Climb every mountain – the lovely scene at the end of The Sound of Music where the family hike over the Alps in the sunshine to Switzerland to evade the Nazis – it’s much less romantic to do it in a Volvo at midnight. Alas, these things are forced on one.
With the old home hearths barred to us by Nicola, one has to spend Christmas away in a salle à manger in a resort in Valais. I told the family it would be just like Aviemore but with reliable snow, and a few more zeroes added to every price. Also Verbier has that one thing which I consider essential for a skiing holiday: a hospital at the bottom of the slopes.
However it was to come to an end: we were not exactly invaded by Nazis, but health officials do their best to imitate the attitude, and all in the resort were told we were in quarantine. Forced to stay closeted in a luxury apartment overlooking breathtaking, glistening mountains, surviving on scraps from the restaurants and wine cellars: this was too much to bear. We are after all Britons, whatever Nicola might say, and an escape committee swiftly convened in the bar, and swung into action as night fell. As the local saying has it; “Chacun pour lui-même“.
It is all nonsense: I am not infected. If I did not get the disease at the coronavirus party we held in the spring, I am not going to get it now, am I?
The idea seized me of taking to skis, a high lang-lauf up the mountain and over into French Savoy, but it just would not do with the luggage. It might have worked for the von Trapp family, but they only had to walk for a few minutes before the credits rolled. (Although that does make me suspicious; I am familiar with the Salzburg region and it is about two hundred miles from the Swiss border; if they had actually crossed the mountain above their villa they would not have ended up in the cantons, but would find themselves having tea with Adolf in Berchtesgaden. It is almost as if Rodgers and Hammerstein had not studied a map beforehand.)
The hotel manager was terribly shocked to receive our call from Vallorcine in the morning, mainly because we asked for a refund. He had tipped us all off, so what did he expect? I gather that he knew nothing until his concièrges found all the rooms empty in the morning.
We never did get our money back – terms and conditions and criminal conduct and all that – most upsetting. His establishment is not getting any more custom from us, not until next year at any rate.
I fail to see what the Swiss authorities are complaining about: they didn’t want British people wandering about in their country spreading our ambitious new strain of “the disease”, and now we are not in their country at all. Oftentimes bureaucrats fail to realise they have won, just because the wrong box has been ticked.
Now our only problem is getting out of France, and I do not care to travel as most do, hanging onto a leaking rubber dinghy or clinging to the bottom of a Eurostar.
