Guilty conscience

Whew!

So much for the new project. Here I was, thinking I was going to be writing down all the daily thoughts for everyone, and I haven't been back for over a month. It's hard to do this when you don't have anyone following your input, but I suppose it is a diary of sorts, and since when were diaries supposed to be public?

I've been battling with the fact that the damn blog page appears in German. A certain off-putter to the audience I'm trying to target, I'm sure. I spent a half an hour on the phone with my brother on another continent trying to interpret the page so that he could leave a comment, but he must have given up 'cause there're no facetious comments yet.

I think the original theme of the blog needs to be changed, because there is just so much else that I would like to talk about (when I get the time to write, that is...). However, this little Swiss one needs telling.

Today is Sunday. The day of rest in Switzerland, and for all I know, in the rest of the world. In the bad old "Old South Africa", when I was just a young whippersnapper being groomed for a future as a big bad white supremacist type (thank God all that crap fell through... has anyone seen what happened to the Führer of Evil White South Africans, Eugene 'Terror' Blanche? Not the kind of ending I'd imagine enjoying as a son of the Chosen People...) Sundays were for braaing (a South African term for barbecueing), drinking beer (or home-brewed battery acid, if you weren't a Chosen One)and gardening, fixing the lawnmower, tinkering with your motorcycle or car, or whatever else tickled your fancy. Now I live in the northern Balkan province of Switzerland and suddenly things are different.

Here, Sunday is a day of REST. Essentially, this means that if you have a gardening implement of any description not only in your hand but at all visible to the neighbours, you are WORKING. This is NOT DONE. If you wash your car on Sunday, you are SINNING. If your vacuum cleaner is not set to silent mode and you get the urge to quickly vacuum that corner behind the dinner table where your guests from the previous evening thought you wouldn't find the rice grains they managed to sow when you weren't looking, be advised: you WILL BE FOUND OUT, and you are SINNING.

I never realised how religous the Swiss are before. I must admit, when I came here nine years ago and had to register at the local municipal authorities, I gave my religion as "Protestant", even though I was last in church about 25 years ago when my cousin got involved in the happy clappers church band as a means to get to practice music for free with top class instruments (yes, that preacher knew how to get the bucks out of his flock alright!). The reason I did this was because I was afraid that these Europeans were still in the middle ages and maybe if I admitted that I didn't really know what my religion was, they might find ways to ensure that I didn't get a job, or even worse. My blank look and "huh?" was answered with "Katholisch oder Reformiert?" and a withering look. Even a dumb plaasjapie (Afrikaans for country bumpkin) like me was able to work out that my choices were Catholic or Reformed (Crikey, like Luther or Calvin? AAAARRRRGGGHHHHH!!!! What century do these people live in?). Not being very friendly to the whole idea of organised religion (thanks, all you meddling, two-faced, hypocritical christians of my past...), I had to rely on my extreme distrust of the last remnants of the two thousand year old Roman Empire that lives on in the Vatican today and make a serious choice. So today I'm a Protestant. Don't even THINK about asking what branch! I have no clue. Though it's irrelevant here where I live. They only seem to know catholic and NOT catholic. Typical Swiss efficiency and logic, eh? None of this Holy Followers of the Lost Lamb Brotherhood, Anglican, Sons of Zion, Methodist, Walk-on-the-Wrong-Side-of-the-Valley-of-Death-and-you-Die or Scientology stuff, etc. Oh no. Catholic or Reformed! This in a country where catholics in the city of Zürich were still officially treated as second-class citizens as late as 1952. A strange race, to be sure, but a good one nonetheless (unless you work for the IRS).

So, I digress. There I was, standing in my garden, busily involved in converting the kid's sandpit into a snailproof, high-tech organic research and development centre for the cultivation of lettuce, when I heard a friendly yet menacing voice coming from the other side of my far too short and far too sparse garden hedge. "Schaffe mer am Sunntig?", which translates to (in this context) "Are we working on Sunday?". I looked up into the face of my neighbour, who was looking quite nonplussed at this extraordinary Sunday activity.

Now, I know that he's not overly religious (his Ukranian girlfriend and her daughter have recently moved in with him, and I'm sure I seem to remember something about "though shalt not live in sin" from those awful wasted sunny Sunday mornings when I was forced to go and sit with all the losers in Sunday school instead of running free with the sun in my face and the salt spray from the ocean settling on my bare torso as I learnt to be a little white supremacist), but even though he's such a nice guy one never can tell where the line is actually drawn over here. Especially for a barbarian from Africa like me. So I did what one should never do in Switzerland. I resorted to sarcasm. This is a MISTAKE. Swiss people DO NOT understand sarcasm. Actually, they do. I've heard the most hilarious sarcasm over here, but it's always coming from a Swiss. When a foreigner tries it it falls flat. I put this down to two things. Firstly, you're foreign, so you must be too dumb to understand what is being said to you, hence your answer, which is taken literally and then torn apart while the facts (as seen by your lecturer) are explained to you. Secondly, the English-speakng foreigner tries to translate his sarcasm into German or Swiss-German, which does NOT work. You may think that as you went to school in the Goethe Institute for twenty years, your fluency in German will put you one step ahead of the rest, but you're wrong. Over here, they speak Swiss-German, or Schwyzerdüütsch, and there ARE no institutes that could possibly give you the step up that you need to be able to communicate at a level approximating your proficiency in your own language. Try and picture a hillbilly telling the Queen how to brew her own whiskey, and you'll be close to the language barrier between Germans and German-Swiss.

I digress again. I love digressing. Well, my answer was: "Oh no, I'm not WORKING! This is my passion! My secret love! I do this because I LIKE it!" Though the lecture that followed was boring in the extreme, I did get a momentary glimmer of satisfaction at the fleeting look of blank incomprehension that followed my infantile reply.

The secret, dear readers, is in the hedge. I planted my Thuja Smaragd evergreen conifers three years ago. As a pleb in this ultra wealthy society, I couldn't go out and buy them ready grown at two meters, so I had to settle for 30 centimetre ones, but my god, how they grow. If you think you know what the proverbial "watching a pot boil" means, well, you don't. I have surely consumed at least 2000 crates of beer over the last three years watching these little buggers creep toward the heavens. My perseverance is paying off though. They're up to my nipples already, and the gaps between them are nearly closed. If they carry on at this rate, I'm going to have a lot of privacy on the north, west and south side of the property very soon. Like in about another five years or so. Unfortunately, we have a block of flats on the east side, so that will take, oh... perhaps another twenty years or so, but by then the gardening police will have ordered me to cut them down before they reach the 30 metre mark... I dunno, I suppose I'll just have to be another irritating foreigner and pretend I didn't realise they were getting out of hand.

Okay, this post has gotten so long that I think will call it a day now. Hopefully the next won't be so long in coming as this one. I think I'll go and enjoy the last of the day of rest now... Wherever you are in the world, I hope you're enjoying your day as much as I did mine.