Recreational Psychosis
22 - 28 Mar, Ian
The last seven days began with my birthday.
Single people might be interested to learn of a formula that my (single) friend
Steve told me to determine the minimum of age of any potential partner: you
halve your age and add seven. I don't think I'm giving away any big secrets by
disclosing that Paula clears the minimum age (28) to be an apt partner for me.
If you've set your heart on someone who is too young, the formula can also, of
course, be used to calculate how long you have to wait until time makes you a
good match, as eventually it must unless mortality overtakes the maths. In the
Buddhist cosmology the best age intervals are multiples of four years, and at an
age gap of twelve years partners, like JFK and Jackie, have the same birth sign,
which is supposedly auspicious. Putting the two theories together, if you want
to target a partner with the same Chinese sign you should either pick someone of
your own age or delay marriage until the elder of you and your partner is at
least 38.
I had a very pleasant birthday. The girls had made cards and I had a few nice gifts. Being away, I was also especially pleased to hear by phone, text and mail from friends from home: it's nice to feel remembered. After a lazy morning we spent the afternoon skiing. The snow was perfect, the sun shone and we all skied at our best. It was great to feel a sense of progress over the month, especially since at the back of my mind part of me feels that we should have arranged some ski coaching while we're here. But as we bombed tidily down slopes that we'd approached timidly when we arrived these doubts dissolved.
From Thyon we went straight to the thermal baths and treated our overworked muscles to an hour or two of what is sometimes, displaying a post-puritan imperative to mask every desire as a need, called "hydrotherapy". After that we had dinner at a cozy local restaurant in Evolene, where Zoe had a small fondue and the rest of us had various tasty pieces of meat cooked over a small open wood fire that burned atmospherically by the bar. I'd intended to watch a movie when we got back to the chalet but fatigue gently us all.
Over the next few nights we made up for it by watching three DVD's that Craig had brought over for us. The first was Oceans Eleven (the George Clooney version, not the old rat pack original), which we knew was good. The second was Oceans Twelve, which we enjoyed much more than Paula and I had when we'd seen it at the cinema. The third was Pearl Harbour. I hesitate to use superlatives but some days later I still can't recall seeing a movie that was worse, or even as bad. I can imagine that you could, in the right frame of mind, get some amusement from watching Ben Affleck trying to act (or is he intentionally parodying acting?) but only then if the movie was half its actual length (three hours!). I remember watching an old black-and-white war movie about Pearl Harbour as a boy, which ends, if my memory is accurate, with one of the Japanese generals ruefully commenting that "we have awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with terrible resolve". I watched out for the same line in this re-make. A variant of it came, but was only one of many squandered dramatic opportunities. I hope that someone coined some money from the film because I can think of no other reason for making it.
Like our movie-watching, our next few days' skiing dropped off. Thursday was okay but on Friday, for the first time this month, we had to ski back down to the car as soon as we'd reached the top of the second chair lift. Thick cloud sat on the mountain and dumped snow on us, and our sun glasses (we don't have goggles) constantly gathered mist and water on the inside of their lenses. On Saturday the cloud had gone and the sun was out. As we glided up over the forested hillside in the chair lift water under the snow could be heard melting: it sounded just like invisible rain. On the pistes the snow was starting to get slushy - and strangely sticky actually - and didn't flatter our technique as the ideal birthday snow had. By Sunday it was mushy and little fun so we decided finally to explore non-ski Switzerland.
On Monday morning we rose early, filled the car with petrol and set off on the motorway for Zurich, where I'd arranged to meet an old work friend for lunch. As soon as we left the petrol station and picked up speed along the valley the car started to judder, and when we got on the motorway and tried travelling at cruising speed it became much worse. We turned round and drove to the Europcar office in Sion. We'd hoped that they might just accept that the car ought not to be driven to Zurich and lend us another until they could look at it, or at least have one of their mechanics (for the office is based at a garage) check it over. Instead the receptionist sent us to another garage, who wanted nothing to do with it, and then, when we returned, told me I had to call the breakdown number given on the windscreen. Fortunately, they sent a mechanic round quickly. He drove the car for a couple of hundred yards, agreed that it juddered - he speculated that there might be dirt in the transmission - and shouldn't be taken on a long trip, and then he towed us to an Audi garage. There we were given a pink form, and since they had no spare cars to lend us, we took it and drove the car back to Europcar. With this paperwork, which did no more than confirm what they could have checked for themselves in two minutes, the receptionist agreed, after a couple of long calls with her colleagues, that we could have another car.
We were lucky in three respects. The first was that when I was put on the phone and asked about an "incident" on the 9th of March I had absolutely no idea what it could be. After the call Paula pointed out to me that the guy whose car sustained an invisible scratch must have reported it to Europcar - since he never called us back I'd assumed that he'd reconciled himself to the reality that there was no damage and I'd forgotten all about it. The Europcar phone woman seemed relieved by my honest ignorance and told me that if there had been any sort of incident she wouldn't have been able to approve a replacement car (what would they have done?). Our second stroke of luck was that the car that they had available was an Audi A6 4X4. We had liked the A4 4X4 well enough but the A6 was much nicer: the girls have been very appreciative of the leather seats, the greater cabin space and the info screen mounted in the centre of the dashboard. Our third lucky break was that we had returned to Sion rather than advanced to the next Europcar office in Brig, as I might easily have done. We discovered later that the French/German language border lies between the two towns, and most of the people I'd had to speak with (the receptionist, the breakdown service, two mechanics) had been unwilling or unable to try any English, and I have no German at all.
Luck or no luck, we lost two or three hours and weren't ever going to get to Zurich by lunchtime. As it turned out, we wondered whether we would make Zurich at all. The route that I'd chosen from a very vague Lonely Planet map of Switzerland took us across the Alps. The roads, which I'd assumed incorrectly were major ones, wound up into the mountains and from an early stage in our ascent we passed road signs giving the status of the various passes. Thinking that we had a number of route options I ignored them all, but as we drove further I realised (1) that our number of road routes was no greater than three, (2) that if these were all inaccessible we would have no better plan than to return all the way to Sion and head out in a completely different way and (3) every sign indicated that all of the passes were closed. By now we were driving through pretty towns (Munster was particularly attractive), with ski lifts and cross country pistes to either side of us. The road cut through white fields and at the roadside the snow rose to between three and five feet. Finally, at a railway station with an information sign I pulled in to inquire about our options. We were lucky again: it turned out that the station had a car train, which was the only way we could progress.
It was very Swiss. Faced with high mountains often rendered impassible by snow most countries would either do nothing or build a road tunnel. In post-Thatcher Britain we would, I'm sure, have contracted out the job to a road builder, subsidising them richly to build tunnels from which no public profits would ever accrue; and if their tunnels ever did open they would be frequently clogged up with broken-down cars or closed due to faulty infrastructure. The Swiss, though, have bored out tunnels in which instead of having roads they run trains on which you travel in your parked car. The trains are very simple - open-sided, partially covered metal wagons that could have been built with Meccano - and they run at a fair speed. So long as they are long enough and frequent enough to avoid long waits it's a good system. When we arrived the next train was due in 40 minutes, which gave us just enough time for a decent Alpine lunch in the station cafe.
Irrationally, I was a little nervous as the train pulled away because the A6 is secured with a push-button hand brake rather than a brake that needs your reassuring tug; but it really works, and the car didn't slide around and crash into the car behind or in front.
At the other end we emerged into a new Switzerland in which the chalet homes were the same but the snow was replaced by evergreen hills and grassy green fields. Heidi might have felt more at home here. When we weren't enclosed by long (road) tunnels, there were often huge and picturesque blue lakes at the roadside. Trying to make up a little time, I ran into another instance of Swiss efficiency, receiving a 60 Swiss Franc on-the-spot speeding fine. We arrived in Zurich by mid-afternoon and checked into the Swissotel, which is out of the centre but right by a railway station from which constantly-arriving double-decker trains whisk you into the heart of things in seven minutes.
Since we've been in Switzerland we have benefited greatly from the unseasonal weather, being able to ski far more than we could reasonably have expected. On our compressed Swiss tour the weather was now against us, and instead of enjoying a fresh spring day in Zurich we had to trudge through it under cold grey skies. I've had only happy times in Zurich and I like it anyway (and in truth I like rain) but it was not the best introduction for the girls. But while the city may not have been at its fairest we really liked catching up with our friend Juerg, having drinks, while the rain held off, at a table by the river and then moving on, when the girls' hunger overcame them, for an early dinner. It was good for me to talk with another person with whom I've worked closely in the past, and it was a relief that the girls were able to spend an extended period of time in the company of a Swiss person who isn't mad.
