Dog today, gone tomorrow: panic stricken Annie

The Cavalier King Charles Obituaries Part I

Annie and Muffin were our first two Cavaliers. Annie was named after Anneka Rice. Don’t ask me why, that’s one of the mysteries of the universe and I fear I may have been to blame. Our parents bought Annie and Muffin from a Cavalier breeder when they were very young. Muffin was underage, only five weeks old (puppies are not supposed to leave their mothers until they are at least six weeks old), and Annie was only a couple of weeks older than that. Annie was a Tricolour – black, tan and white. Tricolours are supposed to be patchy, with a white stripe down the middle of their noses that forms a spoon shape on their foreheads. Annie was more like a screwed up Black and Tan. She was almost completely black apart from her white socks and tail. She had a black face with two furious Scotsman-ginger eyebrows. She was also completely nuts.

Annie was a literal stress puppy. We used to know a woman we called Wailing Aileen, because all she ever did was panic at the top of her voice and wring her hands. That’s what Annie was like too. I’ve never met a dog with a worse temperament. She was in a constant state of nervous panic. She was a complete biscuit freak. The dog needed Valium. She expended so much nervous energy she was as thin as a twig.

Annie’s developmental upbringing with my sister and I was a downward spiral of provocation/reaction. Muffin was as staid and calm as a miniature Buddha, but Annie could be wound up like a spring and shot off in any particular direction we chose. Because she was easy to tease with such rewarding results, we played with her constantly using sticks, balls, and bits of rope. Our favourite game was tugging-ears-and-paws. Tug the left ear, then the right, then the left paw, then the right, make the pattern random and continue ad infinitum. It drove her absolutely insane. She was a gentle creature and she’d yap and growl and mouth our hands as she tried to catch our moving fingers, getting more and more excited until she flipped and gave us a gentle bite. When we tried to play that game with Muffin, she’d just sniff our hands and look bemused.

They say dogs look like their owners, well Annie looked like King Charles II himself. Though the rest of her coat was short and wiry she had the longest black curly ears. They almost reached the floor, and they were always filthy from her dragging them in food and charging around the garden – sticky weed, what a nightmare, and in the winter she used to gather little snowballs in them. My dad took to giving her a haircut every couple of months to keep them under control. It gave her ears a lot of volume; she looked like a dog with a permed bob, late eighties style.

Because Annie was so excitable, the only way she could escape from herself was by hiding under the settee. Of course we tried to drag her out from under there, but she got very adept at manoeuvring away from us at top speed by crawling on her belly. Sometimes she’d steal my sister’s dummy and chew it under there, but when we tried to catch her, she’d turn upside down and propel herself away by pushing her feet against the bottom of the settee. Other times, she’d fall asleep and be so quiet when guests came around they never knew she was there, until she let out a huge rumbling snore that sounded like a fart and ruined any pretensions of class in our household.

Annie talked too. When people came to the door, she’d get so excited and yappy you could barely hear above her noise. Visitors would greet her with a “hello,” and she’d reply in a bow-wow: “haw-oooww!” usually followed by an excited sneeze.

Annie’s defining moment was at Colwick park. My sister and I were playing on the lake edge, and I walked out onto one of the corners of a T-shaped jetty. Annie was bounding around on the grass and I called to her. She came racing over at ninety miles an hour in typical fashion. I expected her to stop at the bank, but instead she leapt – sailed through the air, and damn her she almost made it. But only almost. She executed a resounding belly flop into the lake and swam out to meet me, howling and wailing in astonishment, before turning back and struggling up the bank. I was bent double in stitches. The amazing part was, she’d never been swimming before!

Annie didn’t live very long. She was only around two years old when she died. A classic tragic figure, it was the flaw of her own nervousness that killed her. She’d never been a good traveller. In fact, she wailed constantly and tried to hide under the back seat of the car and it made family trips extremely tense affairs. We went on holiday to Wales, and the journey back was on a hot day. She seemed fine at the motorway services; she drank water and walked around cheerfully enough, wagging her tail. But back in the car, Annie wailed and wailed and stuffed herself further and further under the back seat. The stress must have been too much for her. When we got home she seemed distressed and shaky, my mum carried her up the drive, and she says she just felt her go.

