Cluttered memories

I have been thinking a lot about "clutter" over the last months.
Partly because of the number of times Ninesh has had to pull important documents out of the recycling bin: cheques, passport applications, insurance documents, all enthusiastically binned by me in my constant desire to keep our house free from unnecessary "stuff".
But mostly because we have spent many weekends over the past year, trying to help my parents-in-law empty their 4 bedroomed home of the clutter accumulated over almost 50 years of marriage.
We started gently with the shed and the garage, getting rid of old flower pots and mouldy books. 
But all of us knew, right from the beginning, that the biggest problem, was the attic.
It's a big attic, running the width of the house and it is piled from boarded floor to pitched roof with "stuff".
Huge suitcases, paper-filled tea chests, children's toys, christmas decorations, curtains, duvets, newspapers.  
Like unpeeling the layers of an onion, the attic reveals year after year of my parents-in-laws married life in reverse chronological order:  the most recent unwanted Christmas presents balanced precariously on top. the love letters of their courtship buried right at the bottom.
When, at last, we pulled down the attic ladder and ascended into the chaos my decluttering fingers were itching to recycle, throw away or donate the seemingly insurmountable mountain of debris.
I could feel the words of Dr Seuss  burning on my tongue.

                                  " This mess is so big and so deep and so tall,
                                    That we can't clear it up,
                                    There is no way at all."

But with the house sold and a moving date pending, surrender was not an option. there had to be a way.
And so, grabbing a dusty, overflowing box  from the furthest corner, we began.
We worked and worked.
By the end of the day we had driven to the tip and local charity shops so many times  that our car could probably have driven there by itself.
But, like the porridge from the magic porridge pot, the stream of objects flowing through the attic hatch seemed never-ending and the ocean of chaos in the living room seemed to be constantly growing.
And in the middle of it all, stood my mother-in-law.
"My father always used to drink from this" she says, stroking a small, dusty cup.
" Look, this is Ninesh's certificate for coming second in athletics when he was 6" she hands it to me, "You should keep it." 
"And here's the horse his sister used to play with. I'll give it to her when we visit next weekend."

And for a moment I pause.
My decluttering frenzy halted by the anguish in her voice.
To her, these are not just dusty cups or bits of paper or broken toys. Instead, 
They are something precious and irreplaceable.
 They let her touch her past and bring it back to life.
We are not just throwing away rubbish, we are dismantling memories.

When my parents-in-law were first married, they left Sri Lanka to live in Canada.  My father-in-law worked for the High Commission, so they knew they would probably spend their lives moving from country to country. 
But while they were away from Sri Lanka, civil war broke out. 
As Tamils, their families were forced to flee and my mother-in-law's family home was burnt to the ground.
Her niece narrowly escaped with her life, everything else inside the house was set ablaze.
Nothing left.
A whole family history destroyed.
Nothing left to hold in your hand and remember.
Perhaps that is why, over the years, everything has been kept and moved to the attic:
A baby tooth, an old pram, a worn-out blanket, an electric heater, a single earring, a newspaper announcing the death of Lady Diana.
Any of them could be important one day.
It is hard to know which of your possessions will form the invisible scaffolding that holds your life together and gives your life meaning.
Everything could be an important something.
So best to keep everything, just in case.  
Perhaps it is too easy to imbue objects with meaning.
But it is also too easy to think they mean nothing.

I walk over to my mother-in-law and touch the cup that belonged to her father.
"You have to keep it," I say.

By the end of the day, we were dust-covered and exhausted but the attic was almost empty.
I surveyed the piles of torn magazines, bagfuls of airmail letters and boxes of bric-a-brac that were strewn across the living room, dining room and kitchen floor.
" Well," I said proudly, " The worst part is over, the attic is empty. What a constructive day.
 My father-in-law smiled and poured us all a big glass of wine.
" True," he said, "that's great.  Now there's just the other attic. The one above the extension, it's quite full.......?"
And I am wondering if you can just have too many memories! 

Running the right way in the wrong direction

A few weeks ago my 16 year old niece went to her first ever football game. 

