Reading: Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
Eating: Crisps
Drinking: Caramel Latte
It's all Kate Bush's fault, quite frankly, as I'm sure you'll all agree. She'd drive ten year olds to bewail the state of the political world and addict themselves irreparably to rubbish bands like Anathema and HIM.
I find now, as the new year rolls round in my mouth, that I miss Switzerland. This time last year, I had been there less than a month, and it was cold and grey and, somehow, still ravishingly pretty. By the time spring came round, it was like watching everything wake up, gradually and without regard for whether or not I was ready for it. The fields of canola flowers bloomed, casting their sickly smell into the air, but at least they were pretty. I remember six year olds walking to school on their own, holding their schoolfriends' hands, without parents worrying about whether they'd be snatched.
I remember Suicide Hill, and suffering myself to be nicknamed a little Eskimo Boy by a preadolescent Spaniard, trading suggestive looks with a rather older Spaniard, while ice cream melted on my hands and I burnt my toast. I miss eighty-cent 70 % Lindt chocolate bars and a pair of thick white duvets covering my narrow bed. I do not miss sleeping alone.
I miss the Altstadt, with its hidden tea rooms and shops with horrid eighties-throwback fashion in their windows, longing after the bookstore, wishing I knew German so I could read the many, many volumes smelling of old paper and ink.
I miss drinking beer beside Lac Genève, sitting on the parapets of old city walls, and looking down into valleys from 1527 metres above sea level, and lying sprawled over a dark blue velvet settee, watching Manchester United beat the snot out of Liverpool, drinking Feldschlösschen lager and eating Nutella out of the jar with my fingers.
And, of course, you.
Get well soon, and stop running into things on motorbikes. It isn't particularly healthy.
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