Welcome back. Apparently there have been a fair few visitors, despite my relative absence whilst I’ve been falling into much Swissness. Apologies. I’ve been baking biscuits.
Chocolate to buy, clothes to degrime, biscuits to bake, apartment to clean, and case to pack. I left suburbia for another bit of suburbia it seems. South Manchester goodbye, hello Suisse-Romande. That’s just today. The last day before I leave. Fingers crossed Geneva airport won’t fuck up again (snow? Let’s not work. Snow in other Swiss airports? Do we need to ask?)
Books about crazy people punctuate suburban routine: Plath’s The Bell Jar (finally, swallowed in two days whole, after rejecting it when I gave it a go in the college library), Doris Lessing, Sartre, plus grammaire grammaire und grammatik.
Let’s see how it’s going…
Swiss German: hopeless, utterly hopeless, I can just about stammer ‘Gruessi’
German: ignore my French accent (why I speak German with a French accent I’m not sure) and it’s fine. Ignore the lack of grammar subjunctive and all that. But I can understand, read and write, which ought to get some cheer.
French: fluent for listening, responding and reading. Written work needs some help for expression and tricky grammar, otherwise fine. (And I thought French grammar was easy. Deluded I was. It’s easy to-start-with.)
English: reasonable, minus the accent which seems to appear when I speak to foreign-speakers in English. With English people, it’s cent pourcent there, am happy to say.
