Category Archives: 2010-11

Ahem I was dreading my visit to the village Post Office to get stamps for our Christmas cards from the po-faced lady at the counter: she has never been helpful with my innovative requests. At the weekend I had posted some letters with Swiss stamps in a French post box. Alli told me I had […]

Ahem The colors of this year’s Fall together with four weeks of bright November daytime sunshine have been extraordinary. Once the thick morning mists have cleared, a flickering palette of bright greens, pithy oranges, flaring yellows, flame reds and burnt russets is scattered during our walks with the dogs around the Leimental, the best of […]

Ahem, The Swiss are well organized in most things but, inexplicably, they are terrible at directing traffic around and through road repairs, leaving motorists (especially cyclists) dangerously clueless as to how to proceed. This disability has spread across the border to our village, where there are now cack-handed diversions affecting all the traffic going through […]

Ahem It was party time at Rue de la Scierie as I invited my best and most generous friends to celebrate my liberation from the crapshoot that is the corporate world. It was a friendly and relaxed occasion that started at 2pm with genteel discussion and ended at 4am in pogoing and karaoke, and although […]

Ahem Rough winds and rain were strafing the bean-poles when we returned home from torch-dry Andalucia, and early August was more like the snarling gusts of January in Alaska than the drowsy calm of canicular summer in the Alsace. Our pool was deep lime green and the weather had rotted many of my tomatoes and […]

Ahem July has been an exciting month for all sorts of different reasons, but notable among these were that Ella came of age with her 18th birthday and that her International Baccalaureate exam results brought her to within a point of taking up a place at Warwick University this September. She still faces a tantalizing […]

Ahem Ella graduated from school at the beginning of the month in a beneficent blaze of family and friends, the ceremony attracting no less than two uncles (my brother Clive and my brother-in-law Anthony), both parents, both sisters Jessie and Gwen, and all extant grandparents. It was great to see Jessie, over for just a […]

Ahem A man from the mairie (local council) knocked on our door one day and asked Alli to give him back our second black rubbish bin. Alli told him he was mistaken as we only had one. He apologized and left. Some days later our bin disappeared in broad daylight, while Alli was actually in […]

Ahem March is a great month, known in Finland as maaliskuu, the “earthy” month when the earth finally becomes visible under the snow. And it is true that March sees off the winter and ushers in the spring. Here in the Alsace, it often starts with an overcoat of snow and can finish in shorts […]

Ahem This month turns out to have been one of the most sociable in all our family’s shared memory. In four short weeks Alli and I have been out to dinner together no less than five times; we welcomed our cousin Christopher and five of his friends to our house; we have gone to a […]