I thought I’d given up despairing…

 …and yet the latest régime just goes from bad to bloody awful.  It’ll be interesting to see whether the latest Rt Hon First Lord of the Treasury survives her party conference.  

It helps, in a way, that the garden is looking a bit better: Ben was here this week and has hauled out some stumps, and hacked down and divided some of the irises: I’ve distributed clumps to friends and neighbours.  We’re thinking about planting spring bulbs where we can enjoy them from the kitchen window.  

We had an unexpected visit on Friday from my old friend Thierry, a colleague back in my Swiss days, and his son, Vincent.  The latter has completed two years at the Federal Polytechnic in Lausanne, and is about to start his Bachelor’s year at Imperial College, returning to Lausanne next year for his Master’s.  Delightful young man.  We took them for a rather disappointing meal at the Hotel du Vin in town.  Had I been on top of my game, I’d have sent my overcooked meal back.  (As it was, I was feeling pretty lousy with a lingering cough following a recent cold, and my assertiveness circuits weren’t firing as they should.).   The restaurant was not busy, though, and it’s a good environment for socialising.  Last time we were there was on my birthday, and we sat in the garden for our meal.  Friday’s torrential rain kept us gratefully indoors.

Autumn

Some welcome autumn colour in the garden, notably the colchicums and cyclamens.  The annual rudbeckias have been less enthusiastic this year, but most are in their fourth years.  A few of the old ones have given up the ghost.  The heat and drought of the summer can’t have helped.  The perennial one, however (readers will remember that it arrived a couple of years ago labelled ‘aubergine’) has really excelled itself.

The tomatoes are now chopped down and binned, and the roots and compost dumped at the top of the garden.  The kitchen wall pots went on the morning of our lunch party, and the row of pots beside the sitooterie followed today, between the showers.  They’ve done very well, and we have a few left in the fridge for a final lunch of bruschette in the coming days.

We are both grizzling our way through a rather nasty dose of man flu, and I’m finding that energy levels are low, even by my usual modest standards.  By the time I’d shuffled round Fortnums this morning and schlepped stuff home, I was more than ready to flop into my armchair.  But I’m certainly on the mend, and just need to summon up some rare patience.  We were due to have our Covid boosters tomorrow, but decided to postpone rather than spread the colds.

As for car repairs, our local tin bashers came in with an estimate that Mr Red BMW didn’t quibble at, so it’s booked in for the work a couple of weeks hence.  It’ll have had its MoT (I hope) and a fresh pan of oil by then.  Martyn is steeling himself to getting the timing belt replaced on the Egg.  After fourteen years it’s a bit of a time bomb, so although the replacement and the annual service will cost somewhere like the current value of the car, the damage a broken belt would cause would certainly lead to our scrapping the car, which still has some years’ life left in it.

I wish I were surprised at the state of the economy.  As it is, it looks as if the Bank of England will act to protect the pound, whatever our so-called government says.  The latter cannot have long, it seems to me: its policies are doctrinaire and illogical, and I wonder sometimes if its aim is to leave Labour with an impossible recovery task.

Lunch party: first for years.

Pleasant lunch for seven here yesterday: Canadian cousins Susan and Jack, bro John and cousins Philippa and David.  Simple fare: Prosecco and canapés outside on the terrace, a chicken casserole with ratatouille sauce and the last of the home-grown spuds; apple and blackberry crumble.  Though we’ve seen Susan a few times in recent years, it’s ages since I saw Jack, and we had a good catch-up.

Small excitement at the station when Susan and Jack arrived.  Just as we were walking to the car, I noticed it jump a little.  A fellow had swept into the next parking place in a red BMW and clipped the corner of my car.  Very limited dents and scratches, but he made no bones about giving me his business card, and asked me to send him an estimate.  I’ve been down to our local tin bashers this morning, and expect a quote in the next day or two.  

Meanwhile, I’ve had a poorish night with the beginnings of a cold.  I hope I didn’t give it to all the lunch guests.  I did a lateral flow test this morning and it turned out negative: just as well, since J&S embark tomorrow on a cruise ship…

Home, and recovering

It has evidently rained quite a bit while we were away, and the garden is looking better than when we left it.  I took five boxes of cuttings off the grass yesterday, and things that had been sulking are coming back to life, notably Tony's fuchsia and the magnolia Susan, which we feared we might lose.  Far from it: it is flowering, and leafing up nicely.  Plainly somewhat confused.

M

The downside of holidays is that the laundry piles up.  We’ve done three lots over the last couple of days, so are pretty much up to date.  Gosh: the fun we have!

Martyn’s had another session of acupuncture, and thinks he’s feeling some benefit.  We are booked in for our Covid boosters ten days hence at a practice in Crowborough: there was nothing on offer in Disgustedville, which seems odd. 

