How the Rat Got his Bread, and other stories

(You should probably listen to Fyfe Dangerfield‘s album Fly Yellow Moon while you read this. Just because it’s good. It’s on Spotify.)

Eeerrrr… yeah, where was I? Oh, yeah, well it was quite an educational day really. We saw a sign that taught us all about different waterfowl in French:

Unfortunately most of the waterfowl I see in my daily life are from Devon and probably don’t speak French, so I still don’t know how to get their attention. There was one very useful cartoon, though, viz:

[The duck is saying: "Be reasonable, we're perfectly capable of feeding ourselves! Just get on with having your own fun. Thanks." The rat is saying: "Heh, heh, heh, I'm the one who benefits!"]

This taught us that:

1. contrary to claims made on The Big Bang Theory, ducks do after all have a need for, and the ability to use, umbrellas;
2. rats catch bread in butterfly nets, which I think is rather impressive and suggests they deserve it; and
3. they laugh by saying “hin, hin, hin”! Which I am going to adopt as my new laugh because it is brilliant.

Then we walked through a park where you can’t pick flowers wearing gloves or take flying half-dog-half-seahorse creatures on leads:

and where only beautiful women are allowed to use the toilets:

In the park were lots of exhibits to help kids (and tourists) Discover and Learn about, like, Nature and Tree Bark and Where Stuff Is and Clever Things We Can Do With Plants. It was cool.

Fran, Discovering.

And then, right, we came through the park and into Geneva’s Botanical Gardens, which are really, really good. There’s lots of good things to look at, and, even if what there is to look at is mainly plants and trees with their names on sticks next to them, as if they’ve all just arrived at a big plants and trees conference and are having a getting-to-know-you session, it still holds your attention for having so many very different plants and trees getting to know each other and for presenting them so well. There were elegant greenhouses like this:

containing big fat exotic palmy things with fronds like this:

and cute orangey flowery things like this:

Of course, I haven’t learnt what any of these things are called, but one step at a time, I think.

But OH MY DAYS, right? Because also at the Botanical Gardens was a BIG FREAKY STEAMPUNK CAROUSEL.

Do click on the image and look more closely. Why yes, that is a stork pulling a pram! And a trike with a mustard-coloured horse’s head on the front! Not to mention the ant with the red leather seat:

And for my money, a day out isn’t a day out until you’ve hung in a wicker basket from a flying clockwork frog.

I love it. I really do. You just don’t get this sort of joyful, defiant oddness making it into a kid’s day out in Britain. How cool would we be if you did, though, eh?

Then we had extremely nice pizza (mine was ratatouille pizza, which I didn’t know you could do but it turns out it’s gorgeous), and wandered on to other bits of Geneva, which I won’t bore you with, save to say that Geneva was, as always, quirky, enchanting, cosy and expensive. When Ffjgyeflgyefjlgyelfjyglejygefgjlef volcano calms down again you should go.

Fran looking cool by the lake.

A chap who sits above the door to a sports shop in the Old Town. Being Gondebaud, King of Burgundy looks like quite a tiring job.

I want a Vespa so VERY badly.

Funky wind rainbowy things in the windows of La Clemence (laclemence.ch), the pub in the Old Town that was my second home back in the day.

Men playing chess in the Parc des Bastions. This chap is losing but putting up a valiant fight, as I remember.

The graffiti is still good.

Geneva! It makes me happy!

So the other week* Fran (although actually she’s got a new blog now, with lots of pictures in, look) and I went to Geneva. Normally when I go to Geneva it’s because somebody wants to employ me to be a translator for a bit, but that hasn’t happened in nearly a year now (they send me work at home cos it’s cheaper; I’m happy cos the tea’s better here), and I’d been thinking I really rather missed the good friends I made out there. And then I thought, Hang On, Often When People Miss Them They Go And See Them, Don’t They? And Fran fancied the trip too, and the Easter holidays we coming up, so off we went.

(*This was before the Coolest Named Volcano In The World made us all go without vapour trails for however many weeks it’s going to be.)