It wasn't that she has always wanted to go to a match or been desperate to be part of that " more important than life or death," football experience.

It was more that she had promised her boyfriend, a Crystal Palace fan, she would go with him 

She had taken him to an interactive theatre event - something she loved, and he said in that case he was going to take her to a football match - something he loved.

Donning the appropriate colours, my niece joined in with the spirit of the match, supporting the right team once her boyfriend had pointed out which one that was. 

 She came back after half time, ready to full of football wisdom and ready to cheer but got more and more concerned as the game went on.

" Someone needs to tell them," she said anxiously to her boyfriend.

" Tell them what?" he asked.

"Tell them they're running in the wrong direction," she explained

And that's how my niece learnt that in a football match, the goal ends change at half-time.

 And  what looks like running the wrong way, is actually running in the right direction.

And it set me to thinking, that life often feels like that.

Like sometimes everything we do is taking us further from our dreams.

That however hard we try to run in the right direction, something pulls us in the wrong one.

" Life is what happens while we're making other plans," that's what John Lennon said.  

And he is right.

Sometimes it's hard to remember that it is life,  and not the plans, that is what's important.

And perhaps, if we stand still for a moment instead of running, we will realise that it's not that we are running in the wrong direction but that our goals are constantly changing. 

Life is full of "half-times,"- starting school, leaving school, falling in love, falling out of love, getting a job,losing a job, buying a house, selling a house, getting  married, getting divorced, becoming a parent, watching your children leave home- and when you come back for the next part of the match, without us knowing it, our goals have moved..

And even if it feels like the wrong direction, we are usually running the right way.

After the excitement of her first football game,  my niece was persuaded to go to another match.  

Not Crystal Palace this time, but their arch rivals, Brighton and Hove Albion.

Shamelessly exchanging her Palace colours for the blue and white of " The Seagulls," she entered the stadium near her home for the first time.

Now a football expert, she didn't query the change of direction at half-time and could say things like " penalty," and " off-side," and " come on ref, use your eyes! "

And when Brighton and Hove scored, no one cheered louder or raised their arms higher than she did.

Which is why, the next day,  she was on the front cover of her local paper, The Argus: famous forever as a one-time-only-die-hard Seagull's fan. 

Which just goes to show, that  in the end,it's not the direction you're running in that matters so much as how loud you shout and knowing just when to cheer.

Mixed-race disconnections

The strange thing about being the white mother of mixed-race children, is that most of the time people don't think they're my children at all.
When they were little it had it's advantages, it made it much easier to ignore them when they were having a tantrum in the middle of the street.  Older people would search the faces of nearby parents wondering who this nightmare child belonged to and their eyes would never rest on me!
But as I pushed them in their pram through town or held their hands when they were toddlers, people would stop me and say:
" What lovely children.  How many hours a day do you look after them?" 
" 24," I would say.
" It's a hard job being a nanny," they would say, touching by arm supportively.
Or others would say: 
" Aren't they beautiful, how long have you had them?  My friend's daughter has adopted 2 lovely little African children."
Perhaps people just jumped to the conclusion that it was unlikely someone who looked like me would have "lovely," or "beautiful," ( subjective, I know ) children. 
But I don't think that's what they meant.  
I think they would look at Joss and Mia's cafe-au-lait coloured skin and assume that their parents had skin the same colour.
And I don't blame them.  
Mia and Joss look nothing like me.
 I think they must have inherited all their father's genes.
But it's a strange feeling living in a world that immediately assumes a  disconnection between you and the people you love the most. 
And it's not just a " white, thing.
I was walking down our road with Joss and Mia one Friday afternoon a few years ago and two Muslim men stopped us.  They were on their way to the Guide Hall round the corner which doubles up as a mosque on Friday afternoons. 
We smiled at each other.
" How come you've got two little Asian kids then?" one of them asked.
" Fancied a change, so I did a swap! " I said, hugging Mia and Joss close.
We all walked away laughing but a tiny bit of me wished they hadn''t had to ask.

And when we visited Sri Lanka with Ninesh's family it was even worse.
No one connected Mia and Joss with me, one of the tuk-tuk drivers thought14 year old Mia was Ninesh's wife and when people asked me if I was alright and I said I was looking for my husband, they would always take me to the nearest white man. ( Perhaps I should have been less careless!)
It's not racist.
It's about perception and accepted norms.
But it seems  strange that in this modern, melting pot of a world, people still find inter-racial relationships strange and mixed-race children " unusual."
" You're lucky," I tell Mia and Joss, " you'll always be different. Unique."
Joss shrugs and changes theTV channel.
" I just wish people would see me before they see the colour of my skin," sighs Mia. 
She's right and sometimes it upsets her a lot.
And as her white English mum I am helpless because it's a feeling I will never truly understand.

But even Mia can see the funny side.
She and I had gone to visit some friends in London. Walking back to the station, we had looped our arms around each other's waists and were chatting as we wandered from rich houses and perfect squares towards busy main roads with rubbish strewn pavements. 
 It was a warm night and we passed a busker strumming a guitar. 
He glanced up and seeing us sang out:
 " what a lovely couple."
"You should take it as a compliment mum," laughed Mia,less horrified than I thought she would be " you must look young."
" Or we just look so different from each other that he thought we couldn't possibly be related," I said, wiping the tears of laughter from my eyes.
We cannot step out of our skins.
All we can do is wait patiently for the world to catch up.
And while we are waiting, the best thing we can do is laugh.

Our family- spot the difference

Sports Relief, the big guilt game

Last Friday was Sports Relief day - again. 

Another evening of being bombarded by a celebrity sprinkled, charity-giving TV marathon. 

Lots of famous people do lots of funny or physically challenging things so that we , the audience, donate lots of our money.

Seb Coe, Olly Murs and Sally Phillips doing lots of funny things for Sports Relief

Humorous sketches and chatty hosts, intersperse the laughs with horrendous pictures of beautiful children in faraway countries dying from malaria or pneumonia or picking out food from enormous rubbish dumps. 

Often the celebrities have been flown over to the faraway places to experience the suffering first hand, breaking down in front of the cameras as they beg us to donate anything, anything at all. 

" Just pick up the phone and make that call.  
 £5 can be the difference between life and death. 
You can be that difference." 

It's very clever. 
It plays on our guilt at every level. 
We feel guilty that we are sitting in warm living rooms with big televisions watching people who don't even have a roof over their heads..
We feel guilty that our biggest worries are about work or exams or what to cook for dinner while there are people who don't even know if they are going to find enough food to make it through the day.
We feel guilty that even the richest of us can access health services for free when there are children dying from completely curable diseases.
As we watch people raising money by being sponsored to run marathons, swim in freezing water, cycle for miles, dance for hours, we feel guilty that we are sitting at home doing nothing.
And once we have watched the phone number for donating flash up on the screen, we feel guilty if we don't donate.
We feel guilty if our friends have donated and we haven't
By the time we crawl into bed after one of these fund raising nights. we have been emotionally battered into charitable submission.
And they are always on a Friday night to make sure that if we don't donate, our weekends will be ruined by our guilt.
 How can we go out and spend money having a good time on a Saturday night, when people are dying for lack of the £5 we didn't donate. 
They are sleek, professional, carefully planned assaults on our emotions these Comic or Sports Relief nights. 
 They are presented  by carefully chosen, familiar, popular celebrity hosts from a variety of backgrounds and genres to make sure that there is someone to appeal to everyone. They last for so long ( 6 hours ) that is impossible to put on the television any time between teatime an bedtime without coming across someone begging you to do the right thing.
And it's true, we should all do the right thing.  Those of us who can afford to give, should.
But the truth is, that although all of us could probably give more than we do, it is not individuals doing the right thing that is going to rectify the world imbalance in the distribution of wealth

.“While we do our good works let us not forget that the real solution lies in a world in which charity will have become unnecessary.” 
― Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah

It is completely wrong that anyone in this rich, modern world should be starving or dying because they are unable to access the medication that could save them.
It is completely wrong that anyone should be homeless or penniless.
But while the richest 300 people in the world are more wealthy than the poorest 3 billion, while the impersonal, enormous multi-national corporations make all the rules, while bankers feel that they are accountable to no one, nothing will change.

