Swiss Cheese


17 - 21 Mar, Ian

Whether fact or fiction, a book that you enjoy and remember opens up or enriches a chamber of the imagination and, like getting fitter, improves your life. If a novel is judged by how well it develops your sense of what it is like to be somewhere, and, even more, to be someone - to be enriched by seeing what life throws at a person different from yourself and how they respond - them, for me, Patricia Highsmith is a good novelist; I finished another Ripley book while Steve was here a couple of weeks ago. Here in the French part of Switzerland, I'm attracted to the idea of this English-speaking guy who has carved himself an easy new life living in France. Even though it's clearly wrong, I always imagine him in Southern France, somewhere just north of the Riviera, because that's the only region of France (Corsica aside) that I know well. I was pleased to learn last week that Patricia Highsmith actually lives in Switzerland. It's allowed me to import my feelings about her novels to where we are now and, irrationally, has strengthened my sense of a dark, more human, reality behind the cuckoo clock facade and made me like the country more.

Also, it's reassuring to have the continuity of a character (Tom Ripley) acting in my imagination whom I first encountered before we left home and met again while on The Ghan in Australia. It's even better to spend some time with an actual friend, and last Friday Craig and Liam flew out to spend a long weekend with us. Liam was born a couple of weeks after Zoe, and has been a friend of Zoe and Heidi all of their lives. The three of them get on well and can sit in the back of a car happily improvising variations of Rock, Paper, Scissors for longer than you might imagine if you've ever seen how quickly bright kids can get bored. Like being in Switzerland as the skiing season melts to a close, our visit from Craig and Liam, following on from Steve's stay here, serendipitously forms part of our gentle transition back to what a friend recently and sadly called "normal life".

While they were here we had two good days skiing at Thyon. Craig has been here many times and took us to some areas that we hadn't yet discovered. The region is called the Four Valleys and as we travelled repeatedly up one drag and down the next set of slopes you can see why. I felt like a little ant scuttling over the top of one of those relief maps where the mountains are coloured white and actually lift up in correspondence with their altitude. From the pistes that wind round the valleys we had superb views down to Sion in the valley below and could look down at planes and helicopters taking off from and landing at the airport. We skied towards Verbier and could easily have reached it, but decided instead to cut and run to give ourselves more time on the real downslopes rather than the winding tracks that you need to take to gain the land distance.

Getting closer to the fashion centre of Verbier did not remove us from the Eurovision-style ski gear than I wrote about last time: there were still guys in pink and green boots and implausibly coloured salopettes. On Saturday evening we went out for dinner at a restaurant down the road, which can match the rainbow ski-wear with Eurovision-style food. Being in Switzerland for a month we had to have fondue, which, along with raclette, is served everywhere. A large orange Le Creuset-type saucepan full of a dense soup of cheese and white wine was set over a flame that makes it bubble rather than congeal. We ate it, of course, by mopping it up with chunks of bread handled on dainty fondue forks. We eschewed the fancy variants that are pepped up with tomato or mushrooms: I've had them before and the tomato one in particular sails dangerously close to being not only inedible but unspeakable. Fondue is one of those dishes that you can enjoy occasionally but not at all often. I felt a cultural imperative to remind the girls about it while we're here but, in truth, the restaurant's steak-frites is a better meal.

Switzerland isn't, I notice, the only European country where the Eurovision spirit is free of irony. In nearby Serbia and Montenegro, the remnants of Yugoslavia, they take the song contest seriously. This year it has been afflicted by the politicisation of the country in advance of the referendum on the independence of Montenegro, and the selection of an entry for the contest has provided another flashpoint of conflict between the two communities. Unable to choose peacefully between a Serbian and a Montenegrin band, the country has had to withdraw from this year's contest.

This strangeness in Mitteleuropa makes me more aware of the fact that while we've seen our English friends here we haven't spent much time with Swiss people. In Ecuador we met a very nice, well-balanced Swiss couple, as well as a pair of Swiss "arshitex" who looked as if they'd breezed into the Black Sheep Inn straight from a Kraftwerk album cover. Over the years I've worked with many Swiss people, but only two or three of them became friends, and one of those died tragically in a hang gliding accident several years ago. While here we've chatted to Swiss people in shops and on chair lifts, but these all risk being occluded by the more heated encounters with the neurotic car guy, and more recently with the useless staff at the letting agency.

