I have a young sharp-eyed stringer who lives by the Welland Canal that connects the Great Lakes of Erie and Ontario. The Regional Municipality of Niagara is situated in southern Ontario, Canada, right on the American border. This area is not to be confused with the Greater Niagara Region of New York. Not even close.

Probably due to such regional proximity – not to mention the long-standing rivalry of the American and Canadian bits of Niagara Falls–all things military are of vital interest.

Now, we might never know why he was obviously surfing women’s underwear sites, but let’s just say he came across the Swiss newsflash by accident.  Starting this month, female recruits in the Swiss Army will have their own (female-shaped) underwear. There will be two sets of underpants—no legs for summer duty, and long legs for winter. The upper-body garment seems to be a state secret.

Now I have it from rock-solid authority (Swiss ex-army man, Corporal, Artillery) that there is no rule that you HAVE to wear Swiss army-issue underpants. He, for example, never did. No one checks.

You could bring your own favourites from home and were even provided with a special little canvas bag that you mailed home once a week filled with army-ravaged socks and underpants.   One’s mother would then take over and do her bit: washing, starching, ironing and sending back to boot-camp (postage-free) the newly-fragrant items. Usually a Toblerone chocolate bar was added to keep up morale.

However, genuine army-issue underpants have always been available. What has previously been handed out was simply XXXL men’s underwear. From what I see of the skinny little recruits on patrol from time to time in the Geneva countryside, they could probably wear these clothing items, fashionably, on the outside of their uniforms.

But we move with the times here in Switzerland, and our Shakespearean Defence Minister, Viola, is a woman. On International Woman’s Day of this year, she announced her desire to see an increase in female army recruits from the less than 1% at present, to 10% within the next decade. To aid in her vision for the future she also announced the new Swiss Army Underwear Scheme. It has been specified that the new underwear will meet the specific needs of women and that the ergometrics of the female body will be taken under consideration.

Well, THAT should pull them in.

As all international news articles have been pointing out, men and women in the Swiss Army have had the same duties since 2004, and whether crawling in a muddy ditch with a 27kg pack on your back or sitting at a desk all day, bunched-up underwear could put you right off.

So, we’re hoping that positive reports are going to be available soon. We’ll keep our eyes peeled and our fingers crossed that the new gotchies are snug and comfortable.

We’ve come a long way, baby!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Apart from being dead, the mouse looked extremely healthy. Miniature (bad news) soft grey fur, it was flushed down the upstairs toilet. There was no ceremony.

Then things got worse. There are some days that you might as well be hiking up Kilimanjaro worrying about altitude sickness and the melting glaciers than staying at home in your village in the Geneva countryside.

A morning trip to the post office was essential—voting forms, a parcel, and a letter. This now entails either a dangerous bike ride through the music-pounding commuter cars, or you brush the wet leaves off your automobile and race along with them. Unfortunately, our own convenient village post office closed down some years back, and we now have to travel about five kilometres up the hill to the next one.

There, my friendly post-lady was in a flap, as I enquired about recent transactions on my post office account and was told to go to a post machine in town. To try to cheer her up, I began our yearly bonding ritual centred on dates and weights for sending parcels to Canada for Christmas. At this point she lost the plot completely and told me I had to order stamps on-line as she was shutting down in a couple of weeks.

I understood she was having a bad day or that I was still delirious after the mouse episode and I returned home to take stock.

When the morning mail was delivered, all became clear. A flyer, featuring a carefully-coiffed, grey-haired, pear-earringed, pleasantly smiling, smartly-jacketed, leather shoulder-bagged, fingernail-painted Swiss white woman (she is holding a bundle of exciting-looking letters and voting forms) explained NOT that the post office was shutting down, but that it was relocating to a grocery store right beside the Chinese pizza restaurant.

This was all our fault, as we were no longer using the post office as much as we should. And as a “service” to all the old fools who have not mastered the art of sending packages and letters and voting forms via their smart phones, the village had found this nifty solution.

It is presented as a very radical improvement as the grocery store opens at 7 am seven days a week.  The spin is that WE, the ancient ones, are the lucky ducks. Not only can we still pay our bills, get some cash, and send thoughtful gifts, in the dark of morning but we can do our shopping as well! If we plan this right, by 8 am we can be back at home and have the whole day in front of us.

Along with the flyer, there was also a very nasty speeding ticket. How this could have occurred in a construction site is a complete mystery to me. So, I am looking forward to the opening of the new grocery-enhanced post office. I will drive to it slowly and carefully and never have to race into town again.

 

 

Who says national referendums are boring? The people of Switzerland, after parliamentary discussion at the beginning of the summer that I had thought was just a joke, are voting in a few weeks on the wildly famous Cow Horn Initiative.

This popular initiative (it received 119,626 valid signatures) is for the encouragement of farmers to let their dairy cows grow natural horns. This, in turn, necessarily leads to roomier stables (as swinging your horns around in close proximity to others can cause obvious damage) and much more bovine naturalness, well-being, self-esteem and freedom.

Most Swiss cows are de-horned when they are very young for the common good and out of social politeness. Of course, it does not exactly tickle, but then neither does getting your wisdom teeth pulled out or your dodgy moles and warts removed.

There will be a financial incentives, of course. If a farmer lets his cows grow horns, then there is 190 francs in it for him/her every year for every cow. And for every goat with horns, you get 38 francs a year.

It is calculated that this new constitutional amendment, if accepted, will cost Switzerland up to 30 million Swiss francs annually. However, to get this agricultural subsidy the farmer also has to prove that each horned cow is let out of its stable into roomy and bucolic pastureland 26 times a month between May and October.

Strangely, the government does not really want this law to pass.

Just imagine. You would need cow-horn police (testing that the horns are real, not just plastic imitation horns); you would need cow-herd police (counting the numbers of cows that are out and about shaking their horns and ringing their bells on every Alpine patch of spare grass; you would need cow-psychologists testing and judging that these new horns are making the cows happier (it can be jolly cold at altitude in September.)

Out of 600,000 milk-cows in Switzerland, only about a quarter of them at the moment have horns. These ones must be putting on their safety goggles in preparation for the clumsy onslaught of amateur horn-wearers tonight.  For as it’s Hallowe’en, I’m sure all Swiss cows are busy dressing up with their fake horns. Much like Mickey Mouse ears, these come out once a year to disguise, amuse and confuse.

There is also a business opportunity here. With all the danger of farmers and other cows getting their eyes poked out with new, flashy, ubiquitous cow horns, the cow-horn protector must be invented. A pair of signed Roger Federer used tennis balls, for example, could be the nec-plus-ultra in cow horn safety essentials.

A perfect example of Swiss skill, compromise and ingenuity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is something disarmingly wrong when there are earplugs instead of chocolates on your hotel pillows. This was not the case in the cosy little family hotel at the top of the Simplon Pass last week. The regulation miniature Toblerones were perkily propped on their feathery mounds.

We were on our way to Italy, fleeing the cold flat grey winter of the Geneva countryside. We had images of 15^th-century frescos, baroque churches, duomos, termas and the Mediterranean dancing in our heads, and to have properly deserved their Latinate luxury, the leaving of Switzerland over the grim Simplon seemed dramatically appropriate.

The Simplon Pass (2006m) is open all year round, but in the winter you can see almost nothing from the road due to the huge mounds of ploughed snow and ice piled high at the edges. You have to be very clever and brave and turn off into unmarked cleared areas to see Kaspar Stockalper’s monumental buildings that he used to stock his merchandise—mostly salt—being transported over the pass. He was a sort of 17^th-century Donald Trump—an extraordinarily rich bully with a castle in Brig and big plans to make money from the rest of the world. He got so annoying, that he was even kicked out for a time.

What is visible, thought, at the top of the Simplon is the gloomy giant granite eagle, built by the Swiss troops during their stay there during WWII to (successfully) scare both the Germans and the Italians away.  History is in the air.

The evening started well, and local generosity included wines from the Upper Valais and a chicken cordon bleu about the size, thickness and colour of a bible.

Then there was night.

In a proper Swiss hotel room, the duvet is the most crucially meaningful feature. At a mountain hotel, the duvet is king. It is very thick, very light, and could possibly protect you from the rigours of the South Pole or outer space. You must position your limbs so that they are half-in, half-out and hope that your body and brain figure it out.

This didn’t happen, and so after the heating was experimentally turned off, it was agreed that the window should be opened. The cold mountain air slipped in.

However, so did other things. In the village there is a humble stone bell-tower. In the day time, I swear, it sits silent. At night, it chimes every quarter hour, and then changes to a bell-tone down an octave to sound the hour. I must admit, I missed both the 1 and 2 o’clock bells, but enjoyed them all after that until the 6 a.m. frenzy of frantic bell-ringing in the alpine darkness. This, it turns out, is not a village fire alarm, but a signal for you to get up to pray.

I had never before quite understood Napoleon’s rather negative attitude towards churches. Simplon might have been my epiphany.

