yawling theatre of the absurd that I have described above.
So, celebrate with us in this festive season of good will, raise your glasses, and declaim, altogether....
Santé ! Joyeux Nöel ! Nous sommes toujours debout !
Lionel
Kate and Tom engaged in Toronto, 2009
Roiling Usurer Chicken
30.12.2009
Ahem
As the days suddenly became shorter to help spin the year to its conclusion, Gwen distinguished herself for the second time by running the Basel Stadtlauf with many of her friends and hundreds of other Baselers at different levels, ages and distances, through the city one cold Saturday evening after dark. I was in charge of her that day and I lost her, having wrongly assumed that the race would end where it began. But the short delay before this realization took hold was enough to disable me from getting to the finishing post in time due to roiling crowds and zealous race planners. I looked for Gwen for an agonizing hour, hurrying between the Marktplatz and the Munsterplatz, getting more and more agitated by my incompetence as a responsible adult and by barely concealed rising worry for her health and welfare, given that she did not know her new telephone number or address and was dressed only in running gear and a number. Finally, after trying unsuccessfully to get her name called over the loudspeaker, I spotted her wandering around the Marktplatz looking relatively unconcerned. She took my joyous exclamations very coolly, all things considered. She had even prepared a Plan B, having met one of her teachers who had promised to take her home if she was still father-less after the teacher had finished her race later in the evening.
At the very beginning of the month it was safe to say that the fall and winter had been mild compared to previous years, but the scent and sight of snow in the mountains around was irresistibly perceptible from the second week. On the morning of Gwen’s 11th birthday, the 12th December, snow fell heavily in Basel. The temperature did not climb back above freezing point for twelve days, reducing to under minus 15 degrees on the night of the winter solstice a few days later. Gwen’s proper birthday party, to be shared with a school-friend by arrangement, will be in January. But she did have a few friends back for a sleepover in our new house while the snow continued to fall. The following day, Ella and I got up very early to meet the homecoming Jessie at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. It felt rather momentous and a little strange to be welcoming a prodigal daughter home from foreign parts for Christmas. I thought we would all have lunch on the way back in a pleasant old-fashioned French hostelry but was outvoted as we passed an Ikea store on the outskirts of Paris, so we had lunch there instead (they do very good food). Coming from over thirty degrees of heat in the West Indies, Jessie felt the Swiss sub-zero temperatures immediately and took to wearing several layers of clothes. It’s the first time we have experienced having a child “back for Christmas”, a further signal of our advancing years, if any were needed. But it’s all good – the years advance much to our pleasure and benefit.
Our move at the end of November to Leymen had been haphazard and tumultuous; the aftermath was no less so. It is not easy to start to reside in France, after becoming accustomed to Swiss competence, efficiency and logic. These elements disappeared overnight when we crossed the border. In limited space I cannot do full justice to the full litany of happenstances, many more redolent of Catch 22 than Clochemerle, but some events do stand out. We ran out of heating oil just before the temperature went arctic, and a frantic Alli had to do a distressed-female-with-sick-child routine to ensure that the oil tanker came to fill us up, they having struck us off their list because we had not paid a bill that had not been sent to us. France Telecom, that corporate byword for customer service, did not understand why I had not called their helpline to complain that I didn’t have a phone line yet. But, as I revealed to them, apparently exclusively, their helpline only takes calls from French numbers. The lack of a phone line proved too much for Amazon France who failed to deliver a crucial Christmas present for Gwen by her birthday and then by Christmas. Our water supply was summarily cut off but that, as a neighbor explained later, was completely normal. It happened often and on this occasion, as on many previous, the water authorities had just not bothered to warn anyone. A new hole went up in the road and again a circuitous and mud-rutted route had to be found across the fields just to get into the village.
Rather grandly, I was reported to the Central Bank of France for having chalked up a €120 overdraft on a moribund account that I use only for holidays. Being reported like this is akin to being denounced publicly as a usurer and sent to a virtual Bastille. Forthwith I found myself unable to effect any bank transactions in France at all, including buying property, which was what I thought I was on the point of doing. For a day I thought that the whole enterprise might completely founder. This would have been difficult to explain to a family that was already ensconced in the house, even though, to this day, we have not actually paid for it. Our mortgage has not yet started even though we have now celebrated a month in situ. Many of our friends are speechless with admiration. Credit Mutuel is curious.
The end of the year is proving to be a very happy and contented Christmas and New Year break, notwithstanding the strange manoeuvres going on all round us. This peace of mind amidst the wreckage of French and Swiss bureaucracy is very largely due to Alli’s parents, whose influence is instantly relieving. Grandpa was soon busy around the house, finding plenty to do that he thought correctly that I would do worse and too late. We had a memorable Christmas day, which involved a morning Anglican service, several hours of sustained present-opening, and a superb Christmas meal. The memorable present of the year was Jessie’s gift to Alli and me of a massive wooden chicken coop which she and a friend’s father had constructed in the short time since she arrived back, as well as information sufficient to build and maintain a chicken-run and to keep chickens in our new garden. I was momentarily struck dumb by the sheer ingenuity of the idea and its implementation. This does not prevent me from hoping that you all have a relaxing and happy time over this Christmas and New Year period.
I know that there were some who did not receive last month’s Ahem (Tatterdemalion Hooting Savanna). It is the only in the last few days that we have regained some kind of home access to the internet and so I am sending it again here as a complimentary attachment.
Yours in communicado
Lionel
Stanbrook Family in Rue de la Scierie, Christmas 2009
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