Our grand-daughter has already made several serious career choices for when she grows up.

It began as being a painter / artist, as everyone praised her early Picasso-style drawings as being produced by a prodigy of extraordinary talent.

This quickly faded, and, liking cats and dogs, a vet became her second profession of choice. This has recently been dropped as she feels she could handle the warm furry outsides of animals, but the squishy liquid insides are a cause of concern.

When she discovered the self-scanning gizmo at the Migros she wanted to devote her life to shopping there, or, even better, becoming a scanning specialist.

Her latest stage brings with it the wish to become a little-kids primary school teacher so she can go back in time and have a school-free Wednesday.

This has resulted in several recent school-related conversations, with some surprising results.

When quizzed about her favorite day at school, Tuesday was craftily mentioned. This just happens to be the day that she comes here for lunch (of either macaroni and cheese or hamburgers) and is the envy of her entire school class who all march off to the faded lettuce and refried polenta of cuisine scolaire.

However, the absolute day of choice is Friday, due to Conséquences Agréeable. I had first thought this was some sort of a board game like Monopoly or Diplomacy or Labyrinth teaching the young blossoming minds the beauty of a morally-ordered world.

It turns out to be much more personal and devious. As each school week wears on, the thumb tack under your name moves from green, through yellow and orange into the red depending on your behavioural errors. If, by Friday afternoon, you are still in the green or yellow, you can spend your time doing nothing—laughing, giggling, whispering. This state of affairs is called “agreeable consequences.” If you have messed up in a possible multitude of ways (including faults of your parents forgetting to sign a report card, for instance) your thumb tack marches relentlessly at each error one step closer to the red.

If you are in the red field by Friday, you do not enjoy “agreeable consequences” but their opposite – dire consequences – work: dastardly multiplication tables, writing out lines, French dictation and correction. This is, of course, an 8-year-old’s nightmare which can–among the very best students–lead to precocious parental signature forgery.

This little piece of elementary psychology is only introduced in the 5th year of primary school (the year when Wednesday morning classes are begun) by the very sharpest of teachers. I like to think that our grand-daughter longs for a purer and simpler time of the truly agreeable 4-day week of her earlier school years.

And I am sure that her smug, selfish, lazy happiness created through the misfortune of others is an entirely unforeseen by-product of Friday afternoon’s “agreeable consequences.”

My garbage can phobia began exactly 10 years ago. We had just moved to the village, and recycling was still a concept struggling to be born.

In the old days, the large metal community garbage bins were out by the smelly water treatment plant. Situated above ground they were clearly labeled—glass, paper, everything else. Of course, a few fussy people rigorously separated aluminum, tin, plastic and food scraps, but it was with gay abandon that the rest of us pitched a tuna can, a banana peel, a yoghurt bucket and an old jam jar into a big, solid, green plastic garbage bag and threw it all neatly away.

Twice a week you would roll out your private galvanized garbage can full of your personal trash and garbage men in trucks rolled around the countryside and picked it up. Once every couple of weeks you would bundle up your newspapers and put out the bottles. It was a private and orderly world.

Then came the advent of the plastic community trash bins located in garbage hot-spots. This inevitably bred a certain sort of citizen: the self-appointed Garbage Policewoman—in my case she was profoundly Swiss, of a certain age, and lived in a sniper-vantage-point third-storey apartment. She had excellent eyesight, mobility and wind-proof hair.

Yes, so I got busted throwing an old apple crate and a little short piece of garden hose into the general container. Filled with an acute sense of civic duty, this particular person defended the integrity of her trash-bags-only garbage bin. Severe and lasting trauma was the result.

Since then, garbage sorting has been streamlined. In the village recycling headquarters over by the volunteer fire-truck shed and the community defibrillator, there are: above-ground containers for old clothes, garden trimmings, oil, coffee capsules and batteries; and underground ones for metal, plastic, glass, paper, and kitchen miscellaneous.

To make matters even more emotionally challenging, some party-pooper has plastered the glass deposit chutes with the Alcohol Help Line telephone number.

The municipal council has supplied each household with a personal compartmentalized heavy-duty plastic carry-bag to walk your garbage to the recycling station. It is illustrated with a cross-eyed friendly-looking wild boar that walks on his back legs and wears red running shoes. He cheerfully balances an empty wine bottle on his snout, carries a heap of newspapers on his head, jumps on a plastic bottle to flatten it, drives a snail pulling a compost bucket, flips batteries into a little box and juggles metal cans. There is also a helpful list of things that cannot be put into the garbage, and a map to get you to the cantonal dump.