How about some of those presenters on the Comic Relief nights giving away some of the expensive clothes they wear or donating the cost of a trip to the hairdresser. 
 How about some of our footballers earning £100,000 a week, donating one week's salary. How about Starbucks or Amazon donating some of the tax they haven't paid.
That would be a lot of £5s!
But the truth is, collective guilt is never as effective or powerful as individual guilt.
So once again, last Friday's Sports Relief made a record amount of money: over £51.000000 
Which just goes to show how much people are prepared to pay for one night of guilt-free sleep. Or maybe you'll feel better about yourself for even longer, perhaps even until Red Nose Day.

Romance is Alive in an MX5

Spring is here. 
I know it is, because last Saturday, for the first time this year, I drove our very old MX5 along the A27 with the roof down.
And it felt amazing. 
Music playing, sun shining, deep green fields flashing by. 
So close to the ground you are almost molten.
You never feel more alive than when you're driving in an MX5.
It was bought on a whim, this little black car of ours.
Ninesh phoned me one lunchtime a few years ago and said he had seen an old MX5 roadster advertised on the intranet.
" It's a bargain," he said. " A once in a lifetime opportunity.  The owner's going to bring it in tomorrow so I can have a look at it."
And the owner brought it in. 
And Ninesh looked at it, test drove it and bought it, all before the end of his lunch hour.
And then he phoned me.
" I've added it to our insurance already," he explained, " so I'll drive it home after work.
Don't tell the kids.  It'll be a surprise."
" It will," I agreed, " it's still a surprise to me."
I was just cooking dinner in the kitchen that evening when Joss came racing in.
" Mum, mum," he yelled, " dad has just driven up in a convertable.  Where did he get it from?"
" Why don't you go and ask him?" I laughed.
" Come on Mia," shouted Joss, pulling her through the front door.
I followed them, watching as they clambered in and out of the passenger seat while Ninesh proudly showed them the radio, the seats, how the roof could be pulled up and down.

" It's amazing mum,' said Joss, his eyes shining," it's only got 2 seats but there's a little gap in the back, just big enough for snacks! "
" And is the boot full of flowers?" I asked Ninesh.
He laughed.
 Our " boot full of flowers," story is ( literally ) Hollywood romantic.
I had given up my London: job, flat, family, friends, to begin an uncertain new life with Ninesh in California.
Jet-lagged and a little shaky from a customs interrogation, I stepped through the arrivals gate at LA airport and into Ninesh's arms.
" The car's not far," he said, grabbing my bright red suitcase and pulling it and me through the sliding doors.
Outside I stopped for a moment and breathed in the warm, polluted LA air, gazing up at the sun-filled, never-ending blueness of the sky.
"Welcome to the rest of your life," my mum had said as she and my dad drove me to the airport that morning.
And here it was, the rest of my life, just beginning.
" Come on," said Ninesh, dragging me into the cool darkness of the car park.
" It's not much," he said, pointing at a small, blue, metallic car parked in a corner, " but it's all I could afford and it will get us around."
I nodded, not really listening. I've never been that interested in cars.
" Shame it's not that one," I said, pointing at the sleek, black, shiny Mustang convertable we were just passing.
Ninesh stopped in front of it.
" I know," he sighed, " I've always wanted a convertible. Perhaps our key will fit it."
And leaving my suitcase in the middle of car park, he tried to fit the key to his car into the boot.
" Nesh," I gasped, " you can't just put your key in someone else's car. You'll be arrested."
Ninesh laughed, slipped the key into the lock and popped open the boot.
" I wonder where all those flowers have come from?" he grinned.
I stepped forward and stared into the boot. 
He was right, it was full of flowers.
I looked from Ninesh to the flowers and back to Ninesh, completely confused.
" This is our car," he said, " I wanted it to be a surprise."
" But we don't have any money," I said, " it must have cost a fortune."
" It was a bargain," grinned Ninesh, " a once in a lifetime opportunity. Welcome to America."
And so, with a boot full of flowers, music playing and sun shining, we put the roof down and drove into our new life.