Now, there’ve been quite a few Geneva pictures on this blog before now, and never yet have I managed to show you a good touristy picture of what the famous bits of Geneva look like. I want to say there’s some dee, arty reason for this; there isn’t. I just get a bit bored taking pictures of statues cos you always get tourists in the way taking pictures, and when I try to take cathedrals I never do them justice because no matter how beautiful they are in real life, by the time I’ve crammed them into a picture they just look out of shape and uncomfortable and badly fitted, like Geoff Capes in a Proper Mini.

Anyway, for this reason, you’re not getting a proper tour of Geneva but a tour of what happened on the first day of our holiday. Well, I shall start. Probably the story’s actually going to get broken up over the next few days as if I do it in one go (a) I’ll never get to bed and (b) you’ll never read to the end. That’s no slight on you, by the way; I know I wouldn’t be able to manage it myself.

So we were walking down by the lake, right, and we’d only been going about ten minutes when we saw something that made Fran very excited, like this:

What, you ask, could cause such excitement in one so young? I shall tell you. IT WAS AN ENORMOUS PIECE OF CRAFT. A genuinely huge figure, made out of… oh look I’ll just show you.

Look at him! It’s a robot, wearing a crown, and riding a horse, who is also a robot! Made of Bits And Bobs! He’s like the Friday night children’s-club cutting-and-sticking activity of your WILDEST DREAMS. His horse’s nose is made of fuses!

And its bottom is made of circuitboards (of course)!

He’s wearing a crown made out of, um… driiiinks?… caaaans? and has eyes made of… dear goodness me I don’t know what. Possibly dodgem steering wheels. Or some hideously cannibalised bits of loudspeaker.

Either way, THERE IS NOTHING ABOUT HIM THAT IS NOT BRILLIANT. And there he sits, triumphant, on an otherwise achingly genteel promenade by the lake in the very centre of Geneva. We did look around him to find out any info we could on who had made him and, in heaven’s name, why, but all we saw was this plaque:

Which, as I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you, says “Collective work given by the Public Establishments for Integration in gratitude to the people [of Geneva]“. Which could mean anything, but whoever these Establishments are, I wish them all the best, because this chap really is the best start to a holiday you could wish for.

Tomorrow, you may discover how a rat laughs, and what would happen if Tim Burton made fairground rides. Don’t touch that dial.

The snow, obviously

When I was a student I spent a year studying and doing cool Christian stuff in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia. One winter afternoon some Russian student friends and I got to talking about how cold it had to be in the various places we came from before they’d close the schools. Sergei was from Dagestan in the Caucasus, as far south and warm and Turkic as you can go and still be in Russia, so he somewhat apologetically kicked us off saying that where he was from they shut the schools when it got to -20C. I think Karina was from Kazan or somewhere like that – somewhere fairly central and continental – and she rather proudly said that where she came from they shut the schools when it reached -30C. Then Tanya suddenly looked as though, if there was ever a time to be proud of coming from Kazakhstan*, it was now, and said that there they didn’t shut the schools until it reached -40C. Her victory was shortlived, though, because pretty quickly Vovchik straightened himself into a more commanding storytelling position, cleared his throat and began:

“I remember one time growing up in Yakutsk, in the far east of Siberia, I was walking to school one morning and it was really weird – there was nobody about. I knew it wasn’t a holiday, and I was pretty sure it was, like, Monday, and not still the weekend, so it was a bit odd really. Anyway I got to school and I couldn’t get in – there was just the security guy on the gate. And I was like, what’s up? And he was like, school’s closed. And I was a bit worried now, so I was like, oh yeah, why’s that? And he said well haven’t you heard the radio? And I said no, and he said well they’ve closed all the schools today ’cause it’s minus fifty-nine!”

We all laughed. Vovchik settled back in his chair - there was no way anyone could beat that unless they’d been brought up on the moon - and then he asked the question I’d been apprehensive of since we’d started the topic:

“So Nathan, how cold does it have to be in England before they close the schools?”

“Um… Well there’s not an actual temperature as such… It’s more… they close the schools… er… when it snows?”

