Cheers

In an effort to combine the admirable features of being a little bit more civilised and of drinking more, Reto and I have added the excellent feature of cocktail hour to our household. After a few practice runs on the previous weekend, we had our official inaugural drinking frenzy, I mean civilised drink on the balcony, last Friday evening. We had excellent heavy glasses, we had gin, we had tonic, as had slices of lemon, we had ice cubes (no small thing in this country, where as it turns out it’s hard to buy an ice cube tray. After a long and fruitless search of Aarau for this very thing though, I got home and realised we already had one, in the freezer, full of ice). Not only this, we had the pleasantly setting afternoon sun, we had the strains of the accordion as played by the woman over the road who seems to like to sit in her garden and practice (which might seem as though it should be horrible, but I really enjoy it. Think more Amelie soundtrack than lunatics and Germans), and we had blini with smoked salmon, crème fraiche and dill.

It was all ridiculