I am Swiss: but wasn’t to begin with. There is no doubt whatsoever about that. Swiss as a piece of Gruyère cheese. Swiss as a tub of marmot fat (yes, you can buy this at a drug store in Altdorf—the town where William Tell shot the apple off his son’s head.) I am Swiss.
Before we progress it is important to establish this. I have spent my entire adult life in Geneva—the real one. I have a fistful of defunct red passports filled with stamps and visas and now punctured with Swiss-cross holes through them. I speak French (with a slight accent, I like to think) and I can swear like a trooper in Swiss German.
In addition to the shocking vocabulary, I also have a Swiss-German washing machine, salad swinger, iron, alp-horn, and husband. These things last forever.
I, and many of my possessions, have survived three St Bernards and a Great Swiss Mountain Dog. I even like Cenovis. I eat muesli for breakfast soaking in big, fat, Swiss cow bio-milk and take turns shopping at the Migros and the COOP. I make a delicious roesti. How much more Swiss can a girl possibly be? (I don’t often talk about it, but I do draw the line at dried green beans and blood sausages, but I’m thinking of working these in as well.)
However, there are moments when an inner un-Heidi rather Hyde-like creature emerges: a marshmallow-eating, pop-drinking, potato-chip crunching, peanut-butter smearing, chain-sawing, canoeing, gum-chewing, hockey-cheering Canadian throwback to earlier, easier times. Spaghetti in tins and rice in puddings: that’s where a piece of me still belongs.
And so welcome to my world: the world of the perpetual tourist at home and abroad.
Pour moi, un des p’ts bonheurs d’être suisse c’est……..de bouffer engouffrer une pleine poignée de chips ZWEIFEL au paprika, les seuls chips dignes de ce nom au monde!