We caught up a little with news of friends and colleagues. One guy we used to work with, I learned, whose only discernible professional qualities are the abilities to talk quickly and to act without the fetters of taste or probity, having being sacked as CEO of a public company by the Board speculated in another company and made himself a handy $200 Million of personal profit. This isn't as unusual as you might think. A few years ago a guy I knew in Zurich told me over dinner that the private bank of which he has since become the CEO has a facility on the Bahnhof-Strasse (Zurich's largest and fanciest shopping street) where clients can refresh themselves and their families. To qualify for entry clients must have at least $100 Million of assets under management with the bank.
Yesterday we awoke to heavy rain. I started my day with a most pleasant breakfast at The Savoy with another friend from work and returned to discuss how we should pass our time. Personally, I would have favoured a "museums and architecture" tour of the town - one of the cathedrals has stained glass windows by Marc Chagall that I particularly wanted to catch - but it's a tough sell to girls who want to stay dry. So we checked out of the Swissotel and decided to see if conditions in Luzern were any more favourable.
They weren't. Luzern is an easy drive from Zurich and is a smaller but perhaps equally attractive city. Its other draw for us that it's the best place in Switzerland to buy a cuckoo clock. When we stayed in Mountain View Lodge in Fairbanks in August we'd loved the clocks there, including a cuckoo clock, and since them we've been planning to get one. And we did! Nothing too fancy, just a simple mechanical clock with the inevitable pine cone weights (which are so important to the genre that they retain faux weights on the battery-operated models) with a painted face and a model goat: kitchen kitsch. Other than that, we had lunch, walked around a little, crossing the ancient wooden Chapel Bridge over the lake before being again defeated by the rain and driving off to the Jungfrau area.
We reached Interlaken in time for afternoon tea and cakes. If the weather had been clear we would have taken the train up to Jungfraujoch and if there was calm and settled snow we would have stayed overnight at Grindelwald. But the area, like the whole of Central Europe apparently, was blanketed in cloud, and at over 2,000 metres there were blizzard conditions. As well as being Europe's highest railway station, Jungfraujoch competes aggressively for the title of the most expensive so we decided to save it as an adventure for another time. While we were checking out the weather reports in a hostel shop (Balmers) in Interlaken the owner came and introduced himself to us. For no better reason than goodwill and eccentricity he invited us each to choose, gratis, one from his range of quality t-shirts and gave us each a metal water bottle with a Grolsch-style cap to take home.
Looking at the roadmap with a newly educated eye, I saw that we could return to Valais by a direct route across the Alps, taking another car train. This time we turned off all of our lights and travelled through the mountain tunnel in the dark, illuminated only by the interior lights of the cars ahead and behind us. It was like a ghost train ride. Quite soon, after having had breakfast in Zurich, lunch in Luzern and afternoon tea in Interlaken we arrived back in time for dinner at Chalet Rosalie, where we had tasty steaks from the Coop.
Whenever I'm at a supermarket checkout I wonder what it would be like to live for a week off the goods chosen by the person ahead of me in the line. I've never simply gone and duplicated a stranger's trolley load but I do go through phases of buying something I've never tried before every time I shop. It's a soft and simple form of travel. When I had my first proper job I also used to do voluntary work with the mentally ill. The people I met with were all under treatment and I only rarely went to the psychiatric hospital so I had little direct experience of their psychotic episodes, and I'm no authority on the symptomatology of mental illness. One thing that struck me, though, as I chatted or worked or played darts with them was how disconnected they all were from the normal stories that we all ordinarily discuss with our kith and kin. They didn't seem to read books or newspapers or watch movies or even catch the soaps, and their only work was with each other: consequently they seemed to float apart from the fabric of society. I don't think that this was directly to do with their illnesses: I've known several more privileged people who have had similar conditions, none of whom has been this way. Rather it was to do with the fact that they were people who had never been given any chances in life and who had fallen, like ball bearings through the pins in a pachinko machine, to the lowest socioeconomic classes where their illnesses had only made their problems worse. Mind you, many of them had jolly dispositions and dealt more rosily with life than the most fortunate, as you'd know if you'd ever had to tell a large sample of people the news regarding their absurdly large bonuses.