My mum laid her down in the hallway, and she didn’t know what to do, she was just panicking, I came in, Annie wasn’t breathing. I took hold of her and just shook and shook and smacked her back in a terrified attempt to shock her to life, and then my dad came in and told me to stop. He tried giving her CPR. Nothing made any difference. She’d shit herself. She was already dead. A heart attack, an embolism, we weren’t quite sure. We buried her in the back garden the same day. It was like losing a person. For two weeks we were in constant tears, grieving, simply couldn’t believe what had happened.

Crazy Nottingham

Well, it’s definitely not like living in Nice. I haven’t been blogging because there has been so much disturbance in my life lately; my family live here and so do my friends, and I bought a plethora of hard to get hold of nutrition books from Amazon as soon as I got back to the UK, so this is how I’ve been spending my time.

Hen Triangle

We started calling Nottingham “Crazy Nottingham” about a week after moving in. In the four or five years since I lived here, Nottingham has changed a lot. There was some case law apparently, and it’s set a precedent. There are more pubs and clubs than ever, all with late licenses, and they are bussing people in from Birmingham, Derby, Leicester and Sheffield to fill them.

We’re living on Theatre Square. To our left is the notorious trouble-pub Long Island, eighties bar Reflex and seventies bar Flares, ahead is Mode, (who recently installed the most annoying outdoor strobe light), the Theatre Royal and the Concert Hall (where only two nights ago all hell broke loose with the visit of a big time boy band), behind that Rock City, and to our right are several karaoke pubs and The Cornerhouse building where pikey teenagers flock to watch Hollywood blockbusters.

In short, we’re in the direct epicentre of the entire Midlands Stag and Hen triangle. It’s like a blast zone. Every Friday and Saturday night a series of black or white limousines pull up outside the Concert Hall and let out hordes of staggering slappers dressed in L plates, wedding veils, nurse’s uniforms and devil horns. Different groups of hens get into fights with each other, pecking and flapping and squawking. We have a friend who lives in London: he came to visit us in Nottingham and he was shocked. He has never seen anything like this. They queue for miles here to be let in to the late-license bars. Groups of shaven-headed men on the prowl leer and jeer at the blubbery mountains of exposed thigh and cleavage, and take photos on their picture phones. J. has taken to staring out of the window in disbelief at the crazy folk outside. “Scum,” he mutters under his breath at irregular intervals.

The Displacing Foods of Modern Commerce (another rant)

Every time I get a decaf (the coffee drinker’s methadone) in Café Nero or Starbucks, I lose a little more hope. I watch a succession of mothers with buggies feed their children atrocious pieces of carbohydrate: low fat “skinny” blueberry muffins, sugar coated Danishes, pain au chocolat, fake-apple pastries (the gelatinous chunks are actually made of agar-agar from seaweed). One woman fed her boy an entire bag of chocolate coins followed by a muffin, which he threw on the floor. Another fed her boy low fat high-sugar yoghurt followed by a piece of chocolate cake. Jesus Christ, and they wonder why their kids are screaming. This didn’t happen in Nice. Children didn’t go to coffee shops; they went to brasseries where they were fed real food. Children were quiet in Nice, and if they weren’t, they were invariably the children of tourists. All of these children I see acting up in the coffee shops have the same features: poor bone structure, underdeveloped jaws, narrow faces, big foreheads. They look malnourished. It’s because they’re not getting enough fat-soluble vitamins. When these kids grow up they will need orthodontics to correct their poor facial development. Feeding your kids junk foods means they literally grow up ugly; undershot jaws, big foreheads, stub noses, asymmetric features, stunted growth. Contrast this to the Adonis-like beauty of the native Niçoise on their fat-and-vitamin rich diet. No it isn’t down to race. Ever wondered why the upper classes are so much more beautiful than the working classes? It’s all down to childhood diet. But no longer, now the entire nation is living on poverty food on the sad, outdated advice of the government. These poor kids will all grow up gawky or overweight, with the same personality traits: sugar addiction, moodiness and fatigue. These health-conscious mothers would shudder at the thought of feeding their kids a fry-up, but for all their fear of fat, they would be no worse off slumming it with the pikeys in Maccy D’s or BK. It all turns into sugar anyway.