 

The Canton of Geneva is a source of constant hilarity to the other 25 cantons of the Swiss Confederation. Various local politicians go out on shaky limbs, plan unending projects, pull repetitive bloopers. These absurdities (Genevoiserie in French and genferei in German) are well-documented and there is an official web-site (http://www.genferei.org/) that is guaranteed to make you laugh out loud in these cold wet windy January days.

Some of the simpler genfereis include planning to build apartment buildings inside highway cloverleaves, planting the wrong (not growing) sort of (expensive) grass in the football stadium, hiring artists to paint designs under the trams at the tram stops, or modernizing the public transport system so that no one can figure out how to get to where they used to go.

Creativity, foresightedness and complexity are essential ingredients in a jolly good genferei, as is spending lots and lots of money. The joke is even bigger if the federal government has been persuaded to join in.

To my knowledge, no one is ever really punished for a genferei; rather, there is an annual prize for the very best one.  In extreme and conflicting cases there could be a bit of finger-wagging, but as no one did anything bad on purpose, then these follies are written off as simply being part of the great human comedy of life.  

Now, last night’s national news (perhaps to become redundant as we are all voting in a few weeks about abandoning the federal TV and radio tax but that’s another story) had a small report that Geneva is currently forming its very own Mounted Police force. Nine police people are currently in Belgium on a week-long training course.

The news presenter’s smirk was a dead give-away: the story has the makings of a perfect genferei.

Coming from Canada, the idea of tall strong men on horses bounces off my spirit and images of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police rise up: the red jackets, the flat-brimmed hats, the stiff upper lip, the impeccable black horses, the Musical Ride, Dudley Do-Right.

Of course, the Canadian Mounties no longer use horses operationally and from what I have seen a horse’s role in law enforcement in the 21^st century has to do with urban patrolling and crowd control. Getting blown on by a big, smelly, uncouth horse would make just about anyone drop whatever they were doing and go home.

But no. Geneva’s Mounties are predestined to patrol rural and suburban zones. They will saunter bucolic bridle paths and gallop the frontiers. They will drink coffee at the garage up the hill. They will enforce finicky dog-poo laws and check on candy-wrapper litter.

They will be regularly sent on international training courses to acquire more equestrian skills. They will eat sparingly, I’m sure. Just a sprinkle of federal funding (transportation, perhaps?) and a most beautiful genferei is in the makings.

 

 

 

In those old hectic days of work, deadlines, and worry when the hours in a day were just too few to deal properly with shoddy merchandise, you might have been forgiven for tipping that bottle of sour wine down the sink or throwing away some freshly-bought completely-rotten product.

However, one of the many advantages of being part of the post-work-for-money world, is that justice can, finally, be served. We—the retired ones with our marbles still in place and our glasses sparkling clean—are the new commercial warriors out there making the shops a safer and a better place for you.

For example, there was yesterday evening’s incident concerning the duck terrine in the metal-clip glass jar. Served as a festive treat, those salt crystals turned out to be bits of glass. Experience helps here. Having broken a tooth on sandy leeks stuffed into a Brittany crèpe a few years back, I recognized the sound and texture of imminent danger and raised the alarm at the supper table.

Once you have a culprit, it is important to return the faulty product as soon as possible. If not, you could easily forget all about it, destroy evidence, or present a mumbling, half-remembered, unbelievable account of the incident.

If your story is fresh, (much like the duck fat in which the glass shards are still embedded) you do not even need a receipt. The lady gives you money and expresses her sincere hope and belief that such an incident is a freak of nature and will never happen again.

She then calls the manager.

I have returned many horrible things. There was the rotten chicken where I found myself in a Monday-morning line-up with other elderly innocents who had been expecting a roast fowl for their Sunday dinner. The stench was overwhelming and the customer services personnel could not process us fast enough.

Then there was the incident of the fat white worm in the can of corn. There the service après-vente lady made the mistake of asking me whether I had placed the worm there as some sort of prank.

Exchanging a bottle of bad wine is never a problem in a supermarket, but at my local farmer’s barn I once took back a very nasty bottle. Wine snobbery is little tolerated here in the far west, I was told not to return anything ever again. Real men drink corked wine out here in the Geneva countryside.

My perfect return was a thick piece of chocolate with a hair sticking right through it. I ate all around the offensive bit, and actually sent the nibbled disc to the address on back of the chocolate wrapping.  A few weeks later I received a carton of chocolate bars in the mail along with a personal letter explaining how a hygienic bristle from a nut-sweeping brush had got itself stuck and they were ever so sorry.

A fairy-tale Charlie and the Chocolate Factory possibility.