And even if a very old MX5 in West Sussex will never be quite the same as a roaring Mustang in California, whenever I put the top down and feel the rush of the wind in my hair and the warmth of the sun on my skin, I will always believe that the boot is full of flowers.

Pancake therapy

Last Tuesday was Shrove Tuesday, pancake day, here in England.

In our house most days are pancake days. Pancakes are one of the few things that Mia and Joss will eat for breakfast. So Shrove Tuesday doesn’t really mean much.  
But this year I got up very early to make pancakes for our Community Café.

Still half asleep, I measured out milk and flour and broke in an egg.

Outside the sky was just beginning to turn from black to velvet blue as I beat the ingredients together and let the mixture stand. 
Outside the world was filling with birdsong. 
Inside, the kitchen was filling with the smell of sizzling butter

There is something amazingly calming about cooking while the world is sleeping.
Nothing to break your train of thought.
No children asking unanswerable questions.
No canned laughter from the television.
No buzzing phones.
No faceless voices floating out of computers. 

Just you and your dreams and the hope that always comes with a brand new day.
As I poured the batter into the pan, it felt as though anything was possible.
That perhaps this was the day when my pancakes would be perfect.

The thing about making pancakes is that, as long as you have the right pan, there is very little that can go wrong,( unless you toss them too high).

If they get holes in while they cook, fill them in with a bit more mixture.

If they are too crispy, let them cool until they have softened.

If they are too thin, call them crepes.

If they are too thick call them " American style," pancakes.

If they are not perfectly round -  who cares, they still taste good.  

It would be great if life were like that.

If an emptiness of an aching heart could be filled with a drop of mixture.

If waiting for a while could make a problem disappear.
If calling something by a different name made everything fine.
The truth is, life will never be as simple as making a pancake,
But there are always things you can  do to make it better, like choosing the most delicious filling: sugar and lemon, nutella, maple syrup, jam, squirty cream. ....
Perhaps the best thing to do is to begin each day with delicious decisions and a little bit of pancake therapy.

Early morning stack of pancakes

              

Love and roses

The strange thing about love is that although we spend most of our lives searching for it and desiring it and longing for it, no one can really define it or explain it or understand it.
And it has so many different forms, love.
There is the kind that sweeps you off your feet and sends your world spinning into  disarray.
There is the kind that grows slowly from the heart until it has wrapped itself around you like a warm blanket.
There is the kind that consumes you until you can think of nothing else and life has no other meaning.
There is the kind that hurts  and the kind that makes you laugh for joy.
There is the kind that anchors you and the kind that makes you fly.
There is the kind that makes you feel vulnerable and the kind that makes you feel strong. 
And then there is the unconditional kind that you take for granted:
the kind a parent gives to their child.
And that's the kind that makes us who we are.
That " no-strings-attached-devoted-love," that gives us the courage to take our first steps, say our first words, make our first mistakes,  knowing that someone will always be there to catch us if we fall.
It's the kind of love that comes with no expectations, the kind of love that is so unassuming you almost forget it's there.
 But if you don't have it, the world is a frightening, complicated, meaningless place.
 You don't dare try anything because there is no one to catch you if you fall.
Or you try everything because there's no one to care what you do.
It's not just that love completes you but that it supports you and gives your life meaning.
It is love that holds our fragile world together.

When my mum was ill last week, Ninesh, my husband, bought her some roses.
They were bright and beautiful, bringing warmth and colour to the whitewashed walls and polished floors. of the hospital wards.
But you're not allowed to have flowers in hospitals anymore.  They bring germs and allergies and the scent of hope.
So we took them back to her house and put them on the oval table just like she asked.
Like us, they were waiting for her to come home.
A reminder that no-stringss-attached-devoted-love goes both ways, that for now it is our turn to catch her if she falls.
They kept blooming, the roses, their colours almost glowing against the greyness of these rainy days.
They were still blooming when mum came home.
I hope she knew what they were meant to say.
That in the end, whatever form it takes,  perhaps that's what love is: a vase of constantly blooming roses that fills the world with hope and colour and dreams.