Diabetes and Denial

I saw my friend K. the other day. About six months ago I told her to watch her father like a hawk, because he was an obvious candidate for type 2 diabetes. He has the family history, the classic diabetic belly, and a variety of other telling symptoms. A couple of weeks ago he was diagnosed with diabetes. I woke up with sweats in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep: the other person I told her was a candidate was my own father. He has the family history, the classic diabetic belly, and a variety of other telling symptoms. The difference is, my Dad refuses to listen to me when I tell him to get his blood sugar checked.

Tragic Dina

And then there’s Dina. “Excuse me, thank you for not ignoring me,” she says as I walk past her on Clumber Street. I know this is Dina’s begging line, because I’ve heard about it before. She doesn’t know who I am; she doesn’t know I know her name or her life story. She used to be a model. She’s pretty, with long dark hair, but her skin is ruined. Her parents are rich and live in a big house, but they don’t talk anymore. Dina is on heroin. She lives on the streets with her homeless boyfriend and his two dogs. I see Dina around Nottingham quite a lot. J. saw her from the window a couple of weeks ago involved in an altercation on Theatre Square. A man was following her, and she kept screaming at him that he was a thieving bastard, but he kept on following her up the street. Then her boyfriend appeared and set his two dogs on him. The result was a cartoon-like struggle and chase.

Smells Like Nottingham Spirit

We’re renting our penthouse from the poshest woman we have ever met. It has an old brick fireplace that smells like the fabled caves of Nottingham: musty, damp, sandy. Maybe it’s a particular strain of mould? The kitchen cupboards are too low and every time we bend over the cooker or the sink we bang our heads. There’s a place on the living room floor that springs like a trampoline when we walk over it (it’s getting worse). But apart from that, the flat is very nice. Shame about the location, and the neighbours.

Not a Pretty Woman Story

Two weeks after we moved in, a woman moved in downstairs. I first met her when we were woken at two in the morning by screaming, clattering and sobbing in the fire escape just outside our exit door. We could hear a man using his fists. We called the police. The police laughed when they saw her, because she was drunk or on drugs and staggered around in her high heels in the street. Her denim skirt was what my mother would call a belt. The police laughed because they thought she was a prostitute. This was how we met our new neighbour, KH.

KH is a kept woman, and she’s kept by the man who came around to beat her up. Her arms are covered in bruises, she has a terrible squint. She’s a pikey and she’s slim not from healthy eating but from malnutrition. Sometimes she’s as scared as a mouse. Sometimes she’s noisy and obnoxious and plays her R&B music late into the night. She has a habit of having loud, porn-star sex twice a week and keeping us awake. Sometimes she’s ultra-paranoid and knocks on our door asking if her quiet music is too loud, and claiming that she never has it on after nine o’clock. One night a woman came to visit her, and KH screamed at her from ten that night through to six the next morning. She leaves her pink frilly knickers hanging in the window.

A man stays who isn’t the man who keeps her. She has two boys who, after six or seven visits are still too dumb to figure out they can get out of the front door by pressing the button marked “press”, and that if KH doesn’t answer the intercom, it means she’s not in, not that they should spend the next three hours banging at her door. Are they expecting to find her in there? A man in a business suit and dark glasses called on our intercom asking for “Marteela”, or some other made up name. KH let him in. She giggled a lot, which seems to be her way of being charming. Then there was the party where KH had loud, porn-star sex (twice) while half a dozen men were in her flat. She was the only woman.

For the last two weeks, everything has gone very quiet. No music, no sex, no parties, no men. Not a peep. A couple of nights ago the police came. They said KH was in custody but they couldn’t tell us why. Just that they needed to search her flat. They debated breaking down her door. Now there is unopened mail lying on the floor for her downstairs; hand written letters from the inland revenue, a letter from Fletcher’s Solicitors (slogan: it’s never too late). I wonder what she did?

