Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: Swiss

  • bicycle fascist

    I was overtaken on the bike path today by a puzzlingly hostile man. He seemed to have a store of labels and insults saved up and was eager to put them to use. The sun had finally come out. I had ridden clear across town to collect my Ghanaian visa. I was thinking as I rode: honestly there’s nothing like crossing the first bridge to open between East and West Germany in 1989 in a sudden sharp hailstorm to make you want to leave the country for a while.

    Later on all the errands and grocery shopping were finally done and as I was cycling home – the clouds broke apart and a glorious sunshine lit the local world. I slowed down and looked about me, enjoying the pretty sky. Indescribable light at this time of year, sometimes. A pinging from behind warned of another, faster cyclist. I veered wobbling to the left, defaulting by accident to my Australian road rules, and the other rider pinged his bell furiously, with small intermissions, four or five times over. He called out to me. “Can you pull over to the right to let a person pass?”

    “I have pulled over to the left,” I said, “to let you past.”

    He pinged his bell again though he already had my attention. “Are you deaf?”

    I said, “What? Are you German?”

    “No,” he said, primly, as he passed me. “I am a Swiss. Keep your German fascism to yourself!”

    Fuck you, I said, reverting to English, and then the tail of my skirt jammed in the spokes and I shuddered to a stop. As I disentangled myself and set off home I was thinking how quickly we had skipped through the steps to the full apparatus: accusations of physical handicap, warning sirens, curt instructions, national identity and then – within a mere moment, it seemed – we were already arrived at the most unimaginative form of terrorism there is: Fascism.

  • a Berlin evening, so cold, so sweet

    After an exceptionally difficult night and a day of doing difficult work, I said: I need to go out. Let’s go someplace we can have a glass of red and a plate of food. I had in mind Italian but the restaurant was closed for some sawing and hammering, we ended up at a Swiss place run by a Swiss man who aired his Swiss accent to amuse us.

    The wine was nice, the food was ok and the atmosphere thriving and red-checked. People came in from the cold in little gouts. We had a basket of bread and the waitress brought a little marble slab like something chipped out of a wall with a scrape of herbed butter splayed onto it. In the flickering candlelight we talked about his work and mine. I kept picking up the white enamelled wooden pepper mill and holding it in my hand, for the consolation.

    Is it true the Swiss eat apple tart with lavender-scented soft cream? These Swiss do. I remembered the word I had made up to describe the natty fellows in late middle age circling the lake in Zurich in their roll-top cars, who had pink and lemon coloured cashmere jumpers knotted round their shoulders and some of whom were wearing mint green pants: immaculate contraception. We whined a little, pleasurably, about the music, which was one of those wan girls who spoons the stuffing out of twelve or fourteen formerly robust intricacies (The Cure, baby, the Rolling Stones) so that you feel faintly perturbed by the recollection: hey, didn’t I once used to know this song? More than the Queen, she was the opposite of punk. Feeling warmed inside and far more unwound we paid our bill and walked home across the hardening snow, and it had grown so terribly cold during the evening I started to tremble inside my duvet jacket and we both became nauseous with chill.