I’m not quite sure how the rest of the conversation went but I seem to remember nobody believing me. I think I must have stammered some explanation about how it never snows so we’re not really used to it, y’know, sold the gritters to China, global warming, trains, very narrow roads in the country…

But now, today, oh goodness me I don’t care IT’S SNOWING AND EVERYTHING’S STOPPED AND IT’S BRILLIANT. Snow in England is like grace in weather form: we didn’t do anything to deserve it, but here it is, covering all the litter and making everything uncommon and new and pretty, and sending us home from work early to throw snowballs and sledge down stuff and make snowmen like kids.

Because I live in Devon, where it really never snows (the rest of Britain had a white Christmas this year but not us), the last ONE DAY of snow has closed every school in the county – no really – so my housemate Christine was home and Fran, who’s learning to be a teacher and therefore spends lots of her time hanging around a college, was free and so we and our friend Iain said yar-boo-sucks to work for an hour and made a cool little snowman on our roof terrace. He’s only four feet tall (not like Karen and Conrad’s seven-foot giant [actually made by Pete]) but he’s smily chap and he’s called Boris. LOOK:

Boris

Anyway, it’s clearly bedtime and more, so I’ll get on with it. Stay safe, stay warm, don’t eat the yellow snow, but mainly have some fun. It’s inconvenient and you’ve got more important things to do but that’s like most of the best stuff really.

(*There are actually lots of times to be proud of coming from Kazakhstan. It’s arguably the most politically and relgiously free of all the central Asian republics and it’s got this gloriously silly shopping centre designed by Norman Foster.)

Clickety click, linkety link

Owight lovelies? I want to apologise for my silence but if I do I’ll just sound like the person described in this comic (to whom I am already perilously close), so you can have an explanation instead. And with photos, too, you lucky things. What it is is, is I have been on me ‘ollidies (or, for my TX readership, on vacation). I went with some friends from Geneva and some other mutual friends to a village called Samoens, in the French mountains, about an hour and a half outside Geneva. According to its website it’s “to falling in love with“, so you can see it can’t be bad.

We stayed in a big house

with a hammock

A RAINBOW coloured hammock with a WHOLE COW for a mat underneath. Clearly very effective, as you see.

and did all sorts of exciting things. One day we got all harnessed and fingerlessly gloved up like raggamuffins

Magda, a raggamuffin

and amused ourselves by nearly plummeting to our many and varied dooms on zip wires for a couple of hours.

Terror.

Ruddy brilliant.

Another day we got all dressed up like strong men in a Victorian circus and went white-water rafting.

Francoise, Adam, me and Gareth, all very strong.

Another day we went walking up near some huge big steep mountains, but we didn’t have to dress up funny for that one.

Breathtaking. Mags and Gareth are very very small in the bottom left. Normally they are normal size for people, so you can see how big the mountain was.

Then on a couple of evenings, back at the house, a keyboard was found, and Monkey Boy here was prevailed upon to sing some Divine Comedy and wheel out my increasingly unreliable Mika impression, a feat which makes me look like this:

Monkey Boy

and Gareth helped.

And Scribble the dog helped him help, which was very thoughtful.

All in all it were grand. Good food, good wine, good friends and, everywhere you looked, views to make this Fenlander’s eyes pop out on stalks.

So that’s the long and the short of why it’s been a bit quiet around here lately.

Ey, though, I’ve got a lovely couple of links for you. First off (and tip o’ the hat to Stew W. for this), Little Boots, whose recession-bustingly fun first single about going out on the cheap – brilliant – was one of the things that have made me feel pretty happy about pop music in recent months, has this thing on her YouTube channel where every week or so she records a cool little stripped down cover version of some hit or other. Have a nose around; there’s some gems. I especially like this version of Day and Night by Kid Cudi, and this version of Boyfriend by Alpha Beat which somehow manages to be very clearly just two kids having fun at their parents’ house and yet also very listenable and good.

In a rather more hi-tech take on the same idea, here’s my fellow Tennant wannabe Gary Go doing a haunting version of With Every Heartbeat by Robyn:

Finally, as our great island once again transitions seamlessly from lush, verdant spring to pale, windswept autumn without bothering with anything so common as an actual summer in the middle, here’s a combination of two of the most English things you could ever wish to hear: high Anglican chant and the weather forecast.