Update: The Rest of the KH Story

It turned out that KH was arrested for driving whilst high on cocaine. That’s why the police wanted to search her flat. We only saw KH once more; at least, we heard her and saw her television on the stairs. She was doing a runner.

A couple of weeks later we had a visit from a Mr G., who turned out to be the owner of the flat, rather disappointed to have discovered his incompetent staff had let it out to her. Apparently the flat was completely cleared out. She never paid him any rent at all. Her sugar-daddy abuser must have reneged on his deal. It turns out he has a wife back at home in Long Eaton.

Blessed silence

One thing I will really miss about France is the blessed silence.

It’s been several months since I had to overhear other people’s conversations. The last time this happened we were on a train between Derby and Sheffield when an obese office admin from Brighton regaled the entire carriage with a one-sided phone conversation about the horrors of her desk job. Oh, how we sniggered when the train went through a tunnel and she got cut off.

We’re on a plane. Behind us is an incredibly ignorant woman with a pseudo-posh southern accent, patronising her elderly mother at the top of her voice. She’s reading the complimentary copy of the Daily Mail and informing her mother about “asylum seekers” (those “fakers” and “scroungers”) who supposedly receive priority council housing. Oh, and now the children of single parents who get priority playschool places.

“Oh…” says her mother. “Mmm,” in the kind of bored voice one reserves for one’s children when they are being humoured. This lady survived the second world war and undoubtedly remembers the poverty of the 1930’s when the welfare state didn’t exist. There is one thing worse than teaching your grandmother to suck eggs: teaching your mother to suck eggs.

Wilting

I don’t know whether it was a bumble bee or a bluebottle, but whatever it was that just buzzed past the window, it was the size of a sparrow.*

It’s so hot here today I’m wilting on the sofa. Maybe it will be cooler on the seafront. J., who is in the UK this week is missing all the good weather. It was cloudy at the start of the week and then there was a thunderstorm the other morning, and it’s been roasting ever since.

I was watching a baby bang a couple of plastic balls together a few weeks ago and it got me thinking about instinct. Babies love rock-banging. We have been rock-banging for millions of years (two to three million to be more precise). There was a time in our history when rock banging was very important for our survival. I think if we have any innate instincts as a species, they must take a form similar to this – appearing in childhood and disappearing as we grow, uncultivated, ephemeral things not required by modernity. The baby already has cravings for sugar. In nature this would be for fruits or honey to fatten her up to survive the hard times. Of course, the rock-banging could have all been a coincidence of human physics. Two arms, two plastic balls, what else do you do but bang them together?

I was thinking about Jung and other psychoanalytic theories. Having come across so many references to archetypes during my researching of plots it has been playing on my mind. I don’t believe these things are ingrained in our genetic psyche – (they got there how, exactly?) but maybe our social and cultural psyche. We have been eating meat for four million years, but there are vegetarians around today. We have been using fire for two million years. These things are ingrained in our genes, have shaped our bodies. Yet we can still free ourselves of the instincts surrounding them, and that, I think is what has given us a genetic advantage over other animals – our lack of hard-coding.

* It was actually an enormous beetle, and beetles like these regularly startled us for the rest of the summer.

Coeur de boeuf

The old woman next door is watering her cats again. She has four or five cats and is constantly calling them to the back door for treats – “kittieees-kittieees-kittieees”, she sounds like the call of a bird. She doesn’t see too well and when she gets the hose out to water the plants, her beloved kitties always get in the way. They leap in front of the stream to bat it with their paws, then look astonished and wet in the aftermath.

I had coeur de boeuf (beef heart) for lunch. It’s rich in coenzyme Q10, minerals, and B vitamins. Heart food. Did you know that saturated fat is the food of the heart, that the fat around the heart is rich in saturated fat to provide fuel, that the heart runs exclusively on ketones? A medical fact little known by the public.