So, if you need to pitch your old apple crate or a bit of garden hose or all those pre-Christmas cardboard delivery boxes that are starting to accumulate, I would suggest you do it quietly at night and make sure that no one is looking.

Well, if it had been April 1st, I would have thought that it was the joke news story (this is a cunning Swiss farce played out annually to keep us on our toes.) But it’s not; I’ve checked. So it seems to be true that the Swiss post office (fondly known as the Yellow Giant) is getting set to deliver parcels to people on Sundays via taxi. The postal spokesperson was interviewed and she said that they had to move with the times.

I have had a close financial and emotional relationship with Swiss Post for the past 38 years. Being from Away, means that birthdays, Christmas, books, and clothes have all been serviced for me by them. There was the famous cracked tin of Canada No 1 maple syrup that had leaked right through the cardboard box and had bits of other peoples’ letters and Christmas cards sticking to it. There was the 5- gram over-the-limit parcel that I opened, ate a chocolate, and repacked right at the wicket. I have argued about the sanity of sudden new rules, and have made militant post office buddies.

The post office in my village closed a few years back. Then the one in the next village closed. The one in village #3 is probably hanging on by a thread of envelope spit.  We drive closer and closer towards the city looking for real live people to help us fulfill our postal possibilities.

The stoned postman (who was an extremely cool part of the long-lost village postal team; he used to hide my mail in the garage) has given way to a brisk young man, who seems to be hurried, harried, and always running late. He delivers parcels if we’re at home; throws them over the fence if we are not. I asked him about the Sunday taxi delivery service and he said he knew absolutely nothing about it. I mean, they don’t even deliver parcels on Saturdays, so how can Sunday be a sudden delivery-day imperative? Everything in the canton of Geneva is shut on Sundays–well, except for the cantonal garbage dump, but that’s another story.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to my theoretical Sunday parcel deliveries. I wonder where I will have to go to collect my parcels if I’m not at home? I wonder if they will use illegal Uber taxi drivers as they are cheaper?

I wonder what they will think of next.

It has arrived—big and fat and grey. As a Swiss citizen and a woman, I feel an imperative to vote, no matter how badly. This particular October 18th vote elects our members of parliament and our cantonal representatives.

I carefully peel off the back flap and consider the contents: two voting envelopes, one voting card, one ballot paper, one ballot book (which contains 26 lists of candidates), and two instruction booklets (45 pages total).

Already feeling tired, I do a quick flick through the lists. Geneva’s not too bad as our quota is a skimpy 11 MPs. The poor Zurich people have to choose 35.

This time around, there seems to be no one I know—no neighbours, no former students, no hockey players. Careful consideration reveals a brick-layer, several militants, an astrologer, a feminist, a taxi driver, a naturalist, a TV technician, a dentist, a janitor, a lady-of-the-house, and a couple of wine-makers. The vast majority seem to be existing MPs, or people in more modest, boring, local political positions.

So, on with the vote. I choose my favorite political parties and I limit myself to the lists that give candidates’ ages. I then ask anyone who’s sitting at the kitchen table in my 5-minute voting window whether then have any pertinent information…something they’ve heard or read somewhere, a picture or a tone of voice they didn’t like; a good idea.

This line of enquiry is quickly exhausted and so you must take the plunge. Choose a list, cross out the names or the professions you dislike, double up with someone you feel might be good, write in the name of a wine-maker as you happen to be drinking a glass of wine.

This moves things along quite well, but, finally there are one or two names that you sort of have to guess at.

Finally, with a flourish and a strong sense of citizenry, you carefully sign your voting card, put your ballots into the colour-coded voting envelopes and lick them sealed, repack and stick down your untorn outer envelope making sure that you don’t accidentally send the whole she-bang back to yourself, and place the hefty unused information brochures in the paper recycling basket. Mission accomplished.

This intense political activity takes me back to a local radio interview that quizzed people in the streets of Geneva whether they thought long-term non-Swiss residents should be able to vote. One perky articulate woman said definitely not, as they might vote the wrong way.

I’m sure glad that we real Swiss know how to vote the right way.

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.