I had a chat with the orthopaedic surgeon on the phone today, and we’ve agreed that we should sit on our hands for the time being.  The change in my knees continues, but the advice is not to load the knees more than can be avoided: avoid carrying heavy bags and wearing back packs.  Hence, no doubt, why the knees are misbehaving, given our recent trip, which involved both.  Consider walking with a stick.  Auld age disnae come its lane.

NEVER AGAIN

Today’s journey began well enough: we got an earlier than planned train from Bellinzona to Basel, which has the advantage of requiring no change.  It also allowed a bit of ‘just in case’ recovery time, and the delay in leaving Bellinzona was made up in Luzern, where the train changes direction.  That gave us time for lunch in a nice little pitta joint in the long gallery that runs over the middle of Basel SBB station.  

Our TGV to Paris arrived just about on time, but had to make extra stops in Besançon, Montbard and I forget where else.  In the station in Mulhouse, a glance to my right lit on a SIG automatic pistol.  The gendarmes were on board, and in due course a sad-looking skinny kid was ushered off between two hefty flics.  I guess that must have added a good ten minutes to our journey (and doubtless subtracted a lot more from the kid’s liberty).  We consequently arrived 45 minutes late at the Gare de Lyon, to find a long taxi queue and one about as long for the sole working ticket machine in the RER. 

Surprise, surprise, we missed our Eurostar, and could not get bookings in either of the next two.  Fortunately, there were no-shows, so we got seats (some distance apart) on the train that left an hour after the one we were booked on, but only after a long, nerve-wracking wait.  The ride home was mercifully without incident, and we got straight into a taxi at the station, arriving home about fourteen and a half hours after leaving the flat.  

The main and best memory of our trip is the wonderful scenery of the Rhine valley and Switzerland.  But the worst is the awfulness of the travelling experience.  True, we had chosen a pretty challenging itinerary, and one can’t anticipate people throwing themselves under trains - the explanation for our dreadful journey from Cologne to Basel.  But Deutsche Bahn could have done much better by re-routing our original train via Freiburg.  And the legendary efficiency of the Swiss Federal Railway seems to be a thing of the past.  Of course, our last trip to Switzerland was spoiled by our Zürich to London City flight having to return to Zürich when the pressurisation system failed.  We then had to wait hours before returning to Heathrow, and almost missed the last train home.  We no longer do long trips by road, so, unless we stick to cruises, I guess we’ll just have to grin and bear the airport experience.  As Martyn said just now, the waiting areas at St Pancras and the Gare du Nord are just as bad as the airports.

A good last full day in Switzerland

After a long day yesterday, and with a longer one in prospect tomorrow, we decided to have an easy day today.  So we had a leisurely morning, and were only out the door moments before midday.  We took a ride down to Lugano for a suitably unhealthy lunch at the Ristorante Mary.  Our view of the lake was obscured by outside broadcast trucks, but watching them set it all up was quite entertaining.  Having eaten pretty correctly yesterday, and finished off the salad this evening, we don’t feel too guilty about having dined on microwave chicken stroganoff from the Lugano City co-op.  And we didn’t buy any of the vast salamis hanging outside the charcuterie near the funicular!

We have had a lazy afternoon as well: Martyn had a siesta, and I got stuck in to Bill Graham’s latest Dundee whodunit, Love Hurts.  Good stuff, and it deserves to find a publisher soon. 

We have a pretty early start tomorrow, so have done all the packing we can.  Let’s hope the railway experience is as good as it has been yesterday and today.  I’m hoping the next bulletin will be from Forges-l’Evêque…

A fine day with dear old friends

Today’s jolly jaunt was to Bern, for lunch with Pam, Geoff, Lesley and Carlo.  It meant an early start: the 08:18 from Bellinzona, with a change in Luzern, and we got to Bern bang on time at 11:00 after a beautiful ride through several Cantons.  As we approached Bern we had fine views of the snowy Oberland.  Back in the 1990s I frequently took the train to Bern for business meetings with intransigent interlocutors (whose ability I nevertheless respect), and the beautiful views helped to take the sting out of the experience.  

Before I leave the subject of train journeys, I need to express sympathy for the people in the train ahead of ours last night.  We’d to wait half an hour for the Postauto when we were kicked off the train.  When we passed their train in said bus, they must have been stuck between stations for well over an hour and a half.

We found our friends on good form, and we had a long luscious lunch in the garden of the Restaurant Veranda, where we last met for Geoff’s 80th birthday party.  It is a reasonable hop, skip and hobble from the railway station which, I'm glad to say, is well supplied with escalators.  Our table was next to a hedge of ivy which was in flower, attracting dozens of honey bees.  Tea and sumptuous cakes followed at Pam and Geoff’s flat in Weissenbühl.  We had a little air display of nine Pilatus trainers in close formation as we sat on the balcony: she had obviously organised it just for us…. Carlo kindly went out of his way to drop us off at the station.

