Ankle Qi Whooshed January 2010
31.01.10
Ahem
Early in the month while walking with the dogs Alli slipped and fell on an icy path in the woods and broke her ankle in three places. She had to be in hospital for nearly two weeks, undergoing two operations and considerable pain, not to mention an enormous degree of irritation that she was not at home directing family events; “I hate not being in control”. We were very grateful to our near neighbors the Richards, who helped us immediately on this and other lesser crises through the month. Others chipped in with very welcome assistance during the weekdays. As breaking ankles go, it was probably the best time to do it, all things considered. We were just getting settled after the move; Jessie was still at home to help out; and Gwen went off to ski camp for a week shortly afterwards. Alli is back home now on crutches and will have physiotherapy for several weeks. As a family we had a great time together over the Christmas period. The house’s unique and accommodating character benefits us all. The focal point is a large warm kitchen, from which the view east is pastoral, a meadow bounded by a stream and grazed by horses in the foreground, the other side of the village in the rising middle ground and the Landskron Castle cresting the wooded hinterland. Quite apart from the accident, the continual snow and frost made it a memorable and picturesque first January in France.
Ella has contentedly set up everything she needs in her luxurious split-level maisonette penthouse with balcony. She went to Vienna to play in a basketball tournament and helped the school come a creditable 2nd overall, but unfortunately did not have time to see much of the city. Gwen, who has used the sauna with her friends several times already, has plastered pictures and photos of dogs all over her spacious bedroom. A table football, originally intended as Gwen’s birthday present, was finally delivered in a suspiciously small box filled with thousands of tiny plastic pieces and millions of nuts, bolts and screws. It took me hours to build it, with Gwen hopping impatiently around me like a cosmetic surgeon’s assistant, passing me unfeasibly shaped plastic parts to fit into a three dimensional jigsaw. She was also happy to see her friend Maddy, over from New Zealand for the holiday. Shortly after Alli’s accident Gwen went off with the school skiing in Nendaz and had an excellent time there. Jessie was quickly into her stride and held a big party featuring all manner of diversions involving jelly shots of vodka and a drinking game that seemed to last all night and be heard across the entire village. She also went skiing for a few days with friends in Klosters. She left us again on the 21st, spending a few days in San Francisco before going on to her gap year job working for some New Zealand MPs. A week after she left we received her Christmas legacy, a chicken coop that she and a friend’s father had built. One frosty Sunday morning I and three other large men with hangovers brought it home on the back of a borrowed truck and carried it into our garden. It now needs a run and chooks in the spring. Stopping over from Graz, Alli’s parents helped us settle in further, with Nanny doing a mountain of ironing and Grandpa putting up the larger pictures on the walls. They were then seriously delayed getting back home by plane, which they managed only late the following day.
As far as family games went, we played Scrabble the most. The presence this year of an Official Scrabble Dictionary took getting used to, as some of the officially acceptable words were so far-fetched that I began to understand why the game can lose its appeal when played with someone who has memorized this Dictionary, which is full of two-letter words that I have never spoken, let alone used in a Scrabble game. Among them was “Qi” (pronounced “Chy”), a very disappointing discovery, as it robbed me of the certainty that Q can only be played with a U. Now that it can, the word seems to turn up in each and every game, winning at least eleven points. And, according to the Official Scrabble Dictionary, “phpht” is also a genuine word. Well, “phpht” to that, I say. Bonnie is happy in her new environment and hunts deer in the wintry-white woods. Dogs are not as friendly to each other here as in Switzerland and seem mostly to be large, loud, spike-collared and on looped ropes.
I visited the village dump in freezing weather to get rid of the heavy wooden sections of a broken wardrobe. This I did by backing the car very close to the skip, then balancing the heavy sections from the boot of the car across the side of the tip. Then in a virile swing movement with both hands I forcibly flung-slid them one by one up and far into the middle of the tip. On the last and heaviest section a nail caught on my glove which was then whooshed off my hand and launched together with the section high into the tip. It was the most unusual way that I have ever lost a single glove. I don’t know why I feel the need to imitate Buster Keaton whenever I try to do anything practical -a week later, while Alli was in hospital, I helpfully loaded the tumble dryer with a large mound of dirty clothes, under the impression that the dryer was in fact a washing machine. Not finding a suitable place to put in the powder, I liberally sprinkled the inside of the drum with washing powder then forced more powder into a suspiciously small hole in the oddly-shaped cartridge at the top. This had to be rectified by Jessie later with the aid of a vacuum cleaner and teenage expletives. I was only trying to help...
The last days of 2009 were characterized by desperate dashes to acquire French car insurance and number plates and to divest ourselves of the Swiss. Alli is officially the car-owner so it fell to her to go in our neighbor’s car to the Swiss registration center to hand in our number plates then a day later in a taxi to get grey cards, green slips and number plates from around the locality. I performed the less exacting task of driving to a French garage in the dusk on New Year’s Eve to have the temporary number plates fitted and later to get the Controle Technique done. But in this as in many other areas, we are waiting for the key document or return visit of key individual to complete the job. The complex question of family health insurance also urgently looms. Now that both school and work terms are in full swing, and Alli is so much less mobile, the capacity to get so many things done in a short space of time is circumscribed. But we will continue to get there, as I insouciantly inform those who inquire.
Yours with trans-frontier assurance pending,
Lionel
Bonnie in the snow, Leymen, January 2010
Insurance Cornucopia Grace February 2010
28.02.2010
Ahem
Another month of repeated and heavy snowfalls caused delays to our plans in many ways, but more recently the temperatures have climbed and the snow has disappeared and we are now merely buffeted by storm winds. The last day of the month has even been sunny and warm. We finally became legally insured drivers in France, but we have not, however, managed to acquire trans-frontier health insurance, after our insurance company tried to force us off their books even while Alli was being treated for her broken ankle. The company had taken tens of thousands of euros from me over five years and returned almost nothing despite all our expensive pills, potions and visitations, and did not trouble to explain properly to us the rules about moving to France. Neither did any prospective French insurer seem to understand what the requirements were. What is it with insurance and insurers? They swarm around you when you first need advice. They extract your prints and then you pay tall amounts to them but they either ignore you or mislead you when you need something or want to get out. If I was in power I would require insurance payments to be refunded if the insurable risk never happened. If they were then I would be extremely wealthy by now and they wouldn’t. So there. I suppose that these are among the reasons why I have never managed to get elected.
Ella went to Paris and enjoyed attending a conference on the future of Europe. She also went to England for a few days with a friend over half-term to stay with Nanny and Grandpa and managed to come back with a cornucopia of new clothes bought from London’s Oxford Street and the high streets of Brighton and Burgess Hill. During term time, she turned in some great performances in basketball for the school. Jessie, now in New Zealand, has started her job with MP Todd McClay and living with the McClay family and has told us that she is already having (another) time of her life. Her photographs, premiered on Facebook, seem to endorse this. Wakeboarding is her new preferred sport, involving the use of muscles she has never used before. This made me remember my PE instructor at school: “I’ve got muscles in places where you haven’t got places”. We had a sudden and fleeting visit from Alli’s brother Anthony and his work colleague, but I failed them both by being unable to get the Six Nations’ rugby on the TV, to their palpable disappointment. The man who was to install the all-important multi-switch to enable international television said that he wouldn’t scramble around snow-borne roofs and so we stay stuck with French terrestrial television. Gwen at last had her birthday party, which had been delayed several times since before Christmas, in a climbing arena which also served pizzas. She also went with the school to a soccer tournament in Zurich in which the team came second overall. Today she has been skiing with her friend Puck and her family.
Early each morning while Alli is still on crutches (and apart from the half term week) I have been walking the dogs in the freezing cold and pitch black, often sliding around on icy paths in the fields behind the house before driving the children to school then on to work. I have hardly ever driven a car to work regularly in my life, but now I pick my nose in traffic jams with the best of them then dutifully park the car daily in the company car park like a complete idiot. It would be very easy to stop thinking completely. I realize yet again that I am allergic to habit. But it has been too cold, too dark, too icy and too dangerous to cycle right now so I have reluctantly given up the velocipede until I can get back in the saddle again in the lighter and warmer mornings to come. I hum Gene Autry in the afternoons.
I was in London for a conference and had an interesting but short walk guided by a professional Londoner from the Embankment to Smithfield, during which I learnt a huge amount more about the city I have lived in for over 20 years. I also contrived to stay vegetarian in the city’s meatiest restaurant, the St John. A week earlier I was also in London, as my Aunt Margaret had died on the last day of January just before her 80th birthday, and I flew over to attend her funeral at the West London Crematorium, attended by a small number of friends of her daughter Diane and her partner Brendan. It was a simple service, but with all the grace and style of the our family’s generation of which she had been the last survivor. I stayed too long in the post-funeral social, missing my flight back in the process, but it was worth it for the rare chance of a family event, reduced in numbers as it was. I felt, even more strongly than ever, that now, with no parents or direct aunts or uncles left, I and others in this position are now at the top of the life-tree, looking out over the rest of the forest. Calm and happy to be getting older, relieved to be a parent, knowing that ours is the next generation to fall, but also hoping that there will be time to enjoy the view around and about us before we do.
Yours from the tree-tops,
Lionel
Jessie in Rotorua, New Zealand with the McClay children, February 2010
Bulbous Cloudburst Yawled March 2010
01.04.2010
Ahem
The month began in deepest white winter and finished in thrusting gusty springtime. Due to Alli’s slow recovery from her broken ankle I continued to walk the dogs in the early mornings, then drive to work, dropping off Ella and Gwen along the way at their different school venues in Aesch and Reinach. On St David’s day morning the pre-dawn sky was bright from a bulbous moon that lay huge and swollen on the side of the hill. I noticed this as I was passing the Highland cattle, dark brown hairy horned beasts owned by a local farmer. They lie contentedly in the clammy mud, ruminating at dawn and looking heavily unconcerned. A single line of loosely tacked barbed wire separates them from the path, along which I walk on the sides of my feet. Bonnie and Tequila (our lodger dog) have lost their fear and sniff around near them, although Bonnie jumped sideways a full three meters when one of them suddenly moved its large ruminating shaggy head to fix her with a bovine stare.
There was a full-blown snow blizzard on my 53rd birthday and I spent much of the day, a Saturday, ferrying Ella and Gwen, who were representing their school in basketball and swimming respectively, to and fro through the flurries. Heavy snow fell repeatedly during the day and the car became a snow plough. We celebrated my new age by going to dinner at the Couronne d’Or in Leymen. The snow was largely gone again by the Monday morning when I drove to Ruschlikon near Zurich for an early morning meeting. Zurich is a mess of road works at the moment and the tom-tom is useless there. At one point it directed me through a building site and across Platform 4 of the main line station. The snow returned with a vengeance later in the week on the day before I left for the USA. I spent the weekend in New York City where I got soaked to the skin while walking thirty blocks in a prolonged cloudburst with my heavy suitcases and wearing a waterlogged suit, which later quite literally fell apart at the seams. It felt like the flood had come to New York: pavements scattered with broken black umbrellas, gathered in stricken clusters at crossings. It made me wonder, again, what actually is the point of an umbrella? But I had the great pleasure of meeting Peter, an old school friend, for brunch and seeing again friends Donna, Casey and Carl. Donna and I enjoyed an evening of jazz at the Smoke Jazz and Supper Club, featuring the George Coleman Quartet. For the next few days I was in North Carolina enjoying the less hectic hospitality of Gigi and Paul.
Our house is ours! I mean, really ours! After four months and two days of residence and three days before our 21st wedding anniversary we signed papers confirming the purchase of the property and we celebrated with Cremant d’Alsace and dinner in Fluh. We then spent a week in England, starting by attending the wedding in Oxford of my second cousin, Kate Moss. We stayed in Wadham College, enjoying the celebrations there and at Magdalen College. I also had the privilege of meeting second cousins from another branch of my mothers’ family (the Batsons), whom I had never met before. At the Oxford Playhouse Ella and I saw Jean Anouilh’s Antigone, which Ella is studying at school and which I also studied many years ago. I was interested to see in the program notes that recent years have seen a change in the assessment of Antigone’s uncle Creon, considered to be an evil, pitiless and unthinking fascist dictator when I first read the contemporary literary analysis in the 1970s, but now rehabilitated as a concerned parent and helpless tragic figure. The following day we drove to London via lunch at the Duck In at Aston Clinton to see Adam, Angela and their six-month old baby girl, my latest god-child, the very happy and content Eleanor Berenice. Afterwards we drove to Victoria in pouring rain and managed to get to the theatre just in time to see the excellent Billy Elliott – The Musical.
We spent the rest of our time in Sussex with Alli’s parents, who spoilt us with their cooking and comfort. This provided the basis for the girls to go on an extended shopping spree and for me to explore Brighton and its environs. I went to Rudyard Kipling’s house in Rottingdean where he spent five years before moving to Batemans further along the coast. I spent a long time in the nearby Grange House, where a compelling exhibition about Kipling, his community and his contemporaries, is offered by local enthusiasts. I also walked around Kipling Gardens, looked over North End House, the residence of Sir Edward Burne Jones and inspected his nephew (and Kipling’s cousin) Stanley Baldwin’s summer house, and that was all just by walking around the village green.