I bought the coeur de boeuf from Monoprix sliced, so at least it didn’t look like an actual heart – unlike the pork heart, which was whole in the tray. It looked just like normal muscle meat, apart from the occasional funny looking vein attached, and the sealed look of the muscle wall. I fried a slice in butter. I thought it would be tough, for some reason I equated toughness with strength, but of course the opposite is true, it is actually very tender and flexible. You would be forgiven for describing the texture as somewhat slimy when you first put it in your mouth. I had to fight my squeamishness. It’s actually a very smooth meat, not rough like muscle meat, perhaps down to the type of protein it is made from, such as collagen or elastin. The taste is quite pleasant, lighter, more flavoursome and more complex than beef, with a slight hint of liver flavour to it.

You can buy fromage de tête in France, even in the supermarkets. It’s a pate made out of pig’s head. Couper la tête de porc en deux… begin the recipe instructions on the internet. Place in a large pot, add the feet of the pig and cover in cold water. Add garlic, shallots and a bouquet of herbs to taste and simmer for six and a half hours. Add the tongue (la langue de porc) and cook for another thirty minutes. Add wine, de-bone the feet and head and peel the tongue, and cook for another thirty minutes. The mixture is then chopped, cooled, gelatine is poured over it, and it’s left in the fridge for 24 hours. Everything but the oink, indeed! The end result is nutritious and tasty – or so I’ve heard. I plan to try out a few more delicacies. Brains are supposed to be good for the brain. I haven’t dared try them. Goosefat, lard and offal are about my current limit.

War. What is it good for?

Do you ever feel like we’re standing on the brink of a cliff looking over the edge into something ghastly? Something like the valley of the shadow of death, something like German people must have felt when Hitler came to power?

Lately I have been feeling this feeling more and more. I see the brash and overt corruption of the US and UK governments, as I see the transparent veil of lies knitting together the collective dialogue of the “coalition against terror”, the pathetic excuses offered in the face of blatant war crimes committed in Iraq and Guantanamo. It was never about anything but oil and race.

America was supposed to be the example to us all – according to the James T. Kirk model of the universe. America was supposed to be neutral, powerful, benign, the model of democracy setting example to the rest of the world, the peak of civilisation against which all others could be measured. America was a wise ruler who interfered only at the appropriate times, interfered for the right reasons, with the right authority, for humanitarian reasons. Was this dialogue ever true? This ideal we were brought up on, that the media coaxed us into believing? No. Never. But that myth is crumbling fast and what it is exposing is not something we want to see – it is nihilism, that underneath all previous certainty, all confidence, all civilisation, we are left with bad parents, savages fighting over a carcass, children fighting over toys.

Now America abuses people like those “terrible dictatorships in the Middle East” – now America throws away lives and commits atrocities like the Chinese. The corruption so obviously riddling American government, from congress to the madmen who run the White House, and their close ties to the oil and other powerful industries, this corruption is reminiscent of the Mafia. America has become what it has so vilified, and now we are seeing that America has always been this way, we are remembering Vietnam in a different light, Korea in a different light, remembering how the Second World War was already won, that Enola Gay should never have flown, that those atrocities in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were exactly that. Atrocities. America has never been punished, because there is no one there to punish it. America is to the UN what a criminal is to a state of anarchy – a happy abuser running riot without fear of reprisal.

In Bowling for Columbine Michael Moore touches on what is known as the dialogue of fear. It is the American media that dictates this dialogue of fear. The media whips up a frenzy of fear – of black people, of shootings, of crime. It dwells on these subjects, exaggerates these subjects, makes people afraid in their own homes, makes them feel they need to keep guns. The black man is a shadowy figure – a mugger on the street corner, a criminal waiting for the right moment to attack.

A similar dialogue sprang up with the events of September 11th. Of course what happened was wrong. A lot of people died. Who could watch those images and not be moved – horrified, angry, questioning? But to watch them again and again? To listen to the constant news: Al Qaeda Al Qaeda Al Qaeda! These shadowy terrorists who hate America – for no particular reason – unless it is jealousy of civilisation, of superiority, these barbarians and animals who veil their women (and here America suffers one of many cases of amnesia, forgets, perhaps, Mormon polygyny, attacks on abortion clinics, Christian fundamentalism, the makeup of congress, the continued plight of the Afghani women whom it did not bother to consider in the new Afghani government, forgets even the slave trade and the racial makeup of its prisons, forgets its own ghettos).