Oh, one last thing – slightly unfair of me to throw this out just as I’m about to finish and go to bed, but I think I may have had an actual prayer answered today. No, really. Now, I can’t go into great detail about this story as it involves other people’s living arrangements but Fran and I were having a (rather rare) good ol’ pray about a situation which was looking like it was going to go a bit rubbish. And then about an hour later a person (who’d been avoiding their phone calls for a couple of weeks) rang their house and said something that basically transformed the whole situation for the good. Sorry for the vagueness; other people’s accommodation, as I say, y’know. Now, for a Christian I can be quite sceptical about coincidences like this; I know all about confirmation bias and I naturally tend towards pessimism… but… well, it’s rather making me think. It’s making me think I want to do some more praying, at least. I mean. I’m not the sort that likes to get his hopes up (probably to a fault, I’ll admit) but what if this God and Jesus being at work in the world stuff is actually all true?

gushing

I fall for this season every time, I really do… Clearly you’ve all been listening to Eventually Yours on the Changing Tunes MySpace like I told you to and brought the sun out. Well done; give yourselves a pat on the collective cyber-back, because it’s been absolutely gorgeous.

So anyway, today me, Fran, Est, Jo and Iain (you may not know who these last three people are; rest assured they’re cool) decided it was far too sunny not to walk to Topsham, so we did. Just properly gorgeous, it was, today. I love this time of year. All burgeoning and busy and bright with yellow flowers straining at the sky and feisty birds shouting for territory and bees doing whatever it is bees do when they’re not having their honey stolen, buzzing, I suppose, although that’s hardly a job description, is it, and all egged on by the sun, which has come back from wherever the heck it was hiding last week all refreshed and up for a bit of good old-fashioned shining. Brilliant fun.

Previously, when I’ve written on here about rather liking the life I have down in Devon, some eyebrows that are attached to wise people (one wise person, at least) have been raised with the concern that I might be a bit too cozy having a sort of average, don’t-leave-the-house, don’t-take-risks, don’t-make-big-plans, comfortable, freelance translator lifestyle. And they’d have a point, those eyebrows would. That is a risk. After all, people call Exeter the graveyard of ambition, cos no-one ever leaves. But here’s the thing: I know I might not always live somewhere pretty. I know I follow a God for whom my being comfortable and within my depth is dizzyingly far down the ladder of priorities. I know that holding on lightly to cool things (like where and how I live at the moment) is far more fun than grabbing them tight and thinking the world will end if they go. But flippin’ ‘eck it’s fun being here now.

<END gushing>

Daffs springing up like links, more graffiti

So first off, I must eat a bit of humble pie. The other day I was all over my friend’s blog bemoaning the lack of daffs in Switzerland - and getting so upset, indeed, that I was missing out fairly important verbs like “have”, if you look closely. And then all of a sudden, what should I see as I walk towards work this lunchtime but a crowd, a host, of the shining blighters? Pleased me no end, that did. 

Also, I don’t want to belabour the point, but they do love their graffiti around here.

 Remember these guys?

 Well here’s a crowd, a host, of them, too:

 With a cactus! I like them. They look friendly. I’m off for a cuppa. It’s a hard life. (Though we were working till 11pm last night so I do feel a bit justified.)

P.S. By the way, these bigger pictures – better or worse? Nice to see more of stuff or takes a hundred years to load? Your call - you read this thing (for which thank you).

Just 24 little hours

As lovable jazz-Hobbit Jeremy Colon once noted, what a difference a day maaayyykes. On Friday the Geneva sky was grey and grubby, like a headache, hanging low over the roofs and sullenly hiding the mountains in case we looked at them too much instead of working. It gets like this sometimes. Geneva sits at the thin bottom end of a big lake valley, you see, and all the moisture and nastiness get squeezed into the little geographical hole it inhabits, like with the nasty corners in the kitchen that you can never quite get clean. Visibility goes down to nothing (but not in a fun, foggy way), the clouds are low and shapeless, the colour gets sucked out of every building and the lake goes the shade of an old, ooh, I dunno, anvil. Something metallic and dull. If you could describe colour as “muffled” that’d be what it’s like. But you can’t, so please don’t tell anyone I just did.