The North Laine in Brighton. That’s what the urban areas of England ought to be and look like. Edgy, threadbare, multicultural, live-and-let-live, creative and addictive. Like a good second-hand bookshop, this part of Brighton is at once challenging, instructive and relaxing, with different lifestyles cheek by jowl, just as you might find an e.e.cummings next to the meditations of St Teresa of Avila and the Brothers Karamazov next to the Bhagavad-Gita on the opposite shelf. You also realize how much more there is to learn about yourself and others. I warmed to the vanishing art of browsing away a whole afternoon in dusty bookshops while the seagulls mewed and yawled and the rain torrents spattered outside on the spring awnings. I had a pint at the Regency Tavern amidst cackling pink-frilled ladies of the theatre and absurd rococo wall decorations. From a rain swept Sussex we returned to a windy Basel, to a newly dug hole in our road, the water supply once more cut off, and our very own house.
Yours just so
Lionel
Alli and Lionel, Oxford 2010 Wedding of Kate Moss and Tom Hamblin
Vigilante Freewheels Peonies April 2010
01.05.2010
Ahem
Jessie updates us regularly with her news as she freewheels around New Zealand. She finished her parliamentary job with New Zealand’s next-but-one Prime Minister at the beginning of the month and has started on the travelling and sight-seeing phase of her visit. Highlights of her month past have included her record-breaking bungee jump (8.5 seconds in free fall), meeting groups of new friends on the Kiwi equivalent of the Magic Bus, getting her nose pierced, spending quality time with my cousin Christine, in whose house she was very well received and looked after (“Everyone is so lovely here” she wrote), the experience of Milford Sound, the proper way to cook great spinach (yeah, right) and many other mentionable and unmentionable excitements. I exchange notes with her when I have stayed up too late in the small hours and she is in the bright promise of the Antipodean morning. Such is globalization. She is also raising money for charity by jumping out of a plane and freefalling until the parachute opens near the ground. So I use this opportunity to appeal strongly to you all on her behalf to pledge a few dollars to push her out of that plane (photos will be supplied) and make a contribution to the charity Water – to obtain Jessie’s eternal thanks (and mine) please use link http://mycharitywater.org/p/campaign?campaign_id=4240. She is just over half-way to her target, but there are only a couple of weeks left before time runs out. Roll Up! Roll Up!
The redoubtable Miles family, minus their rocker son Ollie from the heavy metal band Braindirt, stayed with us over Easter. We all walked up as if pilgrims on Easter morning to the Landskron Castle at the top of the hill overlooking Leymen and looked out across Baselland and the Sundgau, and although the view was not crystal-clear we could also see easily across to the Black Forest on one side, to the Vosges on the other and across to the Alps on another. The thirteenth century castle has an interesting history as do many castles, ruined or restored, in this grenzland of France, Germany and Switzerland. We also went to Paul and Elise’s excellently sociable party in the Bruderholz while Susanne took the children to the pizzeria in Leymen. On Easter Monday Alli and I worked in our strange new garden, in which interesting and new plants are now springing up: wild strawberries; lilies-of-the-valley; miniature daffodils; peonies, and many other less identifiable plants. Gwen and I sowed a first lot of assorted vegetable seeds after preparing seed plots. We are also growing a generous complement of tomato plants. Gwen single-handedly gave the chicken coop a second coat of preservative paint and so only the run now needs to be built. Gwen and I set our postbox exactly where the French postal authorities wanted us to put it and at the exact height that the French regulations require.
Ella, Gwen and Alli went to see the singer Mika in Basel, and the related CD stayed in our car CD player for many days afterwards. I wrote last month about the Highland cows in a nearby field, and now there are two little Highland heifers, smudges of shaggy brown in the meadow. Ella spent a few days in Lisbon playing in a soccer tournament and was the family’s sole victim of the Icelandic volcano explosion, having to return from Lisbon to Basel by coach in a journey of more than 24 hours, a difficult journey mitigated by the fact that both the boys’ and girls’ teams won the tournament. On one walk recently with our dog Bonnie I at last saw and examined the not-very-famous but genuine and well-protected dolmen of Aesch. For some reason Bonnie keeps getting attacked. It must be something to do with her friendly nature and the unleashed aggression of many badly trained French dogs. But I do think that Bonnie might also be sending psychological invitations to other animals to attack her. The other day without any provocation whatsoever a Siamese cat attacked her at the tennis club. And the geese at the pond nearly always have a go.
We spent a great weekend with our Belgian friends Laurence, Claude, Anne and Sophie – it was all too short but still enough for Alli to catch up on the news from Brussels in the early hours and for us to spend time at a wine tasting event. We had an enjoyable lunch yammering with the Kellys, imbibing some fine Australian wine one Sunday afternoon, a day before I returned to my bike-riding habits after a break of four months. The journey to work is now double the previous distance and takes an hour, so the commute is similar to the time I used to take on the Brighton line to London, except that now my journey is on a bike, costs nothing, and has health benefits, especially to my lungs and coronary arteries, although I do admit that my backside was a lot more comfortable on the 06.25 from Burgess Hill. The following week I drove a white van to the deeply quiet Swiss village of Murgenthal to collect a table from the ex-owner of our house. Loading the table after 9pm and in the failing light I was requested robustly by a householder to be quieter in my exertions and by a local vigilante couple to explain precisely what a French delivery van was doing in their tidy village.
Notwithstanding, a very happy, loud and fiery Beltane to all
Lionel
Anthony, Gwen, Sophia, Susanne at Chateau Landskron Alli in Rue de la Scierie garden, 2010
Gloaming Nymphs Masticating May 2010
30.05.2010
Ahem
My efforts to cycle more regularly to work were impeded by rain, which fell for too much of the month. When I did manage the hour-long journey, it was more than twice as tiring as it had been when we lived back across the Swiss border. On dry and warm days the main problem consisted of mosquitoes and other hovering insects smacking into my face, nose, eyes and mouth as I pedaled along field tracks and towpaths in the gloaming. On the 11th there was a huge hailstorm in Basel; the streets turned white in less than five minutes in an inappropriate re-enactment of the winter.
Gwen went to a swimming competition in Gstaad and helped the school to win it for the sixth year in a row. Gwen’s swimming is of high quality. Her best stroke seems to be the butterfly, a stroke that I use seldom, primarily because by the third consecutive stroke I am actually under water and sinking. Ella went to England to inspect potential universities in a school trip and came back inspired and certain that she wanted to go to one of the LSE, Warwick, Loughborough, Oxford, Bristol or Bath to study politics and international relations, or something similar. She is now mired in end of year exams in all her selected subjects, and has been revising determinedly. Jessie, as she had promised, jumped out of a plane in New Zealand and free-fell for a while before parachuting to safety and thus raised over a thousand dollars for a local water charity. I add my thanks to all who helped her raise this money. We are all looking forward to seeing her when she returns home on 14th June.
We invited our fellow cul-de-sac neighbors to a drinks party on one of the less rainy Saturday afternoons. This was a social risk of a high order, but a necessary one. The party featured several conversations that filled gaps in our knowledge about the house’s recent history. There is a sticky residue from a simmering local marmite of resentment left by the previous owner, who in the past ten years seems to have irritated practically everyone in his vicinity. He has not removed his possessions from our garage and has not accomplished several other agreed tasks. Having encouraged him a few times to boucler l’affaire I have received scant acknowledgment, but my irritation is more than assuaged by the sheer pleasure of having taken possession of this beautiful and extraordinary house, whose acquisition which we celebrated on a day on which, providentially, the weather allowed us to use the garden and the pool liberally. The house warming party was one of the biggest we have ever organized, with over 100 guests, who brought generous and imaginative gifts for the house and garden. The clear-up afterwards was much less onerous than expected. Some of Ella’s friends had kindly helped with the party and this made a huge difference both during and after. Our swimming pool, painstakingly cleaned just in time, had become loamy and green, lacy with pond skaters, bug nymphs and water boatmen. Even a couple of frogs had started living in it. Their full-throated mating calls from the pool steps had been waking us up at night. But the party and the many compliments we received about the house helped us to feel even more well-established in our new location. Our huge life-helping of luck continues to work for us.
A week earlier we had an excellent Sunday curry lunch with some friends in Ettingen, and we also helped a friend move some of her possessions to a rented duplex opposite us in Rue de la Scierie. We are now the owners of an antique Persian rug, a spacious wicker basket, an easy chair for Ella and several art books. I went to the USA on business and met Alli’s long time friend Christiane and her husband Helmut in Atlanta one evening when I played truant from an evening work engagement. We had a great meal together at a fish restaurant and then enjoyed a drink at the top of one of Atlanta’s tallest buildings, watching the city revolve around us as the bar revealed 360 degrees of Greater Atlanta in 35 minutes. I also went to Washington DC and indulged my passion for Ethiopian food, also discovering a promising new restaurant chain called Ketchup while staying at the new swanky suburban development of National Harbor. This was directly after a visit to my wealthy Swiss dentist who pulled out no less than six of my back teeth (up with which of course I was fed). I am in consequence masticating more cautiously than usual. I went to see two comedians, Rich Hall and Ed Byrne, at the Funny Laundry series of shows in Basel. It was the first stand-up comedy I had seen for many years and was well worth the steep ticket price. Poetry purists might also like to know that I voted for Michael Horovitz to be the next Oxford Professor of Poetry. Horovitz is one of the last links to the 60s Beat poets and he edited one of my favorite and best-thumbed collections of poetry, Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain. I hope he wins.
With free verse in mind,
Lionel
Jessie in New Zealand, 2010
Swimming Pool of 13 Rue de la Scierie, 2010
Preening Burqa Joggers June 2010
01.07.2010
Ahem
“There are more greenhouse gas emissions from cheeseburgers than from all the SUVs in the USA.” So starts Gwen’s self-produced leaflet “Go Veggie!”, a major part of her 5th grade presentation at the International School. Each child in the grade had chosen a subject about which they felt strongly, and each had developed a spoken presentation. This initiative invited parents to attend and listen to the presentations. I spent two hours being told by knowledgeable 11 year olds about climate change, smoking, media distortion, South Africa, safe biking (I listened carefully to this one), healthy living (and this), depression (and this), and many other fascinating and relevant issues seen by junior eyes. Gwen’s case for vegetarianism was made confidently and fluently. She made her well-rehearsed pitch to assorted parents over twenty times during the evening. She was exhausted afterwards but she had most certainly spread the word, and I was as proud as a preening parrot. Gwen also had a great school report for her final Junior School year but was upset at the prospect of losing so many of her friends in the annual churn of families from Basel, which was particularly severe this year. She also went to Salzburg on a short trip with the school and had a great time touring the city and learning a little more about Mozart and other famous city scions.
Ella finished her term exams with relief, and promptly took to her bed with a temperature, although she still had to attend school to make an important presentation, choosing the subject of the burqa in society. She recovered well, received excellent grades and exam results, and acquired again the coveted “Honour Roll” for the year, obtaining a score of 6 out of 7. She celebrated by going to the South Side rock festival in Germany with friends, although it rained all the time and became a Glasto-style mud bath. She came back a day early: cold, soaking and muddy. But she also recovered from this to attend a party or three in Basel and is now on a well deserved holiday in England with her grand-parents. This started with us, as I drove with Jessie to England with some larger items that she will need for university and to join the family at the Burgess Hill Miles for the weekend, although Alli, Ella and Gwen were delayed for 24 hours by the French transport strike. On the Saturday morning we all drove to Alli’s cousins Sue and Paul Dampier, to help celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary together with a small contingent of a hundred and thirty friends and family in their beautiful house in Suffolk. We spent the night in the extraordinary house and gardens near Norwich of Vincent and Hilary, also from the extended Miles family, where we dined in style and were the beneficiaries of perfect hospitality. The following morning was memorable for a boat trip taken on the River Yare from the garden mooring, for a very convivial lunch and for a relaxing swim. We then spent a couple of days with our favorite grandparents in Burgess Hill. Earlier in the month, Alli and I spent an evening in the company of the Ferrette Morris Men, who were sharing the bill with the slightly better known England-based Morris dancing teams, respectively, from Kennet and Wantage. (They’ve appeared on Bergerac, you know).
Jessie arrived back home from New Zealand via Singapore on the 14th June with huge and tall stories to tell of her adventures. She got into the swing straight away – almost immediately on her arrival the house was filled with other people, attracted like moths to a flame, and assorted teenagers suddenly appeared from nowhere, sleeping on floors and turning up unexpectedly to meals. It was like some kind of new game based on SIM City, in which when your daughter prodigally comes home from a gap year, comatose teenagers start groaning gently in spare bedrooms, cans of beer and plates of food disappear from the fridge and the dirty laundry multiplies silently, stealthily, unaccountably. Jessie has already organized two parties for July and condemned our house interior as “too white” so now we have a Gustave Klimt print of a colorful and seductive naked lady wreathed in flowers and stretched languorously across our kitchen table. Our Kiwi artist friend Talulah’s vibrant expressionist paintings have also proliferated on the walls like the tendrils of Virginia creeper on G-plan.