Stay with us Scotland

" What do you think about Scottish independence?" my father-in-law asked me as we were clearing out his garage last week.
I stopped, my arms full of old books, and looked at him, shocked.
Because I suddenly realised that I hadn't really thought about Scottish Independence at all.
That's probably because all we can do  in the South of England at the moment, is think about the weather'
The good thing about all this rain and flooding ( not for the people who have lost their homes to the floods of course) is that it legitimises the English desire to talk about the weather.
" Is this rain ever going to stop? Is it going to reach our houses? Have you seen all those fields that have turned into lakes? Can you believe its still raining? Look at those grey clouds. When are the government going to do something about it?"
And much as I love to blame the government for everything,  I find it hard to blame them for the weather.
But I do blame the weather for the fact that I haven't really thought about Scotland and its desire to be separate from England.
And I do understand.  
It has fought so fiercely for so many centuries to maintain its own identity.
It's not just the kilts and the haggis and the Hogmanay, it's the wit and the raw creativity and the stories and the beauty and the ability to survive against the odds.
Why should that all be part of someone else's country?
Why should what makes your country unique be lost to what makes another country important?
I can see why Scotland might choose to become independent.
Why it might choose to move away from a country that doesn't seem to care about it.
But I hope it doesn't.
Not just because we would have no Winter Olympic team without them but because we live in a world that already has too many borders.
Borders dividing the rich from the poor, the East from the West, the blacks from the whites, the Muslims from the Hindus.
It's easy to find the things that make us different from each other.
Easy to build fences or walls or borders to make sure those differences remain.
Easy to create something worth fighting for.
What's hard is finding the things that we have in common, the dreams we share, the peace worth hoping for. 
What's hard, is breaking down barriers, removing boundaries, opening borders.
Scotland is unique and beautiful and complicated and full of history and fairy-tales.
Perhaps if England had valued it better, found goals to share and successes to celebrate, perhaps then Scotland wouldn't be seeking to add another border to our divided world.
At the risk of sounding like David Bowie: stay with us Scotland. 
Give us one more chance to value and understand you- another hundred years should do it, as long as its stopped raining by then.

Beautiful Scotland

The Great Wedding Bake Off

I'm not really one for baking.
Over the years I have dutifully baked birthday cakes that usually come out flat and cupcakes for cake sales that usually taste of nothing.
But last weekend we were invited to a wedding ( I'm not really one for weddings either) and instead of a traditional wedding cake that most people don't eat, the bride and groom asked all their guests to bring a cake.
It was an inspired idea. 
A Great Wedding Bake-off.
And we all rose to the challenge.
It's not just the baking, it's the time spent searching out the best recipe, the hours spent pouring over pictures to find the right decorations, the days spent deciding what shape it should be.
We even did an uncharacteristic and disastrous practice run, boiling rose petals, simmering cream.
" Tastes like grass and vegetables," said Mia, pulling a face.
And she was right, more like rabbit food than wedding fayre.
So we returned to the recipe books and started again.

The night before the wedding found us weighing and stirring and whisking and pouring.
And it was fun.
It made us feel as though we were part of the preparations for the big day.
As though by pouring our heart and soul into a cake, we could pour love and happiness into the marriage of our friends.
In the end we stopped trying to be clever and went for simple. 
 A rose-flavoured sponge ring covered in multi-coloured hundreds and thousands, the centre filled with a bunch of white roses and tiny edible roses circling the edge. 
It wasn't sophisticated or perfect but it was so much better than anything Mia or I have ever baked before that we were bursting with creative pride.

The hardest thing was getting it to the wedding without dropping it.
 But amazingly, we managed.
Breathing a sigh of relief, we handed it over to be added to the table, already groaning  under the weight of mango pavlova, kitkat special, chocolate dream, butterscotch wonder, death-by-chocolate-brownies, flapjack royale, rainbow surprise and more sugar, icing and sweets than a dentist's worst nightmare.

