I learned yesterday that my old friend Claire Smith has died, just over a month before her 99th birthday. She had been in poor health for some time. An intensely social person, reduced mobility and the lockdown were terrible for her to endure.
She was a tough one though: widowed quite young, she coped with that, a house fire, two knee replacements and heart by-pass surgery. She was driving well into her 90s, no doubt to the terror of her fellow Floridians. She worked for some decades for the US Postal Service, part of her duties being translation from French to English. This made her a good choice as a temporary translator at the five-yearly Universal Postal Union congresses, and it was at the Lausanne congress in 1974 that I first met her. We met again at the Rio de Janeiro Congress in 1979.
Between then and my last visit to the USA in 2001 we visited each other at intervals, and I helped her with her move from Maryland to Florida in the late 1990s. An enthusiastic traveller, she visited me at my little house in Tonbridge, my holiday home in the Corbières and at my expat postings to Paris, Brussels and Zürich. It was in Zürich that I collected my only speeding ticket to date. I had run out of vermouth for her favourite tipple, a dryish martini, and it being a Sunday, the only shops open were those on Federal land, such as railway stations. We went along to Oerlikon station (where, ironically, there wasn’t a drop of the stuff to be had), and on the way home to Dübi I went to overtake a very slow-moving car. The car was quite new to me and rather more powerful than my previous one, and I managed to kick down two gears rather than one, which brought me into the welcoming beams of a radar camera at, if I remember right, 58 kph on a 50-restricted road. All Claire's fault, of course.
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