Our swimming pool has been fixed at last and we have had new external blinds installed at the back of the house. We attended a couple of parties and had a very enjoyable Brazilian lunch at our neighbors. I have also been building the cage for the chicken run at the end of the garden with a very decisive degree of direction from my friend Adrian, who was also responsible for a similar role in the creation of the coop. First we dug a half-meter deep trench around the intended area of the runs (ten square meters), then for the cage, we cut and measured lengths from 75 meters of larch. The structure is now up (after nearly three weekends of work), but I have not yet attached the chicken wire or finished the moving, swinging or sliding parts (I am waiting for Adrian to tell me how).
After the initial shock to the system caused by the harder and longer journey from Leymen in France, cycling the 16 kilometers to work has passé from pain to pleasure, and to which I now look forward every day as summertime provides its daybright dawns and longshadow evenings. Mentally, I divide the journey into three parts: rural & farming; backstreets & suburban; city & traffic. Each of these presents a lurid sequence of foreground images whose precise details change subtly each day. There are fascinating differences in the proportion of noteworthy dogs, horses, storks, crows, pigs, cows and other animals, and of human varieties: dog-walkers, road repair artists, bright schoolgirls and thick-set matrons, florid van-drivers, joggers dumpy and lithe. On my daily journey to and fro I cross a national border post, pass through four farmyards, cycle by the trackless side-lengths of two fields, shortcut through two petrol station forecourts, ghost in behind the back-delivery rear-ends of two shopping malls, stalk the swoosh-rumble tramline, follow the lines of tow-paths beside the tumbling streams of the Birsig, pass by several tidy Swiss-flagged garden allotments, a lido and two tennis clubs, before joining the sweaty suburban cycle lane in the commuter traffic for Basel near the zoo, (where I often glimpse and sniff the inmates). Yes, there is a shower at work.
Where’s the soap?
Lionel
Laurie, Kay, Gwen, Jessie, Alli, Ella and Lionel, Broad Oaks, UK, Summer 2010
Throng Lorikeets Wrestle July 2010
30.07.2010
Ahem
Ella’s 17th birthday took place on the 20th, and we celebrated by having dinner together in Basel. She had just come back from England, staying with her grandparents in Burgess Hill for three weeks and enjoying the contented pleasure of being there. I also stayed the night there impromptu on a fleeting visit, after visiting the parental grave in Kensal Rise. The main reason for the visit was really to attend the Elizabethan Ball, an old school reunion event (I once swore I would never do this). But this seemed different. It was a general assembly without an age distinction, so there was a fighting chance that I might not actually recognize anyone. And I had bought the tickets some time ago. When Alli told me that tragically she could not accompany me there, as she had a better, albeit later, offer from her friends in Amsterdam, I invited my old Westminster school friend Adam. We arranged to meet with two of our contemporary friends at a pub local to the school, the Two Chairmen near the Cockpit steps. This is a pub where in 1973-4 I had a school monitor’s nightly duty to visit at around 10pm to chuck out any schoolboys I found there. My tally on this was nil, but coincidentally I was bought a lot of drinks. So Adam and I met Charmian and Sarah and their partners there for a first drink. To my disappointment once the event started we became separated amidst the hallowed throng of Old Westminster pupils after wandering around some unusual parts of Westminster Abbey on the way in. Adam and I then spent much of the evening searching vaguely for men who looked about 53 years old, like us, but we failed to find any. We did manage to see Peter Asher on stage in the marquee playing his 60s single-hit “World Without Love”, and in the college garden (in which I had never previously set foot) we saw some interesting Super 8 film of past school events. I stayed overnight in Adam and Angela’s providentially located flat in the West End, and saw again my god-daughter Eleanor Berenice, the happiest baby in the world. On another breathless visit to London I went to see my friends Fionnuala and her husband Andrew. Just before a fine meal and copious amounts of wine and brandy I sat in their garden and watched thousands of lorikeets streaking across the dusky sky above Walton-on-Thames, on their way to roost at the local rugby club.
My hair has become grumpy, difficult and thoroughly uncooperative. Overnight it has lost its spring, its bounce, its ability to become shaped into a socially acceptable form for the working day. Whenever I comb or brush it now it simply re-assumes the shape that was impressed upon it after a night’s wrestle with the pillow. I am sure that its sudden lack of flexibility represents yet another stage in the aging process. It is simply losing the ability to get back in shape after a night patterned from the bolster. The humble pillow is thus now an overnight permanent wave creator. I think it also explains why so many men cut their hair short or even shave their heads when they get older – it must be because they can’t quickly brush it successfully any more into the shape they want it to be.
Jessie has enjoyed being busy back in Basel. She managed to get a temporary summer job at my company, involving actual work, so we have been cycling together into the city on some of the bright and warm early mornings. Any notions I had about being fit have disappeared as Jessie overtakes me at will and at any time on our way there or back on the journey. Last week, her lifelong friend Jenny stayed with us for a few days and, following her departure, Jessie has gone for three weeks to Winnipeg, Canada to visit her friend Jennalyn. We will see her next at Toulouse airport in three weeks.
The chicken run is close to completion, and we will import the hens after our holiday. We have also been eating lettuces and beans from the vegetable garden for a few weeks, as well as redcurrants, blackcurrants and raspberries, which Alli turned into a memorable summer pudding. The tomato plants are starting to yield, but most will be ready just as we go away. Alli made some cordiale from elderflowers from the tree at the end of the garden. There has also been good progress on the pool house restoration, following my controversial revision of the plans. We have hosted some memorable barbecues this month, one marking the departure of some close and dear friends as well as thanking my project director in the making of the henhouse and run. Another assisted Jessie’s umpteenth party for her friends and a third brought together some good local friends. Bonnie has had another canine friend, a yappy dog called Tiggy, to stay for some days, so for a time we had three dogs, counting our lodger Tequila. They have been discomforted by the hot weather, although after my daily cycle ride from work, I tend to drop straight into the swimming pool. Now there’s luxury.
Yours from the lap,
Lionel
Dinner Party with friends, 13 Rue de la Scierie, 2010
Gwen and Ella, Basel, July 2020
Passion Paella Demesne August 2010
31.08.2010
Ahem
I have an admission. I live two lives; I have two loves. In real time every year since 1997 I devote over 11 months to one life and less than a month to the other. The shorter time is a holiday affair (it was ever thus). So, at the start of this month, I began again to indulge my alternate annual passion. I drove with Gwen, her friend Hunter and Bonnie the dog and we all camped overnight near Vichy on the way to our house La Hune in Mansonville at the southernmost tip of Gascony. This is the place where despite my passion I struggle between a vague sense of unshared responsibility about objects in the house (what needs mending, repairing, taking back, junking etc), general upkeep (roof, floors, garden, pool, fixtures, fittings) and the desire for a trouble-free holiday without commitments or responsibilities. I never get the balance right, and cannot relax until several days after I arrive. Until then I can be seen padding uncertainly around the vast halls like Garcia Marquez’s autumnal patriarch (only without the enlarged testicle), growing stubble, moving piles of books from one bookshelf to the next. Once I realize that the time is disappearing in which to make the annual mark of progress on the beloved property do I manage to become productive, and so just when we have to go home I am frequently in the middle of several brilliant local initiatives.
Alli has no such dilemma. She makes the very most of the sun and the pool right from the beginning, quite justifiably refusing the enticements of castle-viewing, market-wandering, respectful visits to the village’s many senior personalities, housework and food shopping alike. The problem was that this year there was less sun in evidence and so we all made more use of the interior than in previous years. We played a lot of Cluedo, Risk, What’s in the Bag, Spoons and many card games. Ella, who also did serious time on the sun-bed, distinguished herself throughout the holiday by doing the washing up on most days and the children generally helped with meals and their aftermath. The local food was again extraordinary and I must have cut up over 75 melons, all of which were consumed almost immediately. We also went out to dinner more, including to our good friends the Verdiers for an excellent paella, and to memorable meals at the Auberge de Bardigues and Les Templiers at Dunes.
We enjoyed spending time with our visitors, the McCoys of Muttenz, the Tallis-Locks of Forest Gate, and Sophia Miles, who was brought by her Dad, Alli’s brother Anthony. Jessie, fresh from her North American sojourn with friends in Canada, joined us after 10 days to make the family complete. In the mornings we visited the most colorful markets of the area. At one such in the first week, in Lectoure, I gave my keys to a stallholder so that he could make copies of one of them. Feeling efficient in the mid-morning sunshine, I cheerily agreed to return for the keys in ten minutes but then forgot to do so. By lunchtime I was wondering where my keys were and was unable to remember for at least 90 more minutes that they were with the stallholder, who had by then gone to his next gig, the Intermarché car park in Condom, thirty miles further south. Once I realized what the actual turn of events had been, I could, thanks to our good neighbors the Thouins, to borrow their car and retrieve my keys and their copies from the stallholder in Condom, while Gwen and Hunter had the run of Encarion, the Thouins’ mighty demesne in a nearby village. So, undeterred by the clear evidence that I had lost not only my keys but my marbles, I later proposed and agreed with Monsieur le Maire of Mansonville village to convert part of our land for use as the village site for pétanque (boules). I also had discussions with him and others about the possibility of organizing art courses in the house next summer. We had plenty of other visitors, including bats, two of which came into our bedroom through our open window in the middle of one night, and two tree frogs, who hopped every evening from their base in the pool alarm to the wall light on the house from where they feasted on moths and grasshoppers.
Jessie’s recent sky-diving exploits in New Zealand still pay dividends and she was interviewed by the water charity for whom she raised $1,000. The interview included the following masterful summary of a gap year: So you’re a traveler. Tell us about your latest: “I live in France now. I lived in Switzerland last summer, went to San Francisco for a couple of weeks to visit a friend, worked for three weeks in a law firm in the Caribbean. Then I came back to my new house in France for Christmas, went to New Zealand to work in the Parliament and on the way back I went to Singapore for a few days”. The full interview is on http://www.charitywater.org/blog/ctwskydive/. She also won the photo competition of her tour company in New Zealand “Kiwi Experience”. Back in Leymen, we were delighted to welcome my cousin Robert Apps for dinner one evening. Robert is on a major world tour and diverted to Basel in order to see us. He was in great form and we had an excellent evening with him. After spending the next week or so in France he will be joining his partner Caroline to take the slow route home back to Australia by cruise liner.
Here’s to broadening the mind,
Lionel
Uncle Anthony and Ella at La Hune, Summer 2010 Lionel and Alli, Bardigues 2010
Lionel and Jessie, Lectoure 2010 La Hune, Summer 2010 Alli and Gwen, Bardigues, 2010
Lustrous Don Somnolent September 2010
03.10.2010
Ahem
This was a month of beauty and grace. Prime among the examples was the long-awaited wedding in Italy of Claudia Camozzi and my nephew Ivor Stanbrook, in the dramatic coastal setting of the village of Camogli, followed by a sumptuous reception and dinner in the lustrous and high society venue Villa Durazzi in Santa Margherita Ligure. Although the weather did not cooperate, this mattered little compared to the huge enjoyment of a big family wedding. And the bride was so beautiful that the clattering rain actually paused in astonishment as she came out of the church on the arm of her slightly less beautiful new husband. Then the skies opened again as nearly 200 other people posed under 150 umbrellas on the steps leading up to the Basilica. We had all driven down from Basel on the evening before and were able to have an impromptu but excellent dinner, including a perfect Spaghetti alla Vongole, with our cousins Diane and Brendan. On the day after the wedding we took a boat trip to Portofino and had a relaxing lunch there in the sun by the port, then after watching the returning rain hammer down on the roofs from our hotel room balcony, we went to have supper and a rare opportunity for a leisurely chat with the ever-generous family and friends of the Clive Stanbrooks on the diamond-studded hillside overlooking Santa Margherita.
We had a very sociable month, all told, with barbecue parties in Leymen and Raedersdorf, a dinner party with plenty of gossip and back-chat at the flat of our friend Nicole, a family outing to a “Mongolian” restaurant in Riehen, a big party at our house for the parents of those in Ella’s grade at school, and a most entertaining street party in Rue de la Scierie, on what we thought was the last summer day before the fall of autumn. We were wrong, it was sunny for much of the rest of the month, although the mornings were cold and I had to don gloves as I biked to work. I had a very brief business excursion to England, where I became convinced that the area just north of Bracknell is England’s answer to the Bermuda Triangle. However, it rained throughout Alli’s birthday on the 7th, and we went out to an eye-wateringly expensive dinner in Fluh with Laurie and Kay, who were over for a few days at the start of the month. Yet again, DIY jobs were expertly done all over the house and garden. During the same week Alli and I went to see Leonard Cohen in concert. I last saw him in concert in 1975 in Oxford. During the show his humility and humor were ever present. And now, wherever this graceful man wanders, people sing 'Hallelujah’! The Lord himself could not ask for more. And like his creation the partisan, he has so many friends. On a different note, the average age of the attendees was very high. I have not felt so young at a rock concert since attending Joy and Jennifer in 1965.