When all the first and main courses had been eaten, when all the loving speeches had been made and the embarrassing stories shared, it was time for the cake eating to begin.
And we guests took our task seriously, piling plates with as many cakes as possible, sharing on tables so that nothing went untasted.
By the end of the evening, just  the thought of cake was turning us all green.
And our creation didn't win.
The engraved cut-glass plate for the best tasting cake went to the mango pavlova and the plate for the bride and groom's favourite went to our neighbour, Gill, for her  chocolate and flower covered letters C and D ( Caroline and Dez- the bride and groom ).
And when the dancing was over and the happy couple well and truly married, we climbed into a taxi home. 
Sitting in the back, Gill clutched her plate close to her heart.
" I never thought I'd win," she sighed.
I looked at Mia and smiled
Because the best thing about this Great Wedding Bake Off is that the right person won.

And anti-weddinger though I am, it truly was a beautiful day, full of love and happiness and warmth and joy.... and a tableful of colourful cakes and delicious dreams.

So Caroline and Dez, may your life together be full of love and laughter and lots and lots of chocolate cake.

Switzerland, surprises and 40 year old headbangers

Last weekend Ninesh and I spent a wild weekend in Winterthur, Switzerland.
For a few years, when our daughter was a tiny baby, we lived in Winterthur. 
 And although it is more than 14 years since we left, going back there always feels a little bit like going home.
Its cafes, delicious coffee, cobbled streets and strange wooden statues fill me with a comforting sense of warm familiarity that you only have in places where you have been happy. 

Wooden statue resting in the streets of Winterthur- the jury's out as to whether he has a very long penis or just very long legs

As a foreigner, Switzerland is not an easy place to live.  
There are so many laws and rules that the Swiss are born knowing and everyone else just has to find out the hard way.
When we first moved there, I was 7 months pregnant and had to fly back to England for the last month because we didn't have health insurance in Switzerland. While I could speak German, Ninesh hadn't yet learnt it. I was staying at my parent's house when we received a phone call from the Swiss police. Ninesh had broken the law. He had put out a bag of rubbish in the wrong place with the wrong sticker. 
And it is not that anyone tells you which sticker to use or where to put the rubbish. 
 If you are Swiss, you just know that.
" How do they know who's rubbish it is?" I asked one of our friends when Mia had been born and we returned to Switzerland.
" Oh," she explained, " there is a special policeman whose job it is to go through rubbish bags that have been put in the wrong place until they find a name and address!"
" Do they have a special rubbish-sorting qualification?" I asked.
My friend just laughed.
And there are lots of other laws we found out the hard way:
If you live in a flat you may not take a shower after 11pm.  
You may not mow the lawn or go to the bottle bank on a Sunday....

But once you have learnt all the rules that and laws that are important for to you, Switzerland is one of the most beautiful, relaxing, friendly places you could live. 
We lived there for such a short time but the friends we made are still some of those closest to our hearts.
Which is why, last Saturday night, we were back there for our friend's surprise 40th birthday party. 
It was in an underground bar, the kind that you only seem to find in Switzerland  with metal art on the walls and car doors suspended from the ceiling, 

The whole place was ours: a tableful of food, unlimited cocktails, a dance floor and the familiar smiles of long-ago friends.
And we might all be over 40 ( almost all) but we danced and drank and laughed the night away until it was almost light outside.

Age cannot stop us headbanging

And when we woke up the next morning in our friends' beautiful flat, floating above Zurich, the world was white and sparkling and covered in snow.
Exactly as it should be in Switzerland.
And as we trudged and slid and crunched our way through the snow towards the tram and the airport and rainy England, it was hard not to wish for just one more day of chocolate and cheese and Swiss relaxation.
But however many times we fly away from Winterthur, we always know we will be back. There are some places that you never quite leave.

And there's always our friend's surprise 50th to look forward to.

Happy Birthday Christine.