DIARY MINETTE MARRIN
Suspended high above the snow in the Swiss Alps, on a ski-lift that had mysteriously stopped, I was reminded of that famous phrase in a Times editorial of long ago — 'picnicking on Vesuvius'. I can't remember what the Thunderer was holding forth about, exactly. It might have been the awfulness of having Mick Jagger in our midst, or it might have been the IMF inspectors, but the general drift was the end of civilisation as we know it. Perhaps it was the mountains that made me think of it, although as far as I know the Alps are not likely to burst into flame. On the other hand, the snow was melting, very visibly, and unseasonally, as I sat swinging in the intense heat, with scary ultra-something rays burning through my Factor 30 Ecran Total. Each year there is less and less snow, and this probably is the beginning of the end of skiing in the Alps. What really made me have apocalyptic thoughts, though, was the CNN news every morning. We watched it, miserably, on television each day, before setting out, and for the first time I felt that the extraordinary peace and solitude of the mountains — this is term time, so no shrieking snowboarders — are under threat. Or rather, that this entire way of life, with its feeling of peace and security, its confidence and commerce, is an illusion — it is picnicking on Vesuvius. It's true that my anxiety may have been heightened by the experience of dangling alone for several minutes at several thousand feet, without a soul in earshot. But there can be very few people who don't feel the same, at moments, every day. Fortunately, these moments are rare; human nature seems to be so organised that the far-off sorrows of the world do not often interfere with the pleasures of large amounts of foie gras or some serious shopping. And there was a great deal of hue and caline in the smartish resort where I was staying, if not exactly of volupte — it is soothingly middle-aged, I'm glad to say. It has almost no celebs either, which was nice. The best (or worst) they can do is Roger Moore, who has a chalet there, and if he doesn't exactly raise the tone, he can hardly be said to lower it much either, which is more than you can usually say of the British in ski resorts. Fortunately, they hardly have any brutish British where I was staying; I hardly heard any English at all.
Ican never decide why it is that the Europeans are so smart and well-behaved compared with the British. And so confident, apparently. While the British, even the very rich, go around looking as if they had little money and less taste, the French, the Italians, the Germans and the Swiss look as if they owe it to themselves to look kempt and expensive — what the great boutiquier Joseph Ettedgui once described to me in an interview as 'very Madame'. Or very Monsieur, of course. They seem to love it. In the little resort where I've often stayed, they go about in fiendishly expensive designer fur, with elegant, brand-new shoes and colour co-ordinated clothes that appear to have come straight from the drycleaner. This isn't true of everyone, of course. There are some, and I suspect they may be the socially smarter ones, who dress more quietly. But even those who go in for casual chic still wear supple, immaculate suede jeans, serious jewellery and impeccable boots 'cowboy' behind the wheels of radiantly shiny Lexus four-wheel drives. You can see at a glance that they're not of the Anglo-Saxon persuasion.
To someone coming from Britain the obsessive cleanliness is a bit of a shock. The town itself is daz7lingly neat and hygienic — not a piece of litter or chewing-gum in sight, and every shop and restaurant spotless. Every lobby, every lavatory smells strongly of concentrated 'Flowers of the Alps' or 'Matterhorn Mist'. Meanwhile, an English newspaper that I bought announced that London is now filthier than Dakar. Oddly enough, my close friend and next-door neighbour, who is German, says that's what she loves about Britain, and especially London — all the filth and disorder. It's Ordnung of every kind she and her husband fled from; she finds it horri
bly repressive. She believes that the price of freedom, up to a point, is a little filth; our local public pool may be quite foul, but at least you can dive in without a regulation rubber hat. The waves of rubble in the Portobello Road and the rancid smells of street food are a constant, life-enhancing delight to her. This opinion had always seemed completely daft to me, until these few days in Switzerland. There is perhaps something repressive about all that tidying away of all life's dark and dirty debris; it's a kind of pretence that it doesn't exist. And leading such a squeakyclean life is a kind of picnicking not on Vesuvius but on a hidden rubbish dump.
Some French friends of my skiing friends invited me to an informal supper, which I enjoyed very much. I loved hearing their fulminations against their short working week, and how impossible it is to run a farm with no flexibility at harvest time. They hate all the Brussels red tape and corruption, too, not to mention French corruption, and they hate Jospin. Not all the French are terribly French about the EU. Sadly, though, the evening was ruined for one man, whose mother in France had just been burgled. She and her maid had been tricked by two conmen pretending to be from the gas board or something. There were commiserations all round the table, and finally someone asked whether anything of particular value had been taken. The poor man replied that, apart from things of sentimental value, perhaps the worst was the loss of the collection of — well, I'd better not say which painters, but substitute others of equal standing — Matisse and Magritte. What can one say? I immediately realised, as we used to say at home in schoolboy Franglais, that I was dining rather au dessus de ma gore. The world divides into those who love ridiculous phrases like that, and those who hate them. I'm very fond of them: I think they're part of family solidarity, because they come to have a semi-private meaning. One of my favourites, which my younger brother and I imagined we had invented to cover the many and various kinds of panic associated with travel, is folie de gore — train fever. Others are from the diplomatic or army past; there is HdeC for hors de combat; it means something slightly crueller than out of the running; my mother, whose judgments were strict, used to use it with great abandon to mean absolutely useless. English expressions, in her view, like FHB or PLU were quite unacceptable. Only French or franglais, or at least some sort of foreign language, would do, to dissociate one's English self, no doubt, from anything quite so silly. Vivent les differences.
Minette Martin is a columnist with the Sunday Times.
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