John's birthday

Happy 63rd, Mr Engineer Smith!

It was only when we got here on Sunday that we realised why we’d originally planned to arrive on Monday. The pop festival was in full swing for its last night. Each year, there are three nights of over-amplified ‘music’ in the market square, running from about 9:00 pm until 3:00 am. For the first year or two it was held on the football pitch, but when the association that runs it ran out of money and couldn’t afford to rent a marquee, the municipality stepped in and offered them the use of the Halle in the centre of the village. Well, as it turned out, we were so tired when we got here that I crashed out on the sofa, not waking until 01:30, and Martyn fell asleep the moment his head hit the pillow. We left the bedroom shutters and windows closed, and had the fan running. So the noise of the festival didn’t keep us awake for long.

The journey here was long but without problems. We were at the end of the tunnel an hour before we needed to be, so asked to be allocated a place on an only-just-earlier shuttle. As it turned out, they had miscalculated its capacity, so we finished up on the one we’d originally booked, only seven minutes later. And as we’d been bumped from the earlier one, we were boarded as a priority, and were the third car off the upper deck at Coquelles.

We took a little detour en route to collect some wine for Pam and Geoff in a village near Eper-nay. Since we were heading for Berne, we aimed for the border crossing above Porrentruy, looking to take the A16 from there to Biel/Bienne. Mistake: it hasn’t been finished yet, and it took close on three hours to get from there to Berne, the journey including some interesting manoeuvres round Biel on account of roadworks and very poor signposting. Still, the good news was that Swiss customs weren’t interested in us: I’d stopped and got out to buy a vignette, which seems to have been enough of a diversion from the fact that we were carrying something like nine times the duty-free import allowance of wine! Reminds me of the time Pam, Geoff and I were cut up by a dame in a Fiat Uno just before the border at Chiasso. The border police pulled her over and waved us through. We clanked by with 96 bottles of wine on board. Switzerland is highly protective of its domestic wine industry. It produces some decent stuff, and notably the Oeil de Perdrix pinot noir rosé that P&G have given me as a birthday present. Like most countries, though, it also produces some pretty ordinary wines, the difference being that it is priced at the level of rather more competent bottles from across the borders. Hence the two-bottle duty-free limit, I suppose.

With immeasurable patience, Pam and Geoff greeted us warmly and with a fine moussaka: an astute choice of dish for guests with an unpredictable arrival time. And since Geoff’s 2CV is in for repairs (its starter motor having failed to disengage a few days earlier), there was shelter for the car as well.

Next morning we headed for the new MediaMarkt shop at Muri to get a new laptop PC. The Acer machine I bought in Fribourg 5 years ago has been getting a bit tired of late, and has now stopped loading Windows. I’ve probably dripped on ad nauseam about my preference for the Swiss keyboard layout, but for the few readers who have been spared the ordeal, here I go again. I first met it when I went to work in Switzerland in 1997. I then asked the IT manager to get me a QWERTY keyboard, and he refused point-blank, saying that the only choice I had was between a desktop and a laptop (though I did later manage to blag a docking station laptop out of him!). Unlike the abominable AZERTY keyboard I was forced to use briefly in France and Belgium, I soon got used to the Swiss layout, appreciating the ease of access it provides to French, German and Portuguese accented characters. So, gentle reader, I am tapping away at a nice little HP laptop. I’d gone in looking for a Tosh or a Sony, but the HP offered the best mix of specification and price.

On Saturday night we spent a delightful evening as the guests of Heidi and Chandroo in Wabern, a short walk from Pam and Geoff’s. I’ve known Chandroo since 1974, when his then wife was a colleague at the Lausanne Congress. Geoff was a translator at the same event, unlike me as a member of the permanent UPU staff. It’s good how that crowd has kept in touch over the years, augmented by those who were at the net Congress five years later in Rio de Janeiro – where I met Pam and Barbara.

On Sunday it was Part 2 of our self-herding to summer pastures. The motorway from Berne to Geneva is a mess of roadworks at the moment, hence very slow going, but at least the roads were quiet. After Geneva (where French customs didn’t stop us to ask for VAT on the new computer), the new stretch of tunnel speeds the journey greatly. We proceeded to slow it down by taking a wrong turning in Chambéry, but it was at least a scenic short-cut across the Chartreuse. We changed over when we stopped to fill the tank at Valence, so I got the grotty stretch of A7 down the Rhône valley. It is always busy, and varied constantly from stop/crawl to the restricted 110 km/h. For much of the way, I just stayed in the first lane, where there tends to be more room between cars, and where you cover the ground pretty well as fast as those who keep switching lanes.

A glance at the clock tells me that it’s almost time to get on the horn to the telephone company about our internet service here. Having had endless trouble trying to get sense out of them at Easter and subsequently, finally writing to cancel our ADSL subscription, we arrived to find three bills totalling some €72. The ADSL light is showing on the router, but there is no internet service – hardly surprising since some part of Frogtel no doubt counts me as a defaulter. If you read this before mid-August, it’ll mean that the issue has been resolved...