America does not understand why it is so hated, it does not have that level of insight. A large section of America’s people are now mostly overweight, pre-diabetic, and no longer rational. As long as the coca-cola and the fast food keep flowing, they can be led like the proles in 1984. America is a nation of hypoglycaemics, and the dialogue coming out of America is the dialogue of someone with low blood sugar. It is overly paranoid, it is panicked, it is angry and aggressive. It isn’t interested in reasoned thought, it will attack anyone who gets in the way without any thought or reason or excuse. Soon, America will be too confused to attack anything. It will wander around tapping its fingers and mumbling and trying to remember what this was all about. It will surf the web but not read the pages. It will stare at the television, and believe the television without really taking anything in. It will reach for another soda and hope someone else will bring in the corn chips.

Riverbend is an Iraqi girl educated and raised away from Iraq but now back home. Until the war she was a computer programmer. In Iraq. Iraq was a modern nation before the war. Now she sits at home and writes about the war. She is politically enlightened, thoughtful, articulate and intelligent. Each day she receives emails from paranoid and aggressive Americans who tell her she should be grateful for being liberated, who call her a Baathist and a Saddam supporter because she doesn’t support the occupation. Riverbend isn’t a Baathist, she’s just a democrat (remember those?). Riverbend doesn’t feel she should be grateful for all of the deaths of friends and abuses and destruction she’s witnessed.

I look around and everywhere I see a degeneration. I see the human body distorted and sickened to the point of grotesquery by the profits of global food corporations. I know far too many people who have cancer, who should not have cancer. I see babies in Africa being killed off by the formula Nestle is still allowed to hand out. I see addicts everywhere – junk food addicts, drug addicts, alcoholics, gamblers, people with empty lives. I see asylum seekers scapegoated for the failings of government. I see stupid people – stupid because capitalism has left them undernourished and they have never reached their full potential – and these stupid people are voting other stupid people into power. I see corruption and selfishness everywhere. I see Al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia, and America smiling and holding Saudi Arabia’s hand. I see no Al Qaeda in Iraq. But then, those Muslims are all the same, aren’t they?

Sometimes, the more I open my eyes, the more I want to close them. When those planes hit the World Trade Center the world went mad. America had been going under for some time, but at that point it truly snapped. Osama cannot have had any idea of what he was unleashing upon himself and the rest of the world. He wanted to cause the downfall of America. In a way he has succeeded. I am not the only person whose faith has gone. He has shown us all what America is really made of.

Grass Pollen, Olives, and Foie d’Agneau

Grass pollen allergy season has hit at last, and whilst my allergies aren’t as extreme as previous years, I’m still suffering with sinus pain. It’s hot now too, and at seven thirty at night I’m sweating a little still.

I went for a walk earlier to try to clear my head. In between ogling designer handbags and being hit on by predatory French men, I discovered that the olive trees have started to flower. The park actually smells like a jar of pickled olives. Olive trees live for five hundred years, and I imagine them growing long after I’ve gone. We’ve been cultivating olive trees for at least the last 8,000 years – the varieties we eat can only be grown from cuttings. Seeds revert back to small, large-stoned wild varieties. At least we have not bred them to sterility like bananas.

I had foie d’agneau (lamb’s liver) for tea. I pulled a large, tough vein out of the liver and left it on my plate. I studied the small, branching veins leading off the main trunk. I must have veins like this in my own liver. I imagined the clotted vein in my leg and wondered how much it has healed, whether the clot has calcified. Calcified veins are not something I want in my body.