I have now finished the chicken run at the end of the garden, thanks in large part to some unexpected and spontaneous help at different times during the construction endgame from our friend Annette, Laurie my father-in-law, and Jessie’s friend Rick, whom she met while touring in New Zealand, and who was staying with us at the time. All that remains to be done is for us to get the hens, introduce them to their new home and keep them safe from the many foxes that slope around here. Jessie finished her second stint at work and left us at the end of the month for her first term at Sussex University. This was momentous – the departure of our first-born into the wide world. Well, not counting last year spent in various locations around the world, that is. But now she has her own address and, by extension, official identity. Alli went over with her to Brighton to help her move into her new room on the university campus at Falmer. Ella, Gwen and I were left home alone for the weekend. Gwen stayed with her friend Puck while Ella had some friends round for cakes, sleepover, Smirnoff Ice and Spaghetti Carbonara. I played the old mad Dad, who, while teenage laughter echoed through the house, shuffled around in the shadows, scratching, napping and dozing then waking up to watch Match of the Day, somnolent in my dressing gown and slippers.
One afternoon at work as I was moving my papers and files into a new office, I stood up too quickly and gashed the top of my head on the sharp corner of a steel shelf. When I checked my appearance in the bathroom moments later, I had turned into a character in a Wes Craven movie, as red shiny blood was pouring down my forehead and my hair had turned crimson. An hour later I was in an emergency ward, getting some tailoring and a tetanus injection. It just shows that despite all the sitting around, the office is an extremely dangerous place.
Yours in stitches
Lionel
Claudia and Ivor Stanbrook’s wedding, Camogli, Italy, September 2010
Onrush Rookie Fantail October 2010
31.10.2010
Ahem
As yet another year shoots across the failing sky at Samhain without so much as a holding of your horses or a by-your-leave or even an er-just-a-minute, it strikes me as unjust that growing older involves the relentless accumulation of grim supporting evidence of this fact, although I do not feel as if I am aging at all, and there is definitely no motive to do so. Certainly not when I keep seeing friends from the past who appear not to have changed in the slightest. Calmly I am trying to ignore the onrush of elder age, if only to prepare properly for total denial as I climb ever higher on the ladder to the stars, but the revelation that my left hip is thinking of turning arthritic was thought-provoking. I’ve only just stopped jogging to the bathroom, for goodness’ sake.
Alli and I spent a special few days in London, attending the wedding of my friend Adam and his partner Angela, although the visit was marked also by sadness: our travel plans were changed suddenly so that Alli could stay in England afterwards to attend the funeral in Sussex of our friend Richard. A companion since childhood of my father-in-law, Richard died on the day that we flew to London. He and his wife Linda have been generous friends to the Miles family for more than a generation, and their children and grandchildren continue to be close friends of ours and still are now.
Adam, a young 53, had asked me to be one of his two Best Men (the one who makes the speech) and so, needing to stay in central London, Alli and I booked into a budget hotel off the Charing Cross Road. We spent Sunday afternoon shopping in Oxford Street with Jessie, who had come up from Brighton to meet us, and had an excellent Indian meal at the Malabar Junction in Great Russell Street. On the next day, which was bright and sunny, showing off London at its autumnal best, the wedding was formally sealed at the Marylebone Registry Office and celebrated in the Seven Dials Club, in the beating heart of the West End. It was great to see Stephen there, another friend to whom I had been close a generation ago. We had gone on holiday together in 1974 on rookie Inter-Rail cards, backpacking around southern Europe and visiting female acquaintances in Spain. Now an even younger-looking 53, he has a brilliant career as a television producer. Later, in the relaxed conversation-strewn afternoon I made my speech, loosely cast around the great London poem of T.S.Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, which seemed appropriate for such a proper London event.
Back in Basel, Alli and I also went to a young friend’s 50th birthday party in Riehen, at a house on the top of a Schwarzwald foothill overlooking the city as well as the German border. Juan’s family, scorning the relentless rain, had arranged in the garden an impressive fireworks extravaganza depicting his first name and his latest age. And on one evening amidst the falling leaves of Dornach, we went to see the entertaining and sharply written Autumn play of the local English-language Semi-Circle drama group, Unoriginal Sin, by the British playwright David Tristram. Our fantail of Basel High Society was completed by Paul and Elise’s fancy dress Halloween Party, offering another spectacular view of Basel from a prominent hill in the Bruderholz. The party featured some entertaining table-turning which was severely compromised by the raucous heckling of the host, and some macabre story-telling from Martin, who had what he claimed was the infamous brown box of Chief Inspector Abberline, the detective in the Jack the Ripper case. Alli turned out to be in copious touch with the spirit world and psychic to boot. I always had a funny feeling that she was.
Ella has been very active as her final school year gets under way. After earlier spending four days in a bunker in downtown Basel while attending and participating in a special session of the European Youth Parliament with several of her friends, she later went with a big school party for two weeks to South Africa, where she took part in a full roster of activities that included visiting the Pilanesberg National Park, Lesedi, Sun City, Soweto, then the Cape Town area, including hiking around the Table Mountain, visiting Robben Island and the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Gardens. She did some chores in an orphanage and took full part in a Habitat for Humanity Day, helping to paint a couple of houses in Mfuleni, a local township. She came back with over 1200 photographs, which she effortlessly presented one evening for family viewing. Jessie is settled, if that is the right word for a multifarious sequence of bizarre social events, in the Falmer campus of Sussex University in Brighton. I can believe that she might be having difficulty fitting academic work into all the other crucial social, political, musical, thespian, physical exercise, leisure and other key aspects of her composite daily routine. Gwen has been to several parties with friends, and most recently to a Halloween disco at school and a trick-or-treating session around our old neighborhood of Oberwil.
After eleven months and eight days of residence in our dream house here on the French-Swiss border, I can now advise that our garage has finally and totally been cleared of the previous owner’s possessions. Just as Jack Frost called, we actually swoosh-drove our car into our garage with the help of a remotely controlled door-opener. This is a stupendous event, for we have never actually used any garage that we have ever owned for the purpose of storing a car. It will take me a long time to get used to it. For example, at 6.30am the morning after this historic event I looked out of the window and concluded from the sight of the driveway that the car had been stolen, so I tiptoed back into the bedroom with a rising sense of panic and woke Alli up to gravely inform her of the fact. “We drove it into the garage last night” was her comatose but rapid and curt reply before turning over. After a few seconds during which I assimilated this information, I turned respectfully and tiptoed out again. This suggests that Alli is more on the ball asleep than I am awake. My bike trips to and from work have recently been taking place in the sparkling dark before dawn and after dusk. And I will be following a diet for the next few weeks. That should take some pressure off the joints but also, to be frank with you, help me build a ladder to the stars and climb on every rung.
And may we all stay forever young,
Lionel
Ella in South Africa, 2010
Adam and Angela Kinn’s wedding, London, October 2010
Poppy Mincemeat Quaffed November 2010
02.12.2010
Ahem
I miss not having a proper bonfire night, and regret that Halloween spreads itself fatly around and about the Samhain. Of course, All Hallows Eve is a traditional and ancient British celebration. But its comparatively recent shoehorning into the orange plastic mould of Hollywood Americana (Halloween – Halloweed – Hollyweed – Hollywood) takes it far away from its origins in pagan Britain. Now about pumpkins rather than turnips, and featuring cheap horror rather than the defiance of darkness, Halloween seems to have won the sealflap of globalproval and is starting to encroach upon nearby celebrations all over the world. Maybe Remembrance Sunday will be Freddy’s next victim. The poppy is a curiosity in Switzerland and I am every year asked what it is for, often by the same people. As a commemoration of the war dead, the poppy may even bring us back to the original idea of the Hallows Eve, when the dead were honored and remembered with respect.
I spent some time on a course in Freiburg at a hotel with a panorama view of this tidy and interesting German city at the foot of the Schwarzwald. Part of the course involved telling the rest of the attendees about something unusual in which I had a significant interest. I chose my extinguished hobby of hunting for ley lines, and earnestly informed my colleagues about standing stones, black dogs and grey ladies. I am sure that they did not believe that I was even a work colleague of theirs; others had chosen sensible subjects such as entomology, FC Basel, repairing bikes, skiing and architecture. Talking of skiing, the snow has fallen early and often this year, and the month is ending mostly in deep crushed white, arctic temperatures and beautiful morning landscapes around the Baselbiet.
I went to England to go to the funeral of Debbie’s and Fiona’s mother, Doreen. The venue was St Mary’s in Battersea, a beautiful church set quietly and restfully by the Thames as it glides peacefully through London. It was a part of London with which I have never been familiar, and the development of the Chelsea and Battersea Thames reaches had completely passed me by. More familiar was the reminder that no-one on the street seems to know where local churches are any more, not even taxi drivers (I suppose it’s unusual to take a taxi to church) but the Battersea locals’ ignorance of this fine church was a little disappointing. Two residents even spontaneously offered atheism as their reason for not knowing where the church was. I was outraged: I hadn’t even asked for a haircut. The next morning with difficulty I got back to Gatwick, beating some sort of failure on the Brighton line, and arrived without any browsing time to spare. The two jars of Robertson’s mincemeat that I had brought from Tesco were rejected at the border control because they were terrorist paste. So why didn’t I realize?, tutted the kindly manuform. I am hiding my killer urges so much better these days.
Gwen has had three successful sporting excursions. First, she went to Geneva on a school tennis outing. While the school did not win the tournament they did win the prize for the most sportsmanlike team in the competition. (Obviously no-one called the umpire the pits). She also went with the school swimming team to a gala in Gstaad and the team came back victorious. She has also started playing basketball at the school, enjoys it, and has already shown some talent. Last weekend she again did the Basel Stadtlauf, running a few kilometers through the city in freezing temperatures and whilst the snow fell. Alli and I welcomed her at the finish line and we all went for dinner at Tibits afterwards with her friend Charlotte and family. Jessie seems surprised by the sheer amount of reading that she has to do for her law degree. She has, however, found her perfect sport in Extreme for which she practices for several hours a week. The game looks exhausting, and is a cross between handball and hurling, with a team, a sense of humor and a Frisbee. Ella continues to prepare for her exams next year with diligence and determination. Now she is in the final lap, her teachers are starting to mark her up, which helps her chances of a good university offer. Aiming to study politics and international relations, she is now choosing her university – her current preferences are the LSE, Bath, Warwick, Sheffield and Loughborough. Although she has played less sport this year, she was delighted to be chosen as the Vice Captain of the school basketball team.
We had a dinner party for our neighbors in which much of the conversation was conducted in French. This is never easy for me as I am when sober unable to think in any other language but English. Despite my leaden repartee I do find this easier when there are significant numbers of other English speakers around who are only as good as or worse than me. We spent an excellent day with the Kellys, believing that we were celebrating Neil’s birthday one day late before being apprised by chance that it was Susan’s birthday that same day. We also went to evening drinks with our neighbor Nicole and further afield with our friends Jasper and LeeAnn to a wine tasting evening in Hesingue where we met several other friends, bought and quaffed much wine. I find wine tasting evenings very strange, as they take place in conditions identical to having a drink with friends, with the significant difference that your glass is never filled by more than a couple of finger widths. And the bar staff are very slow to refill and keep asking you what the wine is like. Soon, the desire just to chug a proper glass of wine overtakes that of primly tasting and savoring it. At this point a free evening becomes suddenly expensive as the orders proliferate for the purchase of numerous bottles to be delivered later as an urgent inducement to get the damned glass filled properly now.
Notwithstanding these minor seasonal preoccupations, and from a temperature of minus -10C, the whole Stanbrook family wishes you a very happy and healthy Christmas
Lionel
Charlotte (left) and Gwen (right) at the start of the Basel Stadtlauf, November 2010
Meniscus Curmudgeonly Donkey December 2010
31.12.2010
Ahem
Alli’s cooking abilities have attained a higher level of quality than ever before. On a recent cookery course she was even overheard putting the teacher right on a moot culinary point. Her recent creative surge is due, she says, to reading the new cookery magazine Delicious, and to lots of practice. It’s also due to Christmas; she spent many hours in the kitchen preparing for the visit of the Miles en masse, in the form of her parents, brothers and their families: a replete gathering of the clan that I was so privileged to join over twenty years ago. We even commandeered a neighbor’s flat to put up the better elders. Our Christmas flashed by, abetted by feasts, fun and games in the family way, complemented on Boxing Day by the arrival of the Halls and Neil Kelly for lunch, after which we were rewarded by a promptu concert from the Hall twins. The snow fell for three days from the 24th and gave everything around us a deep fluffy winter coat of white just before the temperature plummeted to -10°C. On Boxing Day we ran out of heating oil for the second year running after the supplier failed to deliver as promised and on New Year’s Eve we had a burst water pipe in the pool house, discovered early, but the house, so generously peopled, took the strains with ease and fulfilled its big promise. And that’s not all: a new street sign shows that our road in the local dialect goes by the name of Sag-i-wag.
