Easter Holidays. I am standing outside my front door saying goodbye to Marlyse our family friend, neighbour and loyal (unpaid) dog walker. Marlyse is in her late seventies and needs the exercise and Molly, the same age in dog years, appreciates the slow steady pace. I am still in my yoga clothes with greasy hair. Along comes Inger my friend and neighbour from the top of the village looking all shiny and glamorous in her work clothes walking Rosie her dog – a slightly younger and more sprightlier version of Molly. Today Inger organised a trade conference for global delegates whilst I took a yoga class with my girls, hiked in the woods and made cheesecake with Lexi for her birthday tomorrow. We are both mothers of three children. We both choose to do what we are doing. Inger battles the stress of not always being there and crazy weekends catching up and I battle the undervalued status of a stay at home mum and when the writing commissions are scarce, that nagging feeling of underachieving.  Neither of us has got it wrong.

This is the second birthday cake.  The first, a Victoria Sponge filled with raspberry jam and cream and covered in something unspeakable from the temple of E numbers, the American shop down by the lake, was made for the cowgirl sleep-over party held on Saturday night – burgers, line dancing and the Horse Whisperer.  The cheesecake is for tomorrow her actual birthday (Lexi milks everything she can out of any situation).

Did you know that there are no calories in birthday cake and that it is incredibly bad luck to refuse a slice?   Once when Ollie was around 12 we took him to dinner and bumped into some friends who ended up eating with us. These friends are gourmets and love nothing more than a trip to Alba during truffle season. Everything was going beautifully until Ollie’s birthday cake arrived – a Mille Feuille which I had admittedly picked up at the supermarket earlier as it is too laborious to make.  It didn’t look amazing but it had candles on it and he loved it and when he, in a very grown up manner, offered our friends a slice and they said,

 ”Non, merci”

I could have walloped them. Yes, they are empty calories, yes it is a crap cake from a supermarket and it will take a week to digest but it’s his birthday for Pete’s sake.  I like this couple, they are good friends but that memory always plays in my mind whenever I think of them.

So remember the eleventh commandment: Thou Shalt Always Eat Birthday Cake.

The French call jogging  “le footing” and that is more of an exact terminology.  One foot in front of the other in a bouncing motion.  Anyway I don’t even get to start my “footing” until I arrive at the flat bit at the top of the hill in the woods.  For the moment I am power walking down the hill towards the river when  I pass the couple-without-children-with-the-four-cars going off to work.  I say “bonjour” politely although without the heart chakra engaged  because I harbour a fury towards their his and her minis, the four wheel drive and the porsche.  A few years back they were burgled and ALL her expensive underwear was stolen.  In fact the claim for expensive underwear outbid the other items taken during the robbery.  I know all this because we have the same architect and Georges is our friend.  Along with the fury at the conspicuous consumption is the curiosity as to how couples-without-children live.  A life where sensible, flesh coloured underwear for easy washing is banished, I presume.  I know they spend most evenings in their jacuzzi because I can see the steam.  (This is the second jacuzzi, the first had to be torn down because they failed to ask the Commune for planning permission as it was more than the size of a garden shed – of course it was this is a couple with four cars!).  After downing a jamboree of champagne – I swear I can hear the cork popping all the way up the hill to  my house – they have wild, rampant, loud sex in every room in the house, every night.

I am now at the river.  I soldier on up the snowy path listening to JB Glazinger.  This guy makes me laugh out loud.  He is a self-development guru and has to be the biggest bragger in the world.  He is a martial arts expert, has an MBA and PHD and is taking his pilot’s license which he somehow manages to remind us about in every podcast.  I giggle inbetween pants making my way up the wiggly footpath crunching in the snow as he tells me that I am a magnificient spiritual being living in a material world.  That’s me!  I finally reach the flat bit on the running trail and start my footing but my mind, which is inclined to always take the easy way out, says “Stop!  You’ll fall and break something!” This morning it sounds uncannily like Madre.  “It’s icy and then you’ll not be able to go to London this weekend.”  I take small steps gingerly avoiding the shiny patches then remember what I learned in Martin Brofman’s seminar about perception and reflection knowing full well that if I tell myself I am going to fall then I will.  I pick up the pace and sure enough the ground is firm and compact.  