In a gentle way I sometimes feel a sense of social/neurological disconnection when we travel. I've remarked on, it in other words, at a number of places (Maine springs to mind). Apart from alcohol, I'm not a drug user and trips are becoming my trips. I don't know how you can avoid feeling this way when discussing "Heidi Haus" cuckoo clocks in a country of around 7 million people who between them have about half a million semi-automatic weapons tidily stuffed into the back of their home closets. The guy who ranted angrily on about his phantom bumper scratch could have been an unrefined Tom Ripley.
For a form of disconnection from reality that I can continue to enjoy at home there's always "the news". There should be a warning stamped into the footer of the Daily Mail and embedded in the omnipresent logos of BBC World and CNN that "The News" is not The News. When I last wrote I mentioned the recent UN Report on the far higher than expected species extinction rate. This not only missed the front page of the Daily Mail - it didn't even merit inclusion in the remaining 79 pages either. Since then there has been a report in Science that sea levels are rising far faster than previously thought. Although the report forecasts out to 2500 it indicates, if I read The Guardian's summary correctly, that sea levels could rise by 20 feet, wiping out many areas of England, by 2100 - well within our grandchildren's lifetime - and be irreversible within a decade from now. Far more strenuous action than hitherto believed or currently planned is needed to avert this, the report argues. I first spotted this story on a streaming ticker on BBC World, where it received no greater coverage. Also the European Environmental Agency just reported that the benefits accruing from cleaner fuel and more efficient cars have been completely offset by increased car use and a huge rise in road freight. And our government has now had to admit that it will be miss its commitment, given in three consecutive manifestos, to cut greenhouse gas levels by 20% over the decade ending in 2010. This last story was the only one, as far as I can tell here, to get any serious airtime. This isn't because it's the most deserving of the bunch but because it's the only one that fits into the ding-dong adversarial agenda of the main parties' PR operations.
The News is not the news. As I grumbled in the blog I wrote on the eve of departure for our trip, news programs are simply games shows in which the beautiful people of the BBC and CNN present press releases from the mainstream parties. What proper journalists - James Cameron, Alastair Cooke, Robert Fisk - have always done is completely different from this. And you can still get the real news, it's just not obtained from The News, which is another anodyne branch of the entertainment industry. In our Swissotel room two nights ago we quickly flicked through the BBC 1 and BBC 2 TV channels, which were available to us for the first time since we left home, and immediately gave up on them. Instead I listened to Radio 4, which offered, in sequence, a documentary about the testing process of a new AIDS drug, a documentary about the burgeoning IT industry in nominally Communist Calcutta, and Start the Week, an intelligent arts miscellany hosted by Andrew Marr. It's these kinds of programmes where they seem to transfer the information, analysis and human stories that have been leached out of the news.
I had a very pleasant birthday. The girls had made cards and I had a few nice gifts. Being away, I was also especially pleased to hear by phone, text and mail from friends from home: it's nice to feel remembered. After a lazy morning we spent the afternoon skiing. The snow was perfect, the sun shone and we all skied at our best. It was great to feel a sense of progress over the month, especially since at the back of my mind part of me feels that we should have arranged some ski coaching while we're here. But as we bombed tidily down slopes that we'd approached timidly when we arrived these doubts dissolved.
From Thyon we went straight to the thermal baths and treated our overworked muscles to an hour or two of what is sometimes, displaying a post-puritan imperative to mask every desire as a need, called "hydrotherapy". After that we had dinner at a cozy local restaurant in Evolene, where Zoe had a small fondue and the rest of us had various tasty pieces of meat cooked over a small open wood fire that burned atmospherically by the bar. I'd intended to watch a movie when we got back to the chalet but fatigue gently us all.
Over the next few nights we made up for it by watching three DVD's that Craig had brought over for us. The first was Oceans Eleven (the George Clooney version, not the old rat pack original), which we knew was good. The second was Oceans Twelve, which we enjoyed much more than Paula and I had when we'd seen it at the cinema. The third was Pearl Harbour. I hesitate to use superlatives but some days later I still can't recall seeing a movie that was worse, or even as bad. I can imagine that you could, in the right frame of mind, get some amusement from watching Ben Affleck trying to act (or is he intentionally parodying acting?) but only then if the movie was half its actual length (three hours!). I remember watching an old black-and-white war movie about Pearl Harbour as a boy, which ends, if my memory is accurate, with one of the Japanese generals ruefully commenting that "we have awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with terrible resolve". I watched out for the same line in this re-make. A variant of it came, but was only one of many squandered dramatic opportunities. I hope that someone coined some money from the film because I can think of no other reason for making it.
