My bike race of 2024 was a departure from years past: I tried a new event, the Engadin Radmarathon. The hosting town is Zernez, which is a 45-minute drive from Saint Moritz, in south-east Switzerland. Zernez’s canton – the rough equivalent of a Canadian province or UK county – is known as Graubünden in German, and Grisons, in French.
Zernez in Winter
But I don’t want to write about biking here. I want to write about language.
Languages and Dialects
Anyone who has visited Switzerland knows that many (most?) of the people are linguistic virtuosos.
There are four official languages in Switzerland. The percentage of Swiss who speak them as a first language are as follows: German (62.3%), French (22.8%), Italian (8.0%) and Romansh (0.5%).
In the case of Romansh, you have to give kudos to a country that officially supports a language spoken by such a small percentage of its people. [All four official languages appear on Swiss banknotes, which the Wangs crew will remember was a source of great mirth. “Dieci Franchi”, however, is Italian, not Romansh.]
According to T.S. Eliot, April is the cruellest month.
Well, he may have been a great poet, but Eliot was a rotten meteorologist.
A lot of nice things happen in April, at least where I live (France, and hence the northern hemisphere, when April is in the spring), and it has always seemed a very forward, uplifting time to me.
If I had to nominate the most difficult month – and I still wouldn’t call it cruel – I would have said November.
Compare the two: My Mom was born in April. Likewise VC, SD, JL, AM and many other of my friends. That is hardly meteorology. But still, so many nice people, what’s not to like? April, and the period surrounding it, is a time for hopeful anticipation, because it provides the transition from cold winter, through spring and into warm summer.
November is the inversion of all that (although I do know some nice people who were born in November). It is too late for Indian Summer. Any colourful leaves have long since fallen. The clear, vibrant cold days of full-blown winter have not yet arrived. Any precipitation falls only as rain.
Around my house, nothing ever really dries out properly. The bathroom is chilly, the house, in general, difficult to heat. It is the month where the sun struggles most. When streams and rivers are most likely to overflow their banks.
For this and other reasons, I was feeling rebellious this November, and decided to take a quick break in Paris, a city I hadn’t visited in a very long time.
To begin with, I resolved to remain light-on-my feet and book at short notice when the first period of four to five clear days was forecast. But as the month wore on – that November weather again — it was obvious those good days were unlikely to happen, and in a “to hell with it” moment late one Thursday afternoon, booked the whole thing, transport, hotel, kennel for the dog and all, and at 06:00 on the morning of the next day, was shaking the rain off my shoulders while standing in a train that was just pulling out of the station at Aime. I felt a bit like Bogie, in the train scene from Casablanca, but somehow in reverse. Unlike him, I wasn’t leaving Paris. That train would take me to it.
In October 2023, I finally took the plunge, and made one of my regular trips to the UK via train rather than plane. It was a first for me. I wanted to help somehow save the planet.
Initially, it didn’t seem like such a good idea.
By crude calculations, the train would take more time and be more expensive. A lot more expensive. The cheapest train tickets I could find were three times more costly than flights from Geneva to London. Saving the planet suddenly seemed like a rather costly proposition. And a flight would have me in London very early in the morning. The train could only get me there around midday. So how could I justify the train?
But my friend VC urged me to be logical and look at the door-to-door times, the true costs when you factor in parking, fuel, péage, stress, useful-as-opposed-to-wasted time, and so on.
Despite her admonitions, it still seemed a losing proposition. But I did it anyway, for the first time in October, from home to London and back via local train and Eurostar. In November I did Paris by TGV.
Every once in a while you hear a story that is just so good, the pessimist gets the better of you, and you immediately think it is of apocryphal origin. But I trust the guy who told me this one, and he claimed it happened to him. So I believe it.
And it would be so nice if it were true….
I was in Prague at the beginning of February, pursuing a job opportunity, and had the chance to meet up with a friend there, a mathematician and engineer, Václav. He reminds me a bit of my old Classics professor/friend, Ceri Stephens: kind, engaging, intelligent, and loves his beer. Not quite the same age as Ceri, so perhaps in his 60’s. Václav and I had dinner on the outskirts of town near the castle that overlooks it, and walked back towards Prague around 23:00.