Friday I leave for London. It is my nephew Myles’ sixteenth birthday celebration weekend so we have tickets for X Factor Live!  I know it’s lame but that’s the kind of family we are.  Aunty Sally, Godmother to Lexi, is even printing off Masks from the X factor website.  Madre has opted out as she is more of a Strictly woman and Mr. Jules is skiing with his Norwegian buddy. First, before the fun starts, Lexi has an interview and exam to get through.  We have been doing mock interviews over dinner and trying hard not to snigger when she articulates carefully and puts her posh accent on.  Mr. Jules told her to write “examining nine year olds is ridiculous” next to any questions she cannot answer.

I am squeezing in an afternoon of flat hunting with Casper, Edward and Jeremy who have some bijoux broom cupboards in fabulous locations to show me.  Heehee.  I am still amazed that people speak this way, I thought the Labour government had eradicated Hurray Henrys and any self-respecting ambitious London men spoke like Sir Alan Sugar.  Perhaps it is just property-speak.  My favourite is Stephen Lovelady, who speaks normally and whom I have been unwittingly calling Ladyfinger.  I think I have some sort of disease where I garble words or mishear them at times.  The girl on reception told me that they have a poll for the best alternative surname for Stephen and mine was topping the bill so far. I am a little ashamed to show my face at the uber-trendy Foxton’s on the King’s Road Friday at 4pm.

Over in London this past week for two days with Mr. Jules.   We are looking for a place to live.  THE BIG NEWS IS that as from next September we are transferring over to the UK for a couple of years.  I KNOW!  I’m excited.

 As you faithful readers of this blog already know, Ollie, my eldest,  is in the UK, studying binge drinking and rugby at Loffbro Uni and his departure changed the whole family dynamic and my “raison d’être.”  I wasn’t the only one.  Early in 2009 Sophie-G. started her offensive with the winning sentence:

“I can’t stand the idea of studying Maths and a science until I’m eighteen and I know I will have to give up my dancing in the final year of my Bac if I am to get anywhere near a pass.”

  She was preaching to the choir having hopeless failed my maths O level with a U grade.  The A level system was starting to look a better option for her and when we  found a school with a dance and theatre programme just outside London it all started to make sense. It was time to move on.

 I realised that I too had to think about growing up along with the kids and so I’m looking at an MA programme in Creative Writing at London Uni which is my old stomping ground and so the circle is complete.  Plus Mr. J. rather likes the idea of going out with a student.

The trip over last week was great – Mr. J. proudly drew his Oyster card from his wallet as we got off the plane whilst I had inexplicably lost mine – saw lots of friends, drank too much and viewed many, many apartments which you can imagine is not easy with a Swiss property developer in tow.  What the public school boy/estate agents call “charming” i.e., windows that no longer fit in their frames, dodgy pipes and drafts that could knock an infant flat, Mr. J. calls dégueulasse, dangereux and gonflé.  But what was really nice and genuinely “charming” were the manners of these chappies who showed us around like glorified butlers managing large estates.  We went to see an abandoned project in Basil Street on the market for a king’s ransom and it was an oscar winning sales performance given by Harry as he avoided the bags of cement, bricks and old pipes strewn around the floor.  Mr. J. needed a sit down and a double decaf to recover from that one.

Delightful Edward got very excited about a property he wanted to show us.  “It’s very quiet, all you can see are views of the park.”  I had a hard time convincing him that I essentially live in a park in Switzerland and what I want is to hear the rumble of traffic with the wiff of a London bus in my nostrils as I skip along to the wine bar and M&S Simply Food on the corner.  

 You will still get updates from the riveting life of a Swiss village because we will be here in the school holidays so if it this that you are thirsting after (and not the neurotic musings of a writer/mother/wife trying to make sense of the world) it will be here alongside London life in the shoes of a more-Swiss-than-she-thinks returnee.  Sort of Heidi goes to London review.  For once Mr. J will be  the foreigner with the dodgy accent.   In a sense I will also be a bit of a foreigner in my own country having last resided there in 1982 and never as a tax paying adult.

I hope you will continue to enjoy reading the new blog, with a London slant, as I monitor my progress in one of the world’s most exciting capitals.

Well let’s start the new year blog posting with a bang.  I had a little look at some of the other bloggers in my sphere for inspiration and god are they boring.  One wrote a posting about changing her name to Zelda (after Zelda Fitzgerald  no less)  a requirement of being put back into a will or something – as if it were a daily occurence to the likes of you and me darling – and another let her daughter write and by that I mean actually get hold of the keyboard and type - spelling mistakes and all.  Now you, dear reader, get the odd posting from my daughter Alexia-Rose but YOU ALL KNOW THAT IT IS REALLY ME taking the piss out of myself and my family.  Postings from authentic nine year olds are NOT interesting, the syntax is crap and the spelling not even cute. Please take note all bloggers who feel the urge to exploit the under tens.  Much better to write à la Sue Townsend in the mind of Adrien Mole.  Now that’s funny.  Thine own therapist, bring it on.

I may be high on oxygen just having returned from the mountains or Lexi’s headlice shampoo – yes again – but I pledge not to write any pretentious bull this year and if I do you can complain.  In fact I should put a bullshite-o-meter icon on the front page for you to buzz me with.  If anything I hope you see me as an honest warts-and-all writer providing a glimpse into a normal female’s life (one without pretentious claims to the name Zelda) trying to be more than a mother and sometimes dutiful, although to be quite honest not always, wifelet to Mr. J.

Life is hard, life is beautiful and I won’t try to tell it any other way.

PS Thoughts in my head these days:  Why are there so many unhappy women in their fifties?  It’s healthy in fact its essential, to have a really big argument with your partner once a year, preferably between Xmas and New Year;  Is physical pain coming from our conscious mind i.e., my lower back problems and Mr. J’s neck injury? see www.martinbrofman.ch.  Why did I eat so much and sabotage the two kilos lost from flu just before Xmas? Should I invent the headlice pillow a potentially lethal murder weapon but huge money spinner?

Last night in Verbier I was the only Brit at a dinner with three Spanish, three Swiss and an Indonesian.  We were all speaking English as my Javanese is a bit rusty and one of the Spanish ladies did not speak French.  It is an uplifting experience to think that there we all were,  with completely different backgrounds – where were they when I was watching Blue Peter and eating beans on toast for tea after a hockey game in the twilight autumn of 1978? – religions, food, everything and yet still we are friends.  I suppose that dinner table would be my wish for 2010.  That we are all more tolerant of each other, embracing the rich diversity of different cultures, languages, religions, age, colour and race. 

New Year’s Eve was Mr. Jules and I, four teenagers and Lexi in diamanté basking in the glory of being surrounded by “big” friends.  We ate foie gras, filet de boeuf cooked  for two hours at 85 degrees (cooking tip!  But you have to  like what we in the family call mouse meat), gratin de pommes de terre and crême brulée from the best cheese shop in town.  This year there were fireworks on the baby slope outside our chalet so we all went outside to watch the show.  One firework took off sideways and a chorus of “cooooooooool” was heard from the young flesh wrapped in blankets on our terrace.  When Sophie-G’s party hat caught fire from an errant spark that was not so coooooool.

“It could only happen to me!”  She wailed half crying, half laughing as she patted her torched head searching for burnt hair and I, in mother duck frantically protecting her off-spring mode, stamped the flames out in the snow. 

At 11.45 they all went off into town for the countdown on the Place Centrale, which Ollie’s friend Perry from Uni would later describe as “well good“.  Ollie had his first ever sober New Year’s Eve due to events that I am not allowed to recount but involved beer, a crashed mini, and a lot of shouting.  I sat with the dog in the cellar with the washing machine set on the spin cycle to disguise the cacophonous tirade of midnight fireworks for which Verbier is famous and for which Molly is not appreciative.  I’m not a big New Year’s Eve fan and this is likely to be Molly’s last NYE as her back legs have now started to weaken and she has, unwittingly, taken to tobogganing on the ice.   She deserved the company and quite frankly 2009 didn’t deserve a better sending off. 

2010 will be a good year. 

PS Saw Jakob Hlasek the Swiss tennis champion buying light bulbs. Last year it was Amanda Wakely OBE, looking gorgeous picking up doggie pooh with her pink pooh bag.  Still get a kick out of seeing famous people doing ordinary things like us mere mortals.  What next Tiger Woods at the bottle bank?