Like our movie-watching, our next few days' skiing dropped off. Thursday was okay but on Friday, for the first time this month, we had to ski back down to the car as soon as we'd reached the top of the second chair lift. Thick cloud sat on the mountain and dumped snow on us, and our sun glasses (we don't have goggles) constantly gathered mist and water on the inside of their lenses. On Saturday the cloud had gone and the sun was out. As we glided up over the forested hillside in the chair lift water under the snow could be heard melting: it sounded just like invisible rain. On the pistes the snow was starting to get slushy - and strangely sticky actually - and didn't flatter our technique as the ideal birthday snow had. By Sunday it was mushy and little fun so we decided finally to explore non-ski Switzerland.
On Monday morning we rose early, filled the car with petrol and set off on the motorway for Zurich, where I'd arranged to meet an old work friend for lunch. As soon as we left the petrol station and picked up speed along the valley the car started to judder, and when we got on the motorway and tried travelling at cruising speed it became much worse. We turned round and drove to the Europcar office in Sion. We'd hoped that they might just accept that the car ought not to be driven to Zurich and lend us another until they could look at it, or at least have one of their mechanics (for the office is based at a garage) check it over. Instead the receptionist sent us to another garage, who wanted nothing to do with it, and then, when we returned, told me I had to call the breakdown number given on the windscreen. Fortunately, they sent a mechanic round quickly. He drove the car for a couple of hundred yards, agreed that it juddered - he speculated that there might be dirt in the transmission - and shouldn't be taken on a long trip, and then he towed us to an Audi garage. There we were given a pink form, and since they had no spare cars to lend us, we took it and drove the car back to Europcar. With this paperwork, which did no more than confirm what they could have checked for themselves in two minutes, the receptionist agreed, after a couple of long calls with her colleagues, that we could have another car.
We were lucky in three respects. The first was that when I was put on the phone and asked about an "incident" on the 9th of March I had absolutely no idea what it could be. After the call Paula pointed out to me that the guy whose car sustained an invisible scratch must have reported it to Europcar - since he never called us back I'd assumed that he'd reconciled himself to the reality that there was no damage and I'd forgotten all about it. The Europcar phone woman seemed relieved by my honest ignorance and told me that if there had been any sort of incident she wouldn't have been able to approve a replacement car (what would they have done?). Our second stroke of luck was that the car that they had available was an Audi A6 4X4. We had liked the A4 4X4 well enough but the A6 was much nicer: the girls have been very appreciative of the leather seats, the greater cabin space and the info screen mounted in the centre of the dashboard. Our third lucky break was that we had returned to Sion rather than advanced to the next Europcar office in Brig, as I might easily have done. We discovered later that the French/German language border lies between the two towns, and most of the people I'd had to speak with (the receptionist, the breakdown service, two mechanics) had been unwilling or unable to try any English, and I have no German at all.
Luck or no luck, we lost two or three hours and weren't ever going to get to Zurich by lunchtime. As it turned out, we wondered whether we would make Zurich at all. The route that I'd chosen from a very vague Lonely Planet map of Switzerland took us across the Alps. The roads, which I'd assumed incorrectly were major ones, wound up into the mountains and from an early stage in our ascent we passed road signs giving the status of the various passes. Thinking that we had a number of route options I ignored them all, but as we drove further I realised (1) that our number of road routes was no greater than three, (2) that if these were all inaccessible we would have no better plan than to return all the way to Sion and head out in a completely different way and (3) every sign indicated that all of the passes were closed. By now we were driving through pretty towns (Munster was particularly attractive), with ski lifts and cross country pistes to either side of us. The road cut through white fields and at the roadside the snow rose to between three and five feet. Finally, at a railway station with an information sign I pulled in to inquire about our options. We were lucky again: it turned out that the station had a car train, which was the only way we could progress.
It was very Swiss. Faced with high mountains often rendered impassible by snow most countries would either do nothing or build a road tunnel. In post-Thatcher Britain we would, I'm sure, have contracted out the job to a road builder, subsidising them richly to build tunnels from which no public profits would ever accrue; and if their tunnels ever did open they would be frequently clogged up with broken-down cars or closed due to faulty infrastructure. The Swiss, though, have bored out tunnels in which instead of having roads they run trains on which you travel in your parked car. The trains are very simple - open-sided, partially covered metal wagons that could have been built with Meccano - and they run at a fair speed. So long as they are long enough and frequent enough to avoid long waits it's a good system. When we arrived the next train was due in 40 minutes, which gave us just enough time for a decent Alpine lunch in the station cafe.
