oh one oh two two oh one one

I've just turned over the first page of the calendar I bought in Switzerland last summer. The picture is of mountains covered in glistening snow under a bright sun in clear blue Alpine sky. The middle ground has an airborne snowboarder flying into the picture. The whole experience causes me some confusion.

I've always had a "Swiss calendar", something I inherited from my mother: each year she would acquire a calendar from Switzerland, often a linen (made in Ireland) printed version that converted to a teacloth at the end of the year, decorated in rustic furniture or gentians or Alpine cartoons. I still have these grotty teatowels and the year - 1969 ... 1972 ... 1980 - recalls this or that memory.

When mother's mother was still alive they would arrive as a gift. Then we lived there, then we visted each summer and brought one back for the following year, then my aunt would send one - usually the free one she obviously got from her local garage - but the year was coloured Swiss: mountains, lakes, chalets and little villages, goatherders and alphorns coming round like proverbial clockwork.

The calendar I have on my wall this year? I bought it in Basel last summer; I was there to close the bank account that I inherited from my mother, no great fortune or secret horde but ordinary pennies, the diminished money left from her own inheritance. It was her reserve, her escape money, it served to pay for holidays and travel over the years, paid for my own family to visit the country.

But the Swiss don't want poor bank guests; for a non-resident they were about to hike up the fees in such a way that would purely have eaten the money away, so I closed down the account and used some of the cash for a two-day stay in Basel, and was appalled how expensive everything was. That made me feel thoroughly like an outsider and brought back memories of how poor my mother was when we lived there, how we lacked every basic amenity, how we eventually found a room in an apartment cheaply because my mother looked after the landlord's resident and dying stepmother, a Miss Haversham presence who occasionally shuffled out of her deathbed down the corridor to the lavatory and didn't make it and left little white turds as footprints. The Swiss didn't like poor guests back then either and my mother's circumstances were as difficult as they could be and it all went very sour.

My mother nonetheless missed her "home" country and went back to Switzerland with me each summer but the "holidays" were strung out on a shoestring, living in Salvation Army hostels.
I look at the calendar picture and smell the snow; snow has no smell but yet it comes with a very particular olfactory sensation ... clear air? It is a potent nostalgia. As was the snow we had here in December last year, it is a sensation of light, of danger, of safety.

I bought the calendar in a department store, wandering around with my daughter, and this is the finest bit of the association: I hated being trailed around Switzerland all summer with my mother and maybe last year my daughter wasn't dead excited either, maybe it was a little dull for her but it was very precious to me, to know that a mother and daughter can do something amicably together.

I don't understand the skateboarder; he (it looks like a man) intrudes into the picture, both literally, flying into the image, but also metaphorically. His presence tugs the timeless landscape of little houses and churchspire into the twentyfirst century and this is exactly what I don't want; I want to stew in a dream of unsullied memory, to gloss over the reality of even my own real experience of Switzerland and I want to believe in the myth. Here the source of objection to minarets.