Apparently humans can live off meat alone, as long as they eat the fat and the organs too, and make a broth from the bones and marrow. Native Americans of the North and the arctic regions are familiar with this. People forced to live off meat with little fat become ill after only a few days – it’s fat-hunger, and is known as “rabbit starvation“, with diarrhoea in about a week, headache, lassitude and vague discomfort. They can eat until their stomachs are distended, and still they will not be satisfied. Still trying to heal myself, I am now eating organ meats for the concentrated nutrition – tomorrow is coeur de boeuf.

I have been thinking a lot about vegetarianism, and how I justify eating meat now. I cannot quite put it into words. When I was first a vegetarian in my teens, my philosophy was based on need. It was okay for natives in the jungle to hunt monkeys, because they needed to, to survive. I did not need to eat meat. Now I understand that I did, that my noble intentions made me ill. That we are born into a savage world where the lion does not lie down with the lamb, that we must do the best for ourselves and the ones we care for, and that living by morality is merely a luxury in the battle against the forces of the natural world. If at the heart of me is a savage, then I will embrace that savage and run with her nature – reluctance only damages one’s own spirit, it cannot repair the world.

Lake Geneva

This weekend we went to Geneva. A little background: Geneva is in Switzerland, just over the other side of the Alps, and only 40 minutes from here. Think Heidi, Saint Bernards with barrels of brandy attached to their collars, flowering meadows of lush green grass, goats, Swiss chalets and snowy Alps. Well, that’s the stereotype anyway! We stayed at the imperialistic Hotel President Wilson (5*), “convenient for the UN building” apparently – the human rights convention is right next door, and the main UN building is just a short drive down the road.

The hotel overlooks Lake Geneva. The opposite bank is wooded, with parks and widely spaced houses. Geneva town centre feels very small yet widely spaced, and from the air the houses look spread out, groups of half a dozen with a couple of fields in between and some patches of woodland. There’s something civilised about this – the distinction between town and countryside not being so great. Something that Marx advocated in The Communist Manifesto, but is rarely repeated by modern Marxists today. From the air we could see lots of square buildings, three storeys high with shutters on the windows and quirky symmetrical folded out roofs (I am sorry, I cannot explain in words!). We even saw some log cabins on the edge of the lake.

We could learn a lesson from the Swiss

The cleanliness of the lake astonished me, the water was very clear for a long way down and the bottom was coated in healthy green pond weed. Swans and ducks clustered at the shoreline and herons posed on the grassy banks. There were many small boats moored around the edge of the lake, a water-skier, tourist boats, a ferry, but very little sign of rubbish or pollution. This was confirmed when, aghast, we watched a hawk swoop out of the air and catch a fish in the water. Not just one hawk – we must have counted a dozen in the air over the lake at the same time. I didn’t think hawks came in flocks! The lake must be a veritable cornucopia of fish. Perch was on the menu at every restaurant, we think from the lake. It is a most telling sign of a clean, healthy ecosystem in which the predators at the top of the food chain are numerous. In England, we would be lucky to see even one hawk.

The Swiss speak French and German and are influenced by both cultures. I believe their cuisine lies somewhere in between the two, and they are very fond of their dairy produce like the French (think Heidi). Choucroute was on the menu at several restaurants. The hotel we stayed at was completely obsessed with low-fat foods, but I think this is probably because it was designed to cater for Americans.

There is something fertile about France, and Switzerland too. You rarely see a young mother in England, unless she is a chav, looking scruffy and screaming at her kids. Middle class mothers are much older in England, and most of them have wrinkles before they give birth. In Nice and in Geneva too, there are young, well-to-do mothers everywhere, and shops to cater for a fashionable pregnancy rather than a frumpy English one.

One thing that did strike me was the sheer quantity of naughty children around. I think there were a lot of tourists, certainly Americans and Germans. The population wasn’t as slender as the population of Nice. In Nice children are remarkably well behaved, precocious, and passive. They follow their parents quietly and stop to look at the views, if they’re sat at a brasserie they don’t complain about it – a drink or a bit of bread is enough to keep them quiet.

By contrast, the children in Geneva were running around causing riots, yelling, whining and screaming. Unfortunately our boat tour of the lake was somewhat claustrophobic, due to the presence of one such child – a naughty little boy who couldn’t sit still and ran up and down the deck being violent and loud and seeking attention from everyone. The family spoke French but were somewhat stocky and large, so could have been French or Swiss. The child was clearly overloaded on additives and short of nutrients – perhaps the parents thought he was merely boisterous: I think he had ADHD.