On Saturday, though, flippin’ ‘eck, what a change! Woke up to sun streaming through blinds, sapphire skies etc. Magic. It’s this wind called la bise, that’s what it is. “La bise” literally means “the kiss”, which shows that the Swiss have a much more keenly developed sense of irony than we give them credit for, and if I were much cleverer and more sciency than I am I could throw words like “katabatic” at you to explain what it is. I’m not, though, so basically, if any of the air in the Alps fancies going to the Med for a bit (and I can’t blame it; it’s ruddy freezing today), it has to squeeze through the aforementioned skinny little lake valley in which Geneva sits at pretty much the skinniest, littlest point (Alps to the left of us, Jura to the right, here we are…) to get where it wants to go. A bit like the M62 corridor but for weather. This means that whenever the wind comes from the north it gets very fast and sharp and bity, being, as it is, a katabatic little beggar (I wonder if “katabatic beggar” is a googlewhack?), but it also brings with it this suddenly, magically, impossibly clean, clear Alpine air. And suddenly mountains appear behind everything, like this:

 

And this:

 

Which is all terribly exciting.

 

I’ll tell you something else I’ve noticed this weekend. There are two types of Pretty in cities. First there’s your type that’s Supposed to be Pretty – that’s, like, usually the central bits of places, where there’s attractive old buildings, well cared for, and they’ve put in all cobbled streets and nice street lights and there’s blue plaques commemorating that Oliver Cromwell once drove past there very fast being chased by Royalists and that sort of thing. Now I like that – I could happily walk around those sorts of places all day and enjoy myself as long as there was a cup of tea and some shortcake waiting at the end of it. But there’s also another sort of Pretty which I think I like even more, and that’s the sort of Pretty where it’s not designed to be particularly attractive at all, but it’s just become so through the sheer loveliness and/or coolness of the people who live there.

 

 

Look at this place, for instance:

It’s an unprepossessing building on an industrial estate by the river that used to be a perfume factory, judging by its name, but now…

it’s a salsa venue! Among other things. How cool is that? Also, Genevans seem to love their graffiti.

 

I especially love that last one – which, incidentally, was on the side of another formerly boring building that’s been turned into an indie theatre. It’s an alien dreaming of love! Aawww… Not everyone likes him, though. Here’s what was written on the lovesick alien’s face:

 

“DEAR GRAFFITI ARTISTS AND TAGGERS

You have an artistic vision, which you are projecting onto our walls.

The thing is, we prefer to keep this walls and doors in bright, PLAIN colours.

That’s our right, and we are getting pretty fed up with painting them every time you’ve been round.

But make no mistake – we’ll carry on doing it. And this time we’ve reported it to the police.

So… if you’re listening…

Le Theatre du Loup”

 

Thing is, though: as I was taking that picture there was a friendly-looking older chap standing with a few friends, watching me. They smiled and I managed to stammer out something vaguely French-sounding about how it was a shame the kid had chosen to do his picture there, because it was clearly not the place for it but, in itself, it was rather beautiful, I reckoned. Chap smiled, and explained he was in fact the owner of the Theatre du Loup, and that the kid who’d done the picture had written the theatre a letter in reply, explaining a bit about who he was and saying sorry for messing their door up! He was just some local kid of 17, apparently, and not a particularly happy one, bless ‘im. Then the chap pointed across the road to the mural on the opposite wall, and explained they used to have loads of graffiti around that area until they’d got together all the local graffiti artists and got them to make this one, massive, colourful mural, and now they’ve not had to rub off any ugly tags and that for nearly ten years. Now, I know some people think official graffiti walls miss the point, and that they look a bit tame and embarrassing, like when your teachers wear jeans or Madonna tries to be cool by using the f-word, but I think in this case it’s a rather lovely - and terribly Swiss - solution. Go the Genevans.