The Christmas cold snap was simply the latest of several during the month, and one morning I cycled into work when the temperature was -14°C. Within five minutes, despite significant padding my chest was tight, my toes were freezing and I could already feel the cold pulling hard at my cheeks. My fingers were becoming difficult to feel; even my teeth were hurting. The change in temperature made me feel so dizzy when I finally got into the warmth of the changing room in the basement of my office that I nearly fainted. I had to sit down for ten minutes to recover while I rubbed my stone fingers through my gloves. The next day saw the first of several days of black ice, new snow and slush, and rather unadvisedly I cycled into and from work on each of the days. I decided to give up the bike a few days before Christmas but changed my mind on a morning when I assumed that an overnight thaw had rendered the trip safe. Wrong. I had hardly got out of the car park by our drive when the wheels gave way on some slush-puppy looking ice and I fell, with a grounded suspicion that I had just further damaged knee cartilage that had been troubling me for several weeks already. After being given a lift in a neighbor’s van the full 80 meters back home, I was driven to the emergency ward of the Bruderholz hospital; was diagnosed as having torn my medial meniscus cartilage; was prescribed a mountain of painkillers and two months of physiotherapy; and am now destined to spend many days on the same crutches that Alli used when she broke her ankle this time last year.
Gwen had her 12th birthday party, attending this year’s Basel English Panto with her friends. I found the show rather flat and confusing, but my finely tuned dramatic criticism seems rather curmudgeonly for pantomimes. Gwen has surprised and delighted us this year by insisting that all the presents that her family, uncles, aunts, grandparents etc were going to give her should instead be cash-estimated and sent to an animal charity on donkey rescue and welfare (Happy Hooves). So it was that I found myself in mid-December sending a substantial three-figure sum on Gwen’s behalf to the Society for the Protection of Animals Abroad. Alli and I are very proud of our unusual and thoughtful daughter. Earlier, she went with the school for a swimming gala to Neuchatel. The school won overall but she was unhappy with her own performance and now wants to do more swimming practice next year.
Ella went to Zurich as part of (and Vice Captain of) the school’s Varsity Basketball team and also to the Model United Nations meeting in Paris, where she played the role of a journalist (hanging around for long periods doing nothing – just like the real thing), but also finding the time to maintain her determined revision for exams next year. She has received news of her first provisional acceptance (by Sheffield University) and I am sure that there will be more such. Jessie came back home from her first term at Sussex University in mid-December looking healthy and fit after all the exercise that she has had with the Frisbee game Ultimate, but ahe was soon attracting ailments. Unburdened by academic preoccupations, Alli and I welcomed our friend Clive one night for dinner, and attended an enjoyable and civilized Christmas party given by Cindy and Graham. This was cut short by a call from Jessie, suffering from a throat infection at a party on top of an icy hill in Muttenz, thus needing UPTI (urgent parental taxi assistance). With my artist friend Neil I saw the popular exhibition at the Bayeler Foundation in Riehen on the art of the Vienna Secession - Wien 1900 - featuring works by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. My friend Monty also came over one day and patiently worked to create a wireless network throughout the house, although this may still need some tweaking to be fully achieved.
With my profound wishes to you all for a very Happy and Healthy New Year. Now, where the peace on earth did I put those crutches?
Lionel
Stanbrooks and Miles, Christmas 2010
Visigoths Pecuniary Dodgem January 2011
30.01.2011
Ahem
When my father was in Rome for a few days during his active RAF service in 1944 he wrote to my mother, then his fiancee, a letter every day (there being neither Facebook, Skype nor MSN at the time) and after his death I read in one of these letters his description of the Terme di Caracalla, where he wandered for an afternoon, as I did 66 years later on a quick trip to Rome. Thousands of Romans every day used the facility, which was essentially a multifunctional leisure center, built on eleven hectares, with a huge swimming pool, changing rooms, gymnasia, auditoria, libraries, fountains and statues, individual bathrooms, hair-dressers and massage parlors. It was an extraordinary experience to walk the quiet and manicured lawns and meander through the silent ruins with other respectful tourists with their cameras and headphones and realize what a prodigious and noisy hubbub must have taken place daily hundreds of years ago, memorably described by Seneca: “Just imagine all those voices, which make you begin to hate your own ears”. Completed in 217AD, the baths were functional for over 300 years until the dastardly Visigoths destroyed the aqueducts.
Early in the New Year we had a very enjoyable dinner at the McCoys, featuring turkey dry-rubbed and sealed then deep fried in a large vat of boiling oil. It sounds unusual but it was delicious, taking 50 minutes to cook in its own juices in the deep fryer rather than the several hours of the conventional oven method. At the end of the month, we went to a fine dinner at the Smiths, enjoying good company and seeing our friends the Smits, over in Basel for the weekend from England. We also went to a party at the sociable Anthonys, enjoying the liberal provision of champagne bought in France and stored in our garage over Christmas. I am of course a generous man, often making outright gifts to friends and acquaintances resident in Switzerland of whole boxes of fine wines bought in France in exchange for small pecuniary considerations and invitations to A-list parties in the Baselbiet. However, I must admit I was stopped at the frontier just up the road and subjected to a major interrogation for the first time ever at that border crossing, not about wine but about my identity. Incredibly I was able to produce my passport, frontier worker’s card, driving license and car documents to the young buck from the Reichswehr, and was allowed to pass after five minutes of checking. I thought I had been in a time warp. 25 years ago I was detained at Heathrow for three hours after correctly (and calmly) pointing out at the passport desk that as a UK passport holder I was not obliged to say how long I was intending to stay in the UK. “Them that ask no questions isn't told a lie.” Talking of Kipling, Jessie left us to get back to Brighton for her second term at Sussex University. She has booked to spend more time in Basel during the Easter holiday, although we are apparently sharing this privilege with her friends in New York, Boston and Arkansas, her cousin in Nashville and her Ultimate Frisbee team members in Italy. Ella has had three more conditional University offers, and as each day passes she looks more like becoming a fully fledged university student in international relations later this year, as she will not be taking a gap year. A new boyfriend, Louis, has even been confirmed. She had a brilliant time at the school prom, and also spent some days at the end of the month staying with a family in Munich while Captain of the school’s basketball team, coming second in the tournament overall against eight other International schools. Gwen has also been playing basketball in the school’s junior team, travelling to Zug to play in a similar international tournament.
Recently the toilet seat in the ground floor bathroom mysteriously broke (I was nowhere near it). Given the overall quality of the house’s bequeathed fixtures and fittings, I guessed that a replacement would be neither easy to find nor cheap to acquire. Sure enough, when we located a replacement at a bathroom emporium in Basel, it cost the equivalent of £300. They had first given us the wrong order and were very apologetic, according to Alli, so along with the seat, the shop assistant had offered her at no extra charge an additional mechanism that somehow closed the seat automatically, softly and smoothly. He gave her a long thin package apparently containing this additional device. The task of installing the seat seemed to need ultra-precision tools, so I inspected the package carefully before starting and ascertained that it was in fact a packet of spaghetti. It had been offered to us in apology for the mix-up. Alli’s linguistic ability in Baseldutsch is now in doubt.
We have three dogs barking in the house. Bonnie and the daytime lodger dog Tequila were joined by Bertie the posh Cocker Spaniel for a few days, while his owners sojourned in England. The snow and ice returned at the end of the month, and especially so on one of the days when I had the car. It fell so suddenly and copiously that there was unexpected commuter turmoil auf Englisch for a couple of hours in the morning. I spent that time getting to work, negotiating spontaneously treacherous roads which the Swiss authorities had not yet made safe. It was like driving in a line of dodgem cars. Those without winter tires were in free glide mode and I must have passed half a dozen accidents on the way. But after all, it is winter, and a proper one at that, with wind, rain, snow and ice, as well as occasional and startling bright sunshine, promising a glorious spring. The house roof-beams whine and whistle in the night. And so we certainly have “no call for running out till the house-dogs bark.”
Yours watching the wall,
Lionel
Stanbrooks at Rue de la Scierie, Winter 2010/11 Louis Spong and Ella Stanbrook, Jan 2011
Carp Grotto Viral February 2011
02.03.2011
AhemThis month turns out to have been one of the most sociable in all our family’s shared memory. In four short weeks Alli and I have been out to dinner together no less than five times; we welcomed our cousin Christopher and five of his friends to our house; we have gone to a big bustling neighborhood musical party; and Alli has hosted a cards evening. This renewed propathy must have something to do with living in France as well as in our new house, which we are keen to show off. We both admit to feeling more relaxed since our move from Switzerland, where there are big differences in the nitty-gritty of daily living and doing. Unlike Switzerland, France offers indifferent public services, bad-tempered officialdom, chaotic local government and badly behaved dog-owners. But I breathe a scarcely audible sigh of relief whenever I cross the border back into France, and I cannot properly explain it. Granted, I can now make myself understood locally, even if French is a second language for many Leymenois. French local bureaucracy is certainly worse organized. Alli had gone to the Post Office in Leymen before Christmas to buy stamps for our Christmas cards, and was informed grumpily that she was asking for more than their entire supply of stamps.
We were invited to an imaginative party by our neighbors Simon, Marian and Nicole. It started with a collective afternoon walk in the woods above the village, continued through a traditional High Tea featuring tea, scones, cakes, sweetmeats, cheeses and other delicacies, and moved flawlessly into a splurging evening buffet meal, with live musical interludes featuring Simon and his hand-picked quintet, and ended with a swagger-stagger back to our house after midnight. A local promotion encouraged us to go with our friends the Barnes and the Thouins to a very good dinner at the Boeuf Noir in Hesingue. A few days later Alli and I were again together at the Restaurant Rossli in Biel-Benken for Valentine’s day, followed quickly by Alli “at home” playing hostess and gin rummy with a dozen other expatriate Mums, some of whose husbands joined me in putting the world to rights over fried carp and white wine in L’Ange, elsewhere in the village.
My cousin Christopher celebrated his 60th birthday over a long weekend at our house, to which we also invited five of his closest friends. The culmination of the weekend was an excellent dinner at the Couronne d’Or, offered by Christopher for us and his friends, who came from England and Poland to celebrate his birthday. Christopher had come with us the previous night to dinner in the Wirtshaus Zur Saege, in Fluh with about 10 other expatriate couples in a get-together organized by the Barnes. I took Christopher and his friends on Sunday to the Crossroads church in Basel, where I had once been a regular. It was a good sermon and a good service, complementing the weekend very well. We spent the next day in central Basel, inspected the Munster, crossed the Rhein on the ferry, and had lunch in Riehen, thus missing a carnival parade in Leymen, of which we saw the sodden detritus on the way back. As the rain continued to pour, we visited the extraordinary Basilica and grotto chapel at the nearby village of Mariastein.
I have spent long hours trying to make an internet radio receive BBC radio and to sort out our main computer after it developed a fault which deleted ten years of accumulated files and emails (briefly regretted, then forgotten in an instant). The wireless network reception in our house is not good and the continuing IT difficulties featured visits of computer specialists, questions to German chat rooms, repeated encounters with technological brick walls and sudden blue screens and brain dumps. I began to get a dim understanding for the weird world of the radio nerd, with its bit streams, gate arrays, binary sequences and UDP packets, and the certain knowledge that a little knowledge is a very dangerous thing. And all because The Lady wants to listen to BBC Radio 2 in the kitchen…
My knee continues to improve following some rather indifferent physiotherapy but I still cannot run properly, cycle or play tennis so I don’t know yet whether I will eventually need surgery on an already operated knee. A renewed visit to the doctor beckons. I am frustrated by not being able to walk without a wince even though I cannot honestly say that my knee hurts much of the time. Perfectly fit, Gwen has been playing basketball for the ISB, as has the equally fit Ella, who again vice-captained the school team to the finals in a tournament in Zurich. Ella also took part in (and helped to organize)a weekend-long session of the Model United Nations at the school. This is an admirable scholastic initiative simulating the United Nations in which participants engage in role-play as diplomats representing a nation or NGO or journalists in a committee of the United Nations, such as the Security Council or the General Assembly. Ella has also been doing her mock IB exams and has obtained very good results, confirming her high chances of being accepted by the English university of her choice.
Robert Apps my cousin died last month after a courageous and spirited fight against the cancer from which he had suffered for several years. He had become an Australian citizen just a month ago. As his partner Caroline Black has written, “Rob was stoic to the end, maintaining his dry humour and consistently meeting the challenge of each day and occasion.” We were so glad to have had the opportunity of welcoming him to our house for dinner last summer.