On the tour of the lake we passed the house where Byron and the Shelleys stayed during that fateful period when a nineteen year old Mary Shelley got high on laudanum and various other substances began to write Frankenstein. There are several large mansions on the lake shores – Rothschild, Manoir Colgate, and a few historic palaces now owned by unspecified Arabian princes.

There is a little mermaid – The Little Mermaid of Lake Léman, or, The Siren, a bronze statue by Natacha de Senger, who was set on a rock there in 1966. Of course there are mermaids in Lake Geneva! What was I saying about biodiversity and good ecosystems? There’s also a mermaid in Copenhagen, but, strangely, she has legs. Must be the PCBs.

The Monaco grand prix

Grand Prix Pit Lane at MonacoFriday 21st of May, we went to Monaco for the Grand Prix. Nothing happens in Monaco on the Friday, so it’s free to take a walk around the track, stand around on the stands and ogle at the cars in the pit lanes. That’s pretty much what we did. Disappointingly, J.’s friends would not pay the €300-€400 (a literal grand prix!) it would have cost to see the race on the Sunday.

Monaco Grand Prix TrackWe also went on the Thursday, but a ticket to see the Formula 3000 would have cost €60. So “the lads” sat around drinking super-priced Grolsch under a parasol. My repeated protests that what was the point of coming to Monaco and sitting outside a bar 400 metres from the railway station drinking Grolsch for two hours and then going home – were ignored. Mocked even.

What is the point of men, and what is the point of men and beer? Shoes, Ferraris, designer handbags and yachts. These are important things! More important than Grolsch. I need female company. I need Sex in the City.

Emma on the Grand Prix track at MonacoOn the Friday, we walked around the track. Gawked at the yachts. Gawked at the super-sized Americans with their super-sized children. Gawked at the occasional giraffe-like supermodel having photos taken in the pit lane (not that attractive, I have to say I have seen more shapely waists on the waitresses in Nice). After the track was opened back up for the regular traffic, there were about a million red Ferraris cruising around it. Presumably they all belonged to the Ferrari team, because there weren’t any at all when we visited in March!

Grand Prix Pit Lane at MonacoWe stopped for lunch at a café next to the big casino. I deliberately freaked out P. by eating a whole pat of butter on a piece of bread the size of a coin. He’d been annoying me all week with nonsense about “it’s calories in calories out you know”, and “carbs are essential for energy” (clearly he does not know how many calories I eat). J. would not let me argue it out with him and interrupted me every time I tried to reply. So he kept getting the last say in everything.

Postmodern blogging goes too far

I don’t like to pontificate on the processes of writing too much – writers who write about writing are a very tedious read for non-writers. Bloggers who blog about blogging are much the same. But really! I chanced upon the blog of someone who likes to call herself a writer – a girl much like me – has never had anything published but indeed, has a degree in the subject. Hurrah, thinks I, at last a kindred spirit. But what do I find? Non-English, half sentences, subjects as worthy as “I ran out of deodorant this morning.” What self-indulgence! At least if I am going to bore people, I try to do it in an informative, educational or thought provoking way.

Undoubtedly when I re-read this in a few weeks time it will sound as snotty as something you would read in The Times, but I am familiar with postmodernism, I am familiar with sarcasm, but both of those particular activities require some intellectual force behind them. You will never get published as a writer if the extent of your writing abilities is posting the results of personality tests, the status of one’s toiletries, and yes, one’s own personalised viking name. I know, I know, I personally share part of the blame as an initiator of the dreaded “name generator posting in blog” phenomenon, and as such will be one of the first up against the wall when the revolution comes. I have seen people’s fairy and vampire names in a hundred different blogs. But I have read some good blogs as a result, often from teenagers – precocious young girls with ample drama and emotion in their lives, or merely the ability to make astute observations. They do not pretend to call themselves writers.