For a week now we there hasn't been a single day when we've had water for more than an hour or two in the morning. In Bhutan this would be understandable, but oddly Bhutan was the only country we've visited this year where we didn't have an interruption of the utilities. Prior to that we'd had at least own electricity blackout everywhere (Bhutan, currently being a low power user, exports electricity to India), and here in Switzerland they evidently can't get us reliable mains water. The agency has promised to bring us a back-up cistern every day but has never delivered it, and has only given us information that is incomplete or clearly false.

I find, as I deal with them, that my French has improved a lot over the year, mainly because the will to communicate is strong enough to override any reservations I may have about the correctness of my grammar or vocab. Indeed, will to communicate is key. Craig, who doesn't have a tremendous amount of French but loves talking with people, has proved able to get by with the locals, many of whom have no operational English. In the agency's office the other day without using a word of French Paula made herself understood by the sympathetic receptionist who also speaks little to no English.

Talking to the receptionist did something to relieve the personal low I experienced yesterday when the water failed to come on again, and which was made worse by the fact that, being Monday, Evolene was shut. (Remember that song by The Smiths?) Before visiting the agency I had the maps out, not for the first time this year, to see where we could decamp to in order to make the best of the rest of the month. I had an urge to drive to France, maybe to Nice, where we might see Stephanie and Reynald, or to Dijon, where I've always meant to go someday. But we're staying here because, water or no water, we still want to ski.

I read an article in a week-old Observer on Sunday about the French politician Sarkozy. I didn't learn much that was new about him but there were interesting reflections on the current French mood. The reporter kicked off with a cliche about a French baker who makes the best bread in the world when he's in a happy mood and awful bread when he's had a row with his wife. This is, of course, a metaphor for the rejection of the "Anglo Saxon" spirit spread by globalisation, which tramples over the idiosyncrasies of every local culture, and many French people, the writer argues, believe their trampled culture is superior. The "Anglo Saxon" invasion comes from an economically brutal Britain and a culturally crass USA, neither of which, unlike the French, look for the pourqoui behind the comment. I don't know if this is how French people feel, but if it is I have a lot of sympathy: there is plenty to question in the British economic model, and globalisation is displacing many rich cultures with one that is rich primarily in unsustainable technology.

Elsewhere in the news, though, I find reasons to be proud of being British. For a start, I read yesterday that "our" Archbishop of Canterbury has, no doubt at some cost to himself, come out against the teaching of creationism in schools, unoriginally but correctly calling it a category error. Good for him! He seems so much better than Runcie. And I also take heart from an apparent increase in interest amongst ordinary British citizens in green measures, including in extremis the desire to be so self-sufficient in electricity as to go "off grid". This has the feeling of the pioneering American spirit, and while I don't have the right figures here I'm sure that more people actually do this in America than anywhere else.

At home in Somerset our water comes from a local spring rather than the mains and we also have inherited a self-sufficient system that disposes of our non-compost, non-recycled household waste without using mains sewerage. When we get home we'll be looking at turbines and solar. It feels enabling.

Our troubling effect on the planet features strongly in the book I've been reading since the last Ripley novel: The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond, which was recommended to me by Adrian, whom we met in Bhutan. This book initially irritated me a little because it skates over so many topics - even the plausibility of life on other planets, for heaven's sake. (I also got irritated by his continual US usage of the word corn, instead of the more precise term maize, but that's just me being grumpy.) There are plenty of entertaining books that you could read that give a deeper treatment of any one of his topics (Evolution and Healing, Promiscuity, How we Age...) but the more I've read of the book the more I've realised that it would be completely impractical to cover as much ground as he does by reading more specialised works. He does a very impressive job. It reflects an increasing ascendancy of a new constellation of soft sciences (ecology, biology, history, economics) that I used to think of as fluff over physics since the latter has failed to find a Theory of Everything. Whenever I read anything by a physicist now I seem to eventually come to a reference to a "multiverse", which is a sure sign that I'm wasting my time. Tellingly, I note that the most recent prize to be awarded in the direction of physics (the Templeton) is from an organisation promoting "spirituality". Similarly, all of those neurologists and philosophers who write about consciousness have so far failed to land the big hit that would make their books as crucial as they sense that they ought to be.