I was given some knitted ear warmers by Jessie’s thoughtful friend Bailey, for use when I make it back onto the bike on colder mornings. I uploaded on Facebook a picture of myself wearing them when the Barnes came over to present them to me and the photo has now become a minor viral classic.
Yours, waving frantically from the bitstream,
Lionel
Lionel and Earwarmers Christopher Elston on his 60th birthday, Leymen
Posh Peacocks Disco March 2011
03.04.11
Ahem
March is a great month, known in Finland as maaliskuu, the “earthy” month when the earth finally becomes visible under the snow. And it is true that March sees off the winter and ushers in the spring. Here in the Alsace, it often starts with an overcoat of snow and can finish in shorts and tee shirt. March takes the first breath of summer. It also features my annual reckoning on the 6th and our wedding anniversary on the 25th (Lady Day) which was used as the first day of the new year by Great Britain and its colonies (including America) until 1752, when they changed to the Gregorian calendar and had a 282 day year. My birthday was enlivened on the morning before by the surprise appearance of Jessie from Brighton, a family organized event hidden from me ever since Christmas. I had some imaginative and thoughtful presents, notably a retro record /CD player and a 1960s West Ham football shirt (proper cotton, heavy when wet). I was also given a framed photograph, an unnecessary book on self-improvement, the latest Decembrists album in vinyl, a DVD, a posh corkscrew (the sensitive thing has since expired from overuse) and an even posher knife grinder. The five of us also went to a good dinner locally at the Restaurant Bellevue.
Surprises such as Jessie’s sudden appearance are perfectly normal for Alli’s parents and brothers the Miles, who are always trying to surprise each other one way or another. So it was when we took a long-planned long weekend to Prague. Jessie was due to join us from England later on the day that we arrived: she marched into our hotel room in the evening accompanied by Laurie and Kay, thus surprising not only me, but crucially, their daughter Alli, for once rendered speechless. It was an unforeseen but appreciated addition to our weekend in which we ate and drank well, walked all around the city, perused the street markets, visited the uninspiring Wenceslas Square a couple of times, crossed the very inspiring Charles Bridge several times, took photos at the “John Lennon Wall”, had a boat trip on Smetana’s Die Moldau with coffee and cakes, visited the castle precincts; bought some high quality souvenirs and an unusual oil-painting of peacocks upon which Alli and I, for once, agreed as our wedding anniversary present to each other. On a negative note, a street-walking money-exchanger left Laurie with unusable Hungarian forints, and Jessie’s camera was stolen from her suitcase at Prague airport. Such events mitigate my tendency to be optimistic about one’s fellow person. But overall the visit was a great success and Prague is worth visiting, as long as you guard against rank chicanery.
The vegetable year has begun, and, after discovering from my new vegetable book that I was already two months’ overdue, I planted the first batch of seeds in trays in the greenhouse, dug over the existing vegetable beds (unearthing a dozen good fat parsnips in the process), sowed a line of salads, beans and courgettes, and began to create a new vegetable bed by the fruit trees where the moles have had many field days. Also, Alli has now located and reserved five sturdy cross-bred laying hens who will be introduced to their palace at the bottom of our garden sometime next month.
Jessie has been travelling around the United States, and has visited New York, Washington and Nashville, where she stayed with her cousin Fleur, her husband Ben and daughter Julia-Rose. She wrote long daily emails back to us about her activities, which included meeting Tony Bennett (whom I thought of as an old man even when I was a young man). She went on to Memphis, meeting her friend Bailey, whose ear-warmers I have been wearing every day whilst biking to and from work. Gwen appeared in a school musical called Grabba, in which she played a German school-student called Sandra. She didn’t look all that pleased to be waved at by her Mum from the back row, but she remembered all her lines and played a solid part in an entertaining evening. She has also been partying hard, and went to a disco at the school for her grade, generating thousands of photos for Facebook, making the disco look like something from the psychedelic 1970s. Gwen also went skiing for five days in Nendaz with her friend Charlotte and her family. Unfortunately she fainted on the third day in the ski lift and did not ski again afterwards. This was either low blood pressure (in which case I could offer her some of mine), hard partying, or the delayed dietetic effects of her vegetarianism, partly mitigated by her excellent decision a few weeks ago to start to eat fish. Ella is into the last weeks of revision before her IB exams and is therefore looking forward to the summer more than most. Me? I am eating meat again temporarily but trying to avoid carbohydrates. As referred to above, I started cycling again after the clocks changed in order to prepare my left knee, body and soul for what we all hope will be a long hot summer.
Yours from the first breath,
Lionel
Sawmill Clucked Epicurean April 2011
30.4.2011
Ahem
A man from the mairie (local council) knocked on our door one day and asked Alli to give him back our second black rubbish bin. Alli told him he was mistaken as we only had one. He apologized and left. Some days later our bin disappeared in broad daylight, while Alli was actually in the house. I interpreted this as a straight burglary by the company contracted by the mairie, and started looking for a lawyer who would take our heroic case in the land of liberty against the company. The company was unyielding; the mairie apologetic. A form first filled in last year was re-faxed to the company, which then agreed that it had stolen the bin by mistake. I am learning the Gallic shrug. It’s more Clochemerle than Klosters around here.
The chickens have arrived! In early April five brown hens were introduced into their customized coop where they cowered for nearly three days but soon clucked up the courage to venture out and about in the long grass of the run. After a slow start, we are now getting four eggs a day. We christened the coop Chicken Karma at a small Cremant d’Alsace party of friends and project helpers. Meanwhile, the dandelions in the next field have been massing menacingly and waving their wispy fists at our garden even as our first vegetables were fighting their way through the clay soil. Our road (Sawmill Road in English and Rue de la Scierie in French) is called in the local Alsacien dialect Sag-y-Wag, according to a new road sign. This fine name has prompted me to consider start learning Alsacien. I have tried to learn German, on and mostly off, for over forty years, but I have never got past the basics of thanks, apologies, requests for alcoholic drinks and boys’ comic-book wartime expletives. But Alsacien is a kind of formless, slurred form of High German, so it might just work for me.
Jessie came back from her colorful American travels visiting friends and family to stay with us for a few days before going to Rimini in Italy for the Ultimate Frisbee World Beach Championships, in which she played for her team, the Brighton Mohawks. Ella’s last day at school was marked by an imaginative series of planned events at school for the last night (she and Louis dressed as Fred and Daphne from Scoobie-doo) and she now has just a few days to go before her International Baccalaureate exams begin. Her objective is still to get a place at Warwick University later this year. We went to see Paul and Elise and their newly first-born, Leo, unperturbed by our invasion into his one month of life. Over Easter we entertained our friends Ann-Lii and Frederik de Mare in an epicurean few days: a dinner in Leymen, meals al fresco in our sun-drenched garden, long walks and talks in Basel, Oberwil and Leymen. Alli went to England with Gwen to see her parents, Jessie and friends while I spent a couple of days at our holiday house, La Hune, where a long and deep ditch must be dug across the garden between the septic tank and the main drain, and where our swimming pool liner must be replaced (no small tasks these). I also drew up an agreement with M. le maire for the new village petanque site on our land beyond the wall. Bonnie also had canine visitors Meric and Tequila for Easter.
We have also managed to resolve several small but persistent ennuis that encumber our everyday life. I finally won the battle with the blue meanies of Inter Discount to get BBC radio in the kitchen for Alli after being reimbursed for a non-compliant internet radio and by simply using a laptop for the BBC radio online. The remote controllers for the garage doors, after weeks of shaking and rattling, now work. Alli completed the pool house makeover ready for Easter and the ugly plumbing bits were hidden brilliantly by our designer friend Annet. A package repeatedly broken by La Poste arrived intact. We bought a Jeep Grand Cherokee, knowing that our Galaxy will soon implode. A geomètre marked out the legal access from our house to the road, and thus discovered that much of our neighbor’s garden must be removed to maintain our access when the adjacent land is sold. And I managed to get through to the customer service team of France Telecom to have a sober conversation about the fact that our telephones didn’t work. And shortly afterwards, they did. Hello? Allo?
Yours hanging on the telephone..
Lionel
Jessie at the Grand Ole Opry, April 2011 Louis and Ella as Fred and Daphne, April 2011
Gwen and Leo French The hens at Chicken Karma, Leymen, April 2011
Discus Redstart Cabbage May 2011
29th May 2011
Ahem
The children have all been achieving great things this month, and Ella in particular won a very prestigious regional award, the Young Women in Public Affairs Award of the Zonta International Foundation, which seeks to advance the status of women worldwide and which honors young women who demonstrate a commitment to leadership in public policy, government and volunteer organizations. Alli, Gwen and I went to the swankiest hotel in Basel (Les Trois Rois) to watch Ella receive her award and to hear her appropriate and well judged speech of thanks. This was in the middle of her IB exams for which she has studied diligently despite the competing demands of Facebook, Skype, email, Eastenders and YouTube. She finished her exams and flew off to Magaluf (which Wikipedia is currently calling Shagaluf, I can’t think why) in Majorca with the rest of her grade to spend a few days there before her graduation on 1st June.
Gwen was selected for a track and field prowess of which I had until then been completely unaware: the discus and the shot-put. She went to Munich for a few days to perform these feats and returned having helped the school to a creditable 4th position out of 11 for the competition. This was repeated a week later in Zug, where the school came 3rd overall, and in Bern, where the school won outright. She also went with the rest of her grade to the open air museum at Ballenberg, where scenes of historical Swiss life are depicted in outdoor settings. Jessie celebrated her 20th birthday in Brighton, and had a memorable fancy dress party, in which she dressed as Jessie from Toy Story. She also performed well in her term essays, surprising herself by getting results in her law assignments that were well above average. Notwithstanding, she has applied next year to switch her studies from Law to International Development and Geography, for which I sense that she will have more enthusiasm and energy.
An unusual bird, the Black Redstart, took up residence in our porch and made a nest there some time ago, hatching chicks a few weeks later. This is a likable and companionable bird that makes a clicking noise whenever we appear on the porch. Our hens are still producing eggs although one of them was broody for a few days and mooched around listlessly, pecking in slow motion and looking absent-minded. Four eggs a day is the production average but we never build much of a surplus. I had a lightning business visit to Cambridge to look at ways of monitoring the social media, discovering as I did that the social media is best explained by references to plumbing than to semantics. I had dinner with my work colleagues at a Thai restaurant on the edge of Parker’s Piece while local teams played cricket with hearty British gusto in the failing light. Alli and I went to a ISB 12th grade parents party at Paddy O’Reillys and had a great time, meeting Ella’s boyfriend Louis’s parents for the first time, and getting to know and like some of the parents just a bit too late. We also welcomed our friends the McCoys and the Barnes to a barbecue. From them I picked up vital tips about my vegetable garden and the health of the chickens.
The swimming pool temperature has managed to get above 20 degrees after several days of very warm weather, so Gwen and her friends have spent a lot of time in it, especially at weekends. Even Alli and I have managed a swim every now and then. We are now eating a lot from the garden: lettuce, spinach and rocket mostly, but we will soon have beans, marrows and tomatoes and many wheelbarrows’ full of cabbages, as I created a new vegetable bed from some hassocky land and found space only for my burgeoning cabbage plants. So now there’s a cabbage patch to accompany the chicken run and the compost corner.
So, altogether now, Plant that Bell and Let it Ring!
Lionel
Jessie dressed as Jessie from Toy Story Ella’s award from the Zonta Foundation
Aplomb Hoglets Laxity June 2011
Ahem
Ella graduated from school at the beginning of the month in a beneficent blaze of family and friends, the ceremony attracting no less than two uncles (my brother Clive and my brother-in-law Anthony), both parents, both sisters Jessie and Gwen, and all extant grandparents. It was great to see Jessie, over for just a couple of days from Brighton and also to welcome Clive, on top form, chatting to everyone in reach and many beyond, Anthony with his infectious optimism about the future of the world economy, and my ever-supportive parents-in-law Laurie and Kay, on the verge of their fiftieth wedding anniversary, for which they were presented by their children with final day super-class Wimbledon tickets and a garden seat. Ella is looking forward to the imminent results of her International Baccalaureate exams and hopes to go to Warwick University, where she has a provisional place to study politics and international relations. She went to Southside in Germany, the biggest rock concert around, although as usual for such events it rained most of the time. Notwithstanding, she returned exhausted, windswept and sunburned and promptly went off to England to see her grandparents (the extant ones) via a trip to Brighton to go to a pub quiz with Jessie. She and Jessie also had dinner chez their grandparents and their boyfriends altogether at Broad Oaks in Burgess Hill. Guess who’s coming to dinner?