Irrationally, I was a little nervous as the train pulled away because the A6 is secured with a push-button hand brake rather than a brake that needs your reassuring tug; but it really works, and the car didn't slide around and crash into the car behind or in front.
At the other end we emerged into a new Switzerland in which the chalet homes were the same but the snow was replaced by evergreen hills and grassy green fields. Heidi might have felt more at home here. When we weren't enclosed by long (road) tunnels, there were often huge and picturesque blue lakes at the roadside. Trying to make up a little time, I ran into another instance of Swiss efficiency, receiving a 60 Swiss Franc on-the-spot speeding fine. We arrived in Zurich by mid-afternoon and checked into the Swissotel, which is out of the centre but right by a railway station from which constantly-arriving double-decker trains whisk you into the heart of things in seven minutes.
Since we've been in Switzerland we have benefited greatly from the unseasonal weather, being able to ski far more than we could reasonably have expected. On our compressed Swiss tour the weather was now against us, and instead of enjoying a fresh spring day in Zurich we had to trudge through it under cold grey skies. I've had only happy times in Zurich and I like it anyway (and in truth I like rain) but it was not the best introduction for the girls. But while the city may not have been at its fairest we really liked catching up with our friend Juerg, having drinks, while the rain held off, at a table by the river and then moving on, when the girls' hunger overcame them, for an early dinner. It was good for me to talk with another person with whom I've worked closely in the past, and it was a relief that the girls were able to spend an extended period of time in the company of a Swiss person who isn't mad.
We caught up a little with news of friends and colleagues. One guy we used to work with, I learned, whose only discernible professional qualities are the abilities to talk quickly and to act without the fetters of taste or probity, having being sacked as CEO of a public company by the Board speculated in another company and made himself a handy $200 Million of personal profit. This isn't as unusual as you might think. A few years ago a guy I knew in Zurich told me over dinner that the private bank of which he has since become the CEO has a facility on the Bahnhof-Strasse (Zurich's largest and fanciest shopping street) where clients can refresh themselves and their families. To qualify for entry clients must have at least $100 Million of assets under management with the bank.
Yesterday we awoke to heavy rain. I started my day with a most pleasant breakfast at The Savoy with another friend from work and returned to discuss how we should pass our time. Personally, I would have favoured a "museums and architecture" tour of the town - one of the cathedrals has stained glass windows by Marc Chagall that I particularly wanted to catch - but it's a tough sell to girls who want to stay dry. So we checked out of the Swissotel and decided to see if conditions in Luzern were any more favourable.
They weren't. Luzern is an easy drive from Zurich and is a smaller but perhaps equally attractive city. Its other draw for us that it's the best place in Switzerland to buy a cuckoo clock. When we stayed in Mountain View Lodge in Fairbanks in August we'd loved the clocks there, including a cuckoo clock, and since them we've been planning to get one. And we did! Nothing too fancy, just a simple mechanical clock with the inevitable pine cone weights (which are so important to the genre that they retain faux weights on the battery-operated models) with a painted face and a model goat: kitchen kitsch. Other than that, we had lunch, walked around a little, crossing the ancient wooden Chapel Bridge over the lake before being again defeated by the rain and driving off to the Jungfrau area.
We reached Interlaken in time for afternoon tea and cakes. If the weather had been clear we would have taken the train up to Jungfraujoch and if there was calm and settled snow we would have stayed overnight at Grindelwald. But the area, like the whole of Central Europe apparently, was blanketed in cloud, and at over 2,000 metres there were blizzard conditions. As well as being Europe's highest railway station, Jungfraujoch competes aggressively for the title of the most expensive so we decided to save it as an adventure for another time. While we were checking out the weather reports in a hostel shop (Balmers) in Interlaken the owner came and introduced himself to us. For no better reason than goodwill and eccentricity he invited us each to choose, gratis, one from his range of quality t-shirts and gave us each a metal water bottle with a Grolsch-style cap to take home.
Looking at the roadmap with a newly educated eye, I saw that we could return to Valais by a direct route across the Alps, taking another car train. This time we turned off all of our lights and travelled through the mountain tunnel in the dark, illuminated only by the interior lights of the cars ahead and behind us. It was like a ghost train ride. Quite soon, after having had breakfast in Zurich, lunch in Luzern and afternoon tea in Interlaken we arrived back in time for dinner at Chalet Rosalie, where we had tasty steaks from the Coop.