Jared Diamond, on the other hand, has his own theory of everything that has relevance to my life. Like the author of A Short History of Progress, he is part of a new consensus of green politics backed by firm science and historical analysis, and it's this that's leading several of us to the "wind turbine" section of Yellow Pages.

Yesterday we were at a traditional museum in Lausanne, which had a floor full of stuffed animals, either arranged in little tableaux or in display cabinets. Zoe was upset by just how many animals had been killed to form the collection (the information desk couldn't give me an estimate of the number). It reminded me of the old joke:

Q: What's the difference between an engineer and a doctor?
A: Doctors kill in ones.

Confirming Jared Diamond's indisputable argument that humans are eliminating more species than any phenomenon since the extinction of the dinosaurs, a new UN report has found that in the last 50 years the number of large fish in the North Atlantic has fallen by two thirds, in the last 30 years the percentage of the Caribbean covered with hard coral has fallen from 50% to 10%, and 52% of the higher birds studied were in danger of extinction!! There's something for the girls to get vexed over!

When we arrived in Lausanne we first went to the cathedral, which, having read in Lonely Planet that it was "arguably the finest in Switzerland", I was very keen to visit. It has lovely stained glass, but that's not so unusual and the cathedral was no great shakes - in no way a match for the best in England, France or Italy. There is a program of restoration underway at the moment and much of it is covered in scaffolding. A spire rises above the scaffolding, which is boxed inside an (original) tower, but despite being unusual it doesn't catch the baroque appeal of a Hawsmoor church.

When we arrived in the foggy drizzle The girls popped into Claire's to gets some accessories (the awkward "A" word having being dropped from the shop name now that they're expanding) but we passed most of the day in three museums, which were exemplars of three museum styles.

The first one we visited was the design museum next to the cathedral. I wonder how long design museums will last, other than as an homage to the 1990's. This one was typical: kind of fun but, you do wonder how fascinating it can continue to be to arrange 20 pairs of standard orange-handled kitchen scissors in a display case and emblazon tired slogans on the walls about design being in everything and even "less is more". And these places all have so many chairs on display: they're a designer's fetish.

Our second museum was the one I've already mentioned with all of the animals: this was a proper museum that showed us things rather than didactically posting messages on explanatory boards. They even have displays of "monsters" like a two-headed calf that seem anachronistic now. These are museums for Peter Greenaway enthusiasts (like me). Heidi held the straightforward view that if you want to see these animals it would be better to visit them where they live rather than seeing them dead and stuffed, but she liked it anyway.

The third museum, a theme museum, was dedicated solely to the Olympics: the IOC is based in Lausanne. We enjoyed it, and after this and the Opium Hall in Thailand I'll be looking out for more theme museums. It was a little kitschy but you could see the torches from all of the historical Olympic cities, and real medals, and the gear worn and used by famous athletes.



The gardens to the front slope down to Lake Geneva, which had been covered in fog all day. As we left the Olympic museum and prepared to return to the chalet the sun started to break through. In the past I've been to Geneva a few times with work, if you can call speaking at or even simply attending a Risk conference work, and have liked nothing better than to be by the shore of the lake. It's also pleasant to drive above it as we do on the way from Geneva to Sion, but my very best memories are of riding past it on the train. In these parts of Europe the trains work well - even now the Swiss are investing heavily in new tunnels to improve their network still further - and you can have a fine, easy train journey from Geneva all the way to Milan. This is an example of where the French are right to criticise British economics. To our governments of the past several decades trains never made economic sense, and they say quite rightly that good trains wont draw most people from their cars. But that's not the point, is it. In rich societies such as ours I want some of the government's huge tax take to be spent on trains, over and above any economic or even environmental benefits, because a good rail network is an asset we ought to enjoy. Sometimes we need, to be human, to rise above narrow socio-economic transactions and do things for no other reason than that they enhance our lives with a measure of romance.

Posted: Wed - March 22, 2006 at 11:47 AM              

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