The old knees are complaining a bit after the last few days’ footslogging.  It’s a ten-minute walk uphill to the station from the flat, but the station is well equipped with ramps and escalators.  Stairs up aren’t too much of a problem, but stairs down, particularly from the older continental railway carriages, are a slow business.  Modest plans for tomorrow.  Late departure for lunch in Lugano, then quite possibly a siesta.

Back to normal

Having consulted the forecast, we decided on a trip to Luzern, our original holiday destination.  Our decision to go further south was justified by poor weather in Zentralschweiz, but today's forecast was fine.

As you can see, Luzern was looking its very best.  We cheated a little by taking a trolleybus from the station to the end of the Spreuerbrücke, walked across it and had a little stroll round the handsome old town before lunch.  Said meal was a rather excessive plate of fried squid and chips in a cafe beside the Reuss near the Kapellbrücke.  Destroyed by fire in 1993, the bridge has been beautifully rebuilt.  From Luzern, we took a ship down to Flüelen, calling at places familiar to us both, such as Weggis, Vitznau and Brunnen.  On the lake, and particularly on the Urnersee arm, the sporty Swiss were spending their Sunday afternoon wind- and kite-surfing in their dozens, and when we got to Flüelen railway station, several MAMILs were flouncing around with their expensive bicycles.  Fortunately, they were heading the other way towards Zürich.

We were getting tired by then, after having our eardrums assaulted by scraiching bairns on our various trains, buses and boats, so we debated whether to get the fast train home, or to get the slow train back the pretty way over the Gotthard pass.  We opted for the latter, and at first congratulated ourselves, since the train was quiet enough to allow us a block of eight seats to ourselves from which to enjoy the spectacular views.  

All was well till we got to Lavorgo, where the train stopped, and stayed stopped.  Eventually, the conductor told us to get off, saying that they hoped to organise a replacement bus.  The train left back northwards, leaving us all standing at the bus stop.  I think there must have been some behind the scenes organisation, because the regular Postauto, which arrived punctually, delivered us to a waiting train at Bodio: it took us the rest of our interrupted journey an hour late.  The worst part, as last Wednesday, was the total lack of information.  We thought we were scunnered with air travel, but we have to say that rail travel is shooting up the scunner list.

Monte Generoso

I’d never heard of said mountain, but Martyn has been doing his research, and found that there is a rack railway up from Capolago to the summit.  Cheap it is not, but at least our Swiss passes got us there for CHF34 each rather than the standard fare, which is double.  The views on the way and from the top - some 1700m - are superb.  Looking towards the Piemonte there was rather a lot of haze, but the views down to Lake Lugano, Lake Maggiore and the Alps were breathtaking.  We found a bench near the summit and sat and had our lunch, watching the gliders and paragliders swooping around and climbing the thermals.

The Ticino is not a Canton we know well, and we have been enjoying, transport cock-ups notwithstanding, discovering it a little.  Today Bellinzona held its market, which meant that we were awakened at 05:00 by a young woman erecting gazebos for her stalls just below our front windows.  Our end of the market was largely cheap lurid clothes, knick-knacks and gewgaws, but along in the square there were some more traditional offerings: a chicken rotisserie, butchers and charcutiers and a rather revolting polenta machine.  We’ve decided on minimal home cooking, so fought the temptation to stock up with goodies from the market.

Transport links worked pretty well: our train from Bellinzona was a few unexplained minutes late, but connected well enough with the mountain railway.  We moved from our original seats on the way back to avoid a small but raucous hen party, but could not escape a rather loud group on the train out: only three or four of them, but all talking fortissimo and all at the same time.  Italian stereotypes are detectable north of the border as well.  That said, most of the conversations we overheard were in Swiss German.  Fascinating country as ever.

A day on the lake. Eventually.

We took the boat across Lake Maggiore from Locarno this morning, down the other side a little, then back to pretty, prosperous Ascona for lunch.  Wonderful views of the lake and surrounding mountains. Excellent Caesar salad with grilled king prawns, local rosé wine and a pudding each.  We took the same route back, then got a slowish train back to Bellinzona. 

But you’d be disappointed if there weren’t some negatives to report.  We had a violent storm again in the night, so when I finally got back to sleep around 05:00, it wasn’t helpful that the church bell a few doors down started clanging away at 06:30.  Incidentally, we thought at first that the church clock was half an hour slow, until we realised that it rings a higher-pitched bell once for the half-hour, then reminds us half past what hour it is by ringing the hour again.