Just outside our kitchen there are five mature and very beautiful birch trees. I had never properly appreciated them before, as the seven horses in the paddock are anyway restful and relaxing subjects upon which to lay sight, but when the wind has been particularly frolicsome, their myriad leaves wink and glint in the light and shade of the paddock. No wonder the birch tree reminded the poet Louis Simpson of “a room filled with breathing, the sway and whisper of love”. Well, never mind all that, I went to a village near St Emilion in the Bordeaux region to give a course in creative communications to a spray of French agronomists in the stunning Chateau de Vergnes surrounded by superior Bordeaux vines and excellent food. I also found myself speaking French for two days, which was, franchement, exhausting. I even dreamed in French overnight in my Portacabin lodging but of what I cannot divulge.
The previous weekend we drove to Luxembourg to celebrate the confirmation of our god-daughter Sophia Miles. Confirmation is a major rite of passage in Denmark (Sophia is half-Danish) and so this was rightly celebrated with aplomb and pride. Her parents Anthony and Susanne worked tirelessly together with Susanne’s brother and sister-in-law and several others to put on a weekend feast for over thirty guests, friends and family. I was in awe of the fine food and wine that was served, as well as of Anthony’s vegetable garden, which is already beginning to produce its annual cornucopia. It put my shot rocket, weedy spinach and spiraling coriander to shame, shame, shame. Mind you, I have just collected my first harvest and have already started to create surpluses.
One of our hens has died after being broody and depressed for several days. She was being pecked by the others, and was not defending herself, although we are still not entirely sure of the reason for her death. We are hoping that this was a one-off event. We were away at the time and our house guest Jill found herself dealing with it, with the robust assistance of our friend Adrian, who rendered practical assistance at short notice by coming round immediately and promptly burying the unfortunate hen. We were also disappointed to find that the Black Redstart nest in the lodge had been destroyed by, apparently, killer sparrows, but on the plus side for biodiversity, our resident hedgehogs have produced a brood of three hoglets from their nest in the crevices of the wall in the garden, and the whole family can be spotted quite regularly in the early evening trotting briskly across the lawn.
I went on a trip with house guest Jill and other English friends to Schloss Lenzburg near Zurich to see Much Ado about Nothing in the castle’s courtyard. Shakespeare’s Brian Rix comedy was a good selection for midsummer night, performed enthusiastically by an English-speaking troupe of travelling actors. The castle is one of the most impressive in Switzerland with a great view over the Argovian flatlands. The International School held its annual International Day on a day that promised but did not deliver the rain that traditionally falls on these occasions. I had a minor role to ensure that the performers got to the stage in the main hall on time and were properly aware of the stage and announcement formalities, a task requiring little but sustained concentration. Notwithstanding, I was in trouble right from the off. After the first act - a troupe of six-year olds performing a hip-hop routine - one of the school teachers stamped over and gave me an ear-bashing because she thought the song and the dance used had been too sexually suggestive for their age, and moreover that I was to blame for this. I offered to talk to the dance teacher and looked dramatically around the hall with an urgent expression. I then rejected her robust idea of introducing the next but one act (some matronly Scottish Highland dancing) when the Brazilian rain forest dancers had failed to appear on time. Such was her frustration at both my moral and timekeeping laxity, I tried to avoid her from then on, but could periodically see her muttering at me from the other side of the room – a human trouser-suited Mutley in full glare.
Yours from the Big Society,
Lionel
Faron, Jessie, Louis and Ella, Broad Oaks, Burgess Hill, 1st July, 2011
Tantalizing Pilates Dry July 2011
Ahem
July has been an exciting month for all sorts of different reasons, but notable among these were that Ella came of age with her 18th birthday and that her International Baccalaureate exam results brought her to within a point of taking up a place at Warwick University this September. She still faces a tantalizing wait for confirmation (later in August) that she has a place. She celebrated her birthday with a pool party followed by a group rush to a Zurich night club, returning in less sprightly style at 6am the next morning. On her birthday itself we all went to dinner at Papa Joe’s. She and Jessie have been working at Syngenta, their jobs kindly generated by our friend Monty. We had a dinner party for our friend Jill, who house-sat for us while we were on holiday. We went to dinner twice at the Couronne d’Or in Leymen, and we were cooked dinners by our daughters accompanied by their boyfriends, Faron and Louis, although despite the two pairs of hands each time the kitchen became a bomb site. During the brief sunny periods of the month, Jessie, Ella and Gwen each had loud pool parties. Faron’s week visiting Jessie in Basel included a trip to Reigoldswil which involved taking a cable car to the top of a cliff then free-wheeling fast down on a seat-less mountain bike; and a visit to Todtnau in the Black Forest for a 2.7 kilometer long toboggan run down a mountain, this time also with Gwen and her friend Jenny.
Alli has been taking Pilates exercises twice a week, and it seems to be working for her, if waking up stiff and back-achey every morning is an intentional outcome (although this would suggest that I am also taking the lessons, which I am not). Talking of which, I have been referred to a specialist over my knee which continues to hinder me from achieving my lifetime dedication to a healthy and fit body. The results of an MRI scan will soon be revealed.
We spent two weeks on holiday in Andalucia, where we stayed in a villa in the hills above Malaga with our friends the Davis and Steward families. The villa had many benefits but we were content mostly to lie by the pool or visit nearby sites of interest. These included the extraordinary Alhambra in Granada, trips to the beaches in Malaga, Torremolinos, Nerja and Torre del Mar and a walk around the magnificent town of Ronda. We were near Riogordo, but its river is not fat but dry, boulder-strewn and dusty – a sign that water shortages have become the norm in the region. Ella’s boyfriend Louis joined us for the first weekend and Jessie joined us after a few days in Malaga separately with her friends. I also rediscovered my admiration for the no-nonsense Spanish and for their language.
Hasta luego!
Lionel
Gwen, Jessie, Ella and Lionel, Ronda, Andalucia, August 2011
Marrows Apnea Kimono August 2011
Ahem
Rough winds and rain were strafing the bean-poles when we returned home from torch-dry Andalucia, and early August was more like the snarling gusts of January in Alaska than the drowsy calm of canicular summer in the Alsace. Our pool was deep lime green and the weather had rotted many of my tomatoes and vegetables as well as hyper-inflated my courgettes into giant marrows, most of which were well beyond our consumption needs, so I forced them into the bags and cars of visitors even as they drove away with a squealing of tires. The feeling of corrupted desolation was enhanced when I was given abrupt notice by my company, effective from the beginning of the month – “we are forced to terminate your employment based on the reorganization of the External Affairs department (sic)” – ungrammatical clichés to the end. I was handed a bottle of whisky on my way out.
But my unscheduled mid-term exeat has had its benefits, not least that the weather promptly improved and I am taking the leave literally by bringing the vegetable patch back to the sustainable production standards that I have long espoused (“no-till” farming is dead easy). I also found how elastic is the day as the invitations and offers of help dried up after the sudden shutdown of my work email and snatch of the Blackberry. Each small task seems to take hours, for example, one of my typical days consisted of: Morning – walk Bonnie, have haircut, sit in traffic jam, take coffee in Claraplatz; afternoon - review emails, rotivate patch, pick tomatoes, send off two job applications. And I was exhausted by the end of it. Mind you, my reading has become prolific and I have managed to get through no less than nine quarterly editions of Granta in the past month, bringing me almost up to date. On another day I took Gwen and four of her friends plus Ella and Louis to Europapark, the biggest theme park in Germany. I was abandoned by Gwen and her party once we were through the gate, but after declining Ella’s graceful invitation to hang out with her and Louis, I managed to fill my time profitably, viewing the oldest and least popular attractions and settling down after lunch to doze on a bench in the Magic Garden to a musical background of the Brandenburgs. I noticed that there were other Dad-looking types horizontally inclined on benches on either side of me, sound asleep with their hairy legs crossed and their hats over their faces.
Jessie went off to see her boyfriend Faron in Luxembourg for a week, and then both went on to the Reading Festival in the UK via the new improved Eurostar, while Ella’s productive stint at work came to an end (this one was scheduled) and she had welcome confirmation that she will be going to the University of Loughborough later this year. Meanwhile I have been diagnosed as having a syndrome. It’s quite exciting as I have never had a syndrome before (at least, not one to which I am prepared to admit). Its name is Obstructive Sleep Apnea Syndrome (OSAS) and it’s characterized by repetitive pauses in breathing during sleep which can last up to 40 seconds each time. I am nearly sure that this used to be known as “heavy snoring”. Another visit to another specialist beckons. Our friends Fionnuala and Andrew and their child prodigy daughter Evelyn visited us on the last weekend of the month, and we showed them around the center of Basel, which was quiet even by its own standards, as well as around Leymen. This included a visit to the Landskron Castle atop the hill overlooking the village, Mariastein, a visit to the Agrogast, the local food and wine fair, and live action (and music) at the eclectic annual street party of Rue de la Scierie. But, dear friends and relatives, the holiday party is now over, and I must step up to the plate, open the kimono, and drill down to the granular going forward...
All good suggestions gratefully received (CV supplied on request)
Lionel
Crapshoot Craftwork Cuckoo September 2011
It was party time at Rue de la Scierie as I invited my best and most generous friends to celebrate my liberation from the crapshoot that is the corporate world. It was a friendly and relaxed occasion that started at 2pm with genteel discussion and ended at 4am in pogoing and karaoke, and although I am not clear about the denouement, it did feature adults acting like teenagers and vice versa, and a certain game called SingStar. There are times when I am glad I have little or no short term memory. It was very encouraging in my newly unemployed state to receive so many expressions of friendship, solidarity and generosity. Some even brought us food parcels, albeit on the sophisticated end: jars of pesto sauce, smoked ham, hoummous, Viennese apfelstrudel, coconut cake and so on.
Jessie had her friend Faron to stay in the early part of the month; then she got down to her temporary job with Syngenta in Basel. She also got serious about her new hobby of craftwork, making a very impressive lampshade for Alli’s birthday, as well as an imaginative covering for a bedside table and several coin purses and cushions. She is writing an interesting blog about how she makes these things: http://www.imake2.blogspot.com/. She also part-hosted a stall at Basel’s weekly flea market in St Petersplatz and sold a few items, and was delighted to buy an antique Longchamps handbag with her proceeds. Alli was particularly pleased with her birthday presents this year which heavily featured the cow parade. We all had a celebration dinner at the Cantina Toscana in Therwil.
Fifty years ago took place the first experience in my life that I can with total certainty remember. My brother Clive, who often when I was very young kindly showed or told me rather unusual or disconcerting things, informed me that the year - 1961 - looked the same upside down (the next year in which this will be true is the year 6009, which is only 3,998 years to go.) Around the same time he also convinced me that all French cheese had waving tentacles and, with amateur dramatics in our garden near Oxford, that the humble cuckoo was in fact a gruesome bird with a call that announced horror and curdled the blood. The cuckoo’s call still makes me profoundly uneasy to this day.
Talking of cuckoos, this is the month that Ella followed Jessie in going to university in England, leaving only Gwen, who promptly took occupation of the best bedroom in the house. I drove Ella and her material entourage to Loughborough via a short stay at my parents-in-law in Sussex. I also visited my friend Debbie for a couple of days, during which we managed a couple of meals out (one at Langan’s Brasserie) and saw an excellent play, Di and Viv and Rose by Amelia Bullmore, at the Hampstead Theatre. I also spent a delightfully lazy Sunday afternoon with Adam, Angela and Eleanor which included a walk around sunny central London by and across the Thames. I left them near Waterloo and got back to my car in West London via one of London’s Boris Bikes. I also saw the fabulous Tennysons in their country house near Godalming in Surrey and even managed to have breakfast with my politico friend Lionel at the Goring Hotel as well as dinner in Brighton with Ella, Jessie and Faron after helping Jessie move into her new lodgings. I drove back via an overnight stay in Luxembourg with in-laws Ant and Susanne, whose son Oliver turned eighteen the following day. To be sure, Tempus Fugit.
I have been in and out of hospital this month with various ailments, doubtless psychosomatic, and have been x-rayed, probed, tested, cat-, CT, ultrasound and bone-scanned. So I now have special insteps to make me walk properly, will soon take delivery of a mask to help me sleep properly, and have been told to surround myself with positive people to make me think properly. I can’t really argue with any of these prognoses but I also wonder how I could have had the time for all this treatment if I wasn’t between jobs. On this matter I still look forward to the calling of my name. I’ve read through all the magazines now.
Yours from the waiting room,
Lionel
Ella at Loughborough, September 2011 Jessie at St Petersplatz, September 2011
Piazza Jetstream Recency October 2011
Ahem,
The Swiss are well organized in most things but, inexplicably, they are terrible at directing traffic around and through road repairs, leaving motorists (especially cyclists) dangerously clueless as to how to proceed. This disability has spread across the border to our village, where there are now cack-handed diversions affecting all the traffic going through the village in any direction. At each the lights are unsynchronized, often directing lines of traffic simultaneously straight into each other; at each there is blithe indifference to drivers trying to pass through; at each no attention is paid to the state of the thoroughfare, which has become rutted building rubble, lethal to car suspension. Add the local affection for jumping the lights and the result is aggravated chaos. Just a week ago, following a residents’ demo, I clunk-rumbled past some bulldozers and witnessed a lively site meeting of local counselors with the contractors, all gesticulating and talking at once just as they do on late night French TV chat shows.