Whenever I'm at a supermarket checkout I wonder what it would be like to live for a week off the goods chosen by the person ahead of me in the line. I've never simply gone and duplicated a stranger's trolley load but I do go through phases of buying something I've never tried before every time I shop. It's a soft and simple form of travel. When I had my first proper job I also used to do voluntary work with the mentally ill. The people I met with were all under treatment and I only rarely went to the psychiatric hospital so I had little direct experience of their psychotic episodes, and I'm no authority on the symptomatology of mental illness. One thing that struck me, though, as I chatted or worked or played darts with them was how disconnected they all were from the normal stories that we all ordinarily discuss with our kith and kin. They didn't seem to read books or newspapers or watch movies or even catch the soaps, and their only work was with each other: consequently they seemed to float apart from the fabric of society. I don't think that this was directly to do with their illnesses: I've known several more privileged people who have had similar conditions, none of whom has been this way. Rather it was to do with the fact that they were people who had never been given any chances in life and who had fallen, like ball bearings through the pins in a pachinko machine, to the lowest socioeconomic classes where their illnesses had only made their problems worse. Mind you, many of them had jolly dispositions and dealt more rosily with life than the most fortunate, as you'd know if you'd ever had to tell a large sample of people the news regarding their absurdly large bonuses.
In a gentle way I sometimes feel a sense of social/neurological disconnection when we travel. I've remarked on, it in other words, at a number of places (Maine springs to mind). Apart from alcohol, I'm not a drug user and trips are becoming my trips. I don't know how you can avoid feeling this way when discussing "Heidi Haus" cuckoo clocks in a country of around 7 million people who between them have about half a million semi-automatic weapons tidily stuffed into the back of their home closets. The guy who ranted angrily on about his phantom bumper scratch could have been an unrefined Tom Ripley.
For a form of disconnection from reality that I can continue to enjoy at home there's always "the news". There should be a warning stamped into the footer of the Daily Mail and embedded in the omnipresent logos of BBC World and CNN that "The News" is not The News. When I last wrote I mentioned the recent UN Report on the far higher than expected species extinction rate. This not only missed the front page of the Daily Mail - it didn't even merit inclusion in the remaining 79 pages either. Since then there has been a report in Science that sea levels are rising far faster than previously thought. Although the report forecasts out to 2500 it indicates, if I read The Guardian's summary correctly, that sea levels could rise by 20 feet, wiping out many areas of England, by 2100 - well within our grandchildren's lifetime - and be irreversible within a decade from now. Far more strenuous action than hitherto believed or currently planned is needed to avert this, the report argues. I first spotted this story on a streaming ticker on BBC World, where it received no greater coverage. Also the European Environmental Agency just reported that the benefits accruing from cleaner fuel and more efficient cars have been completely offset by increased car use and a huge rise in road freight. And our government has now had to admit that it will be miss its commitment, given in three consecutive manifestos, to cut greenhouse gas levels by 20% over the decade ending in 2010. This last story was the only one, as far as I can tell here, to get any serious airtime. This isn't because it's the most deserving of the bunch but because it's the only one that fits into the ding-dong adversarial agenda of the main parties' PR operations.
The News is not the news. As I grumbled in the blog I wrote on the eve of departure for our trip, news programs are simply games shows in which the beautiful people of the BBC and CNN present press releases from the mainstream parties. What proper journalists - James Cameron, Alastair Cooke, Robert Fisk - have always done is completely different from this. And you can still get the real news, it's just not obtained from The News, which is another anodyne branch of the entertainment industry. In our Swissotel room two nights ago we quickly flicked through the BBC 1 and BBC 2 TV channels, which were available to us for the first time since we left home, and immediately gave up on them. Instead I listened to Radio 4, which offered, in sequence, a documentary about the testing process of a new AIDS drug, a documentary about the burgeoning IT industry in nominally Communist Calcutta, and Start the Week, an intelligent arts miscellany hosted by Andrew Marr. It's these kinds of programmes where they seem to transfer the information, analysis and human stories that have been leached out of the news.
Posted: Tue - March 28, 2006 at 10:18 PM
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Published On: Mar 29, 2006 10:52 AM
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Published On: Mar 29, 2006 10:52 AM