This morning’s journey was more of the same shit, though in slightly less magnitude.  The train left Bellinzona late, having been delayed by people standing beside the line.  It therefore decanted us to a local train at Tenero, which entailed a long walk to the underpass and a crowded shuffle up to the opposite platform.  We presume that this was for the same reason that we were kicked off the train at Karlsruhe on Wednesday.  Both were long-distance trains, and we imagine the operating companies wanted to get back on schedule for at least part of the return journey.  Never mind the passengers: the schedule is king. 

Talking of kings, we shall shortly be hearing from our new one.  We won’t soon forget that we were resting in Bellinzona when we heard that the Queen had died, and we each shed the odd tear.

Well, they’ve always said holidays are stressful

Not a great first night: although the hotel was quiet - surprising, since it backs on to the station - we frequently woke each other up with our snoring.  After breakfast we had a stroll round and into the amazingly lofty cathedral, and wandered down to the Hohenzollern bridge.  We hadn’t realised that it had a pedestrian and cycle path as well as railway lines, and all along the bridge the fence is solid with memorial padlocks.  I think Paris’s Pont des Arts is getting the same treatment.  

It’s a distressing fact of modern life that the area around city railway stations is a gathering place for rough sleepers, druggies and beggars, and Cologne is no exception.  

We went back to the hotel to finish packing, and Martyn had a look on line to find the status of our train. Delayed around 55 minutes.  After many platform changes, it eventually left an hour late.  The ride up the scenic part of the Rhine was the centrepiece of our planning, and it was no disappointment.  We could have done without the conceited young man in the seats across from ours (he had actually nicked our seats, but the two we grabbed were actually better).  Anyway, young hot-shot spent the journey on one or other of his mobile phones doing boastful video calls to his underlings.

Thereafter things went progressively tits-up.  When the train stopped at Karlsruhe, we were told it would go no further, and that we had to transfer to the ICE train at the next platform.  We stood in the bellows between carriages as far as Offenburg, where we were told it wouldn’t move for about another eighty minutes, and then possibly only as far as Freiburg im Breisgau.  The prospect of travelling like sardines again was bad: the lack of coherent information was appalling.  

Anyway, at this point, Martyn spotted a local train heading for Freiburg, and it had lots of empty seats, so we opted for certainty and comfort, even if the packed ICE would probably overtake us.  At Freiburg there were further announcements about delayed trains to Basel, and the platform was packed with refugees from the train that had stopped at Karlsruhe, so we got into another local train to Basel’s Badischer Bahnhof, then a bus to the SBB station, where we only just caught a fast train to Zürich.  It ran pretty well, but arrived two minutes late, eating into the four minutes we had for the connexion to Bellinzona.  

Fortunately, they held the connexion for several minutes, so we made it.  It made good time to Bellinzona (indicating 229 km/h in the Gotthard base tunnel) where we arrived nearly on time.  Just as a torrential thunderstorm began to tip down.  Our flat is in a pedestrian street a 10-15 minute walk from the station, so we dug out the brollies and waited for it to abate a little.  So we arrived at the flat some time after 11 instead of the expected sixish, looking like drowned rats, with soaked shoes, clothes and luggage.

Good start.  Still, the flat is spacious and well equipped, with a spectacularly huge jacuzzi and a shower cabinet that would accommodate the opposing five-a-side rugby team.  We’ve checked out local shops this morning: a nearby Migros fixed us up with breakfast, and the Co-op at the station has provided a couple of ready meals - and some wine from a vineyard near Lagrasse!

Day 1 of our latest jaunt

As so often when we’re about to travel we both slept rather badly, so were good and ready to be rather grumpy.  So, when, at  08:20, our taxi (booked for 08:10) had not turned up, we were getting distinctly  scratchy.  Martyn had booked on line, and had a printed confirmation on his desk.  When he rang to enquire, they said they had no record of the booking, and had nothing available for us.  So nothing else for it: we’d to schlepp our bags crossly down to the bus stop.  The bus only just got us to our second choice train to London.  We’d to change to a very crowded Thameslink train (complete with the usual implacable, loudly complaining sprog, who mercifully got off at Blackfriars) to a very crowded St Pancras.  For the first time in decades, our passports were stamped by French border personnel at St Pancras.  As I write this paragraph, I’m hoping the worst part of the journey is over: we are comfortably installed in the Eurostar to Brussels.  I shall relax when we’re on the next train to Cologne: we have a tightish connexion in Brussels.

Later: we arrived in Brussels on time after a pleasant Eurostar ride, including a complimentary snack lunch, a glass of rosé and a cup of tea.  The change to the German high speed train was quick and easy, and the ride reasonably comfortable if rather noisy.  It was the first time I’d used the Belgian high speed line east of Brussels.  Our hotel in Cologne is expensive for what it offers, but it’s a short walk from the station.  Aperitifs in a popular bar nearby, then supper - excellent Schnitzel - at the noisy but welcoming Gaffel am Dom.  Early night!