Alli has been in England seeing her parents and Jessie and Ella, leaving me at home for a few days in the company of Gwen, who was voted onto the school council as her grade representative after making a successful speech as one of the prospective candidates. This means that she has already won more free elections than I have. No sooner had Alli arrived back than I departed with Gwen to drive to London. I needed some good advice from friends and relatives, and Gwen wanted to spend her savings on shopping. I accompanied Gwen for much of this, and even managed to buy some high quality trousers for myself, only retreating to the pub when she marched into Oxford Street’s Primark. We stayed with our friend Debbie, who was very hospitable despite the simultaneous rebuilding of her kitchen. We ate out in Battersea Square, which, in the good weather, reminded me of a sun-flecked Italian piazza. I got some useful advice and lunch from my friend Stephen in Hampstead and was invited by Fionnuala to an entertaining dinner of the PR Practitioners Guild in the Butchers Hall near Smithfield. We also stayed in Notting Hill courtesy of my cousins Diane and Brendan and their dog Molly. Gwen and I wandered down the Portobello Road before Ella arrived to accompany Gwen on her shopping mission in Shepherds Bush. The next day we drove back via Paris and stayed in the center of the city overnight before going up the gigantic Eiffel Tower the next morning. We also made the most of the pavement cafes and bistros before gunning it back across France to Leymen the next day. A few days later, I made a lightning visit to Brussels, also by car, and enjoyed the hospitality of our friends Laurence, Claude and Corentin in Rixensart. I came back via an overnight stay with the endlessly welcoming Miles of Biwer, Luxembourg, leaving my washing bag there as a tribute.
The month has seen a lot of rain and grey-laden clouds but has also produced much autumnal sunshine and powder blue sky. We don’t live under the Basel airport flight paths but they are often white-etched on the sky like a giant latticework; or an unstarted celestial game of noughts and crosses with great slashes of jetstream crossing each other even as the geometry becomes fluffy and fades and then gets renewed every few minutes, as soundless planes climb into the blue. In the sunshine the pool casts its numinous reflections on the walls, a Hockneyesque remainder of summer. While the vegetable garden is no longer productive, we have profited from a profusion of walnuts from the trees around us. Alli’s collection now totals over 10 kilos, garnered whilst walking the dogs. Dogs? For several days we have had our day-care dogs to stay with Bonnie: Tequila and Meric.
Some of the recent Facebook photos of Ella from her first few weeks at Loughborough University as well as of Jessie at Sussex have been admirably surrealistic. Dressing up is clearly a major student occupation. Ella is enjoying student life, and has started writing for the student newspaper; she has had her first scoop by successfully conducting an interview with the upcoming band the Rizzle Kicks, who, managed by my friend Adam’s daughter Martha, seem to get more popular by the day. Jessie has been in major organizing mode for her Extreme Frisbee team and has also been in a frenzy of cooking and crafting.
The month featured coughs and colds amongst us all, the worst affected being Alli, who remains under the weather and doctor’s orders as we slip into the dark half of the year. Facebook has decided that “recency” is a word and offers it as a way of selecting stories – “sort by recency”. Even Microsoft denies the word’s legitimacy. But I like it, and rather wish I had invented it myself. It seems an admirably Anglo-Saxon way out of an awkward alternative and a lot shorter than
chronologically yours,
Lionel
Ella (on right) Loughborough Faron (as a giraffe) and Jessie (as Cleopatra), Brighton, October 2011
Russet Bobbling Witty
November 2011
30.11.11
Ahem
The colors of this year’s Fall together with four weeks of bright November daytime sunshine have been extraordinary. Once the thick morning mists have cleared, a flickering palette of bright greens, pithy oranges, flaring yellows, flame reds and burnt russets is scattered during our walks with the dogs around the Leimental, the best of the several picturesque valleys carved to the south, alongside the Birsig stream and whose paths and roads connect several Swiss and French villages. Leymen is in the French Sundgau region, “land of the fried carp”, in the south of the Alsace. From the 12th century Landskron hilltop castle, we can see across to the Vosges in France, the Schwarzwald in Germany, and the Jura in Switzerland, the mighty Rhein winding between all of them with Basel in the centre. How lucky we are to live here! But not so lucky just now for our elderly neighbor, who became the latest victim of the gigantic Leymen roadworks scandal when a raised pothole knocked her from her bicycle. She appeared at our door with blood pouring from her head and Alli drove her immediately to the hospital for treatment. I may well be the next victim, jailed for roadworks rage as I grind across the building site shaking my fist.
Geoff came over from England on a flying trip to join me and Neil in watching Wilco at the Kaserne in central Basel. It was Wilco’s first time in Basel (Neil and I saw them in Zurich seven years ago). The venue was just outside one of Basel’s main Herbstmesse sites with its neon roller coasters and look-at-me screams. After a while the lead singer Jeff Tweedy announced that he was feeling unwell and expressed the hope that he wouldn’t throw up, a revelation that created a mild reverse riptide effect from the bobbling heads at the front. He said he had eaten bad lentils at a French truck stop. I liked this detail. On the road, the band eats dodgy food from motorway caffs. I had assumed that they would be flying first class, or at least have had a celebrity chef on the coach.
Moving from dodgy to delicious, Alli and I were treated liberally to dinner at a Lebanese restaurant in Binningen by our good friends the Barnes of Biel Benken. Evenings with the Barnes bring the best out of us and in the early hours Alli and I often end up dancing together, which we scarcely ever do elsewhere. A couple of days later we welcomed the Kellys and Annet for Sunday lunch. I also went to England for a couple of days, mostly to talk with some friends about a possible business venture. I saw Jessie for dinner in Brighton and also the next night in Battersea, where we together attended the legendary Mike Waterson’s 11/11/11 dinner party at his restaurant the Gazette in the mod-posh part of the south bank. The party brought together, he said, his best friends, and so I felt privileged to be there, despite his several unprovoked public swipes at my impeccable reputation in his witty speech of welcome.
Gwen, who has been picked for the school’s basketball team, completed with distinction Basel’s annual Stadtlauf for the third year in a row. We went for dinner at Tibits afterwards with friends. I also took Gwen and her friend Puck to Freiburg, and grabbed the shopping opportunity with gusto, finishing at least half of my festive mandate, as I am an impatient shopper and the Christmas market there had just begun. We had a large German lunch at Martin’s Brauhaus in what is now a family tradition. I also took Gwen and her friend Maya to a marche bio in Orschwihr, then on to the excellent Christmas market in Mulhouse.
Ella’s article on the Rizzle Kicks was published in the Loughborough University Student magazine. I thought both the article and the magazine were impressive – a far cry from my drowsy days as the fey arts reviewer on Oxford’s Isis. And, btw, I am quite frequently asked about my use of American spelling and terminology. I normally use the word Fall instead of Autumn, and this is why: The Old English fiæll and the Old Norse fall came together in 16th century England as the collective and typically descriptive term denoting the season (leaf fall). Before that, the English had called the season Harvest, a term retained in Germanic languages as Herbst. In the 17th century, as English emigration to the British colonies in North America was swelling, the new settlers took the current English language terms (and spelling) with them across the Atlantic. While the word Fall then gradually became obsolete in Britain as European continental influence increased, it became the more common term in North America. A similar story goes for many of the spelling differences between the US and the UK. As you see I am determinedly fighting this creeping obsolescence in the Mother Country. We wish a merry Christmas to you all!
laters, dudes!
Lionel
Gwen, a golden statue and Puck in Freiberg, November 2011
Jerkily Kwanzaa Iambic
December 2011
01.01.2012
Ahem
I was dreading my visit to the village Post Office to get stamps for our Christmas cards from the po-faced lady at the counter: she has never been helpful with my innovative requests. At the weekend I had posted some letters with Swiss stamps in a French post box. Alli told me I had to get the letters back before they were collected or they might be destroyed for not being French, er, letters. So, after failing to get an indication from Mme Po-face as to when the letters would be collected (the official times given on the box are complete fictions) I kicked my heels for half a morning outside the post office waiting for the collection, entertained only by watching the schoolchildren run screeching around the yard and the village ladies glide in and out of the car park, petite in their darkwindow bigstupid cars. From my vantage point at the epicenter of the village, the little yellow van of the jolly rotund post-lady could occasionally be seen darting in and out, accelerating, slowing and reversing jerkily around the village drives and letter boxes throughout the morning like an impatient autumnal bee. Finally, flushed and sweating, she arrived to empty the postbox against which I was leaning. I was so relieved so see her at last that I planted a big smacker on her rosy cheek as I took back the letters. I later posted them from a Swiss post box a few hundred meters up the road. I suppose the jolly post-lady promptly told her story of the effusive Englishman to Madame Po-face inside the office, whose view of me has completely changed as a consequence. When I came in a couple of days later with my complicated festive order, she cheerily complied, complimented me on the way the letters were sorted into different countries and even offered to help me lick the stamps for the envelopes. Who knows what else she might have offered had I stayed longer, the little minx?
There might have been a disastrous end to the story because one of the envelopes referred to above contained concert tickets for Ella in England and was so delayed that Ella might not have been able to attend the comedian Howard Russell in concert in Birmingham, despite having paid for the tickets. A flurry of signing and scanning and emailing signatures sorted that out. In another irritating interlude, my French current account lost over 4000 euros in three days because someone used the number of my credit card to go on an online spending spree. Nothing was more amazing than the behavior of the bank which did nothing for three days after I told them after the first sign of fraud. They just officially shrugged and reimbursed the money. Ouai, ca passe toujours.
Our Christmas holiday saw the return from University of our prodigal daughters Jessie and Ella. This year we have made the change into a third age in which the assumption is that we stay at home and hope that our adult children come to visit us. Without other visitors, apart from our lodger dogs Tequila and Posh Bertie it was a quieter Christmas, although we went to several parties hosted by others and we gave one ourselves. It was our Kwanzaa party, the Swahili term for the general festive season, yuletide or whatever else people choose to call that socially awkward gap between the saints Stephen and Sylvester. We also saw the best English Christmas panto in Basel for years, Treasure Island. The gift haul between us all was as imaginative as ever, with a common theme of concert tickets, gutscheine and proofs of purchase – I was given tickets for the Jay Hawks concert in London by Jessie and Ella, and Ella had tickets to see Malcolm McIntyre, while Jessie received a sewing machine and Gwen an ice cream making machine. Some of the presents, reflecting the family’s increasingly globalized status, were photographs or documentary proofs of themselves, the originals being elsewhere.
We drained our septic tank (well, actually someone else did) and some super-efficient gardeners cleared, tidied and revived our garden in a series of backbreaking tasks which would have taken me weeks of suffering, aches, pains and complaints. We also took delivery of a pool table, gifted by a generous friend, and with my friend Neil’s help, we moved it to the top floor of our house into Gwen’s room. The table was quickly in use the next day when Gwen had her ‘pirate’ birthday party. I arranged a treasure hunt for Gwen’s friends, ensuring that everyone spent at least two hours tramping around in the wet fields near the house searching for clues written in iambic pentameters. They came back to hot dogs, crisps and cup cakes with rice paper labels illustrated by the faces of the boys in One Direction. For the record, Harry was the most eaten. I just don’t know how Zane, Liam, Louis and Niall can cope with this.
This is Gwen’s favorite month, as it features both Christmas and her birthday (the only day of the year when she eats meat). This year it also featured the definitive removal of braces from her teeth, so her smile was in abundant evidence afterwards. We also had our lodger dogs, Bertie and Tequila, who don’t like each other very much, so they kept out of each other’s way (Bonnie gets on with almost everyone). Hurricane gusts and tempestuous winds assailed us and the house in mid-December, wreaking havoc and damage in the garden. Our trampoline, at the height of the storm, lifted itself from the ground and hurled itself against the glass side of the pool house. We were extraordinarily fortunate that the first point of contact was the guttering. Being made of solid copper it took the full force like a Hummer bumper which crumpled but nothing else was damaged.
As jobs are harder to find than an odorless camel, a new Swiss company called Clement Reputation GmbH rises, a phoenix on heat. Odd metaphors, granted, but as I add my googleplus, log onto my logo, hook up my linkedIn, spin a new web site, fill up myspace, wash my facebook, scope my skype, wipe my beak and tweet, even stranger similes and metaphors obtrude. As an entrepreneur (the practice for which the French have no name) I feel obliged to give full company details below in expectation of plenty business.
We all wish you a very happy Christmastide, Kwanzaa and New Year,
Lionel
CLEMENT REPUTATION
Issue, Stakeholder, Message
and Reputation Management
office: +33 970 44 55 49
mob: +41 76 409 87 16
Bonnie, Leymen, December 2011 Ella, Leymen, December 2011
Gwen, Leymen, December 2011 Gwen ‘s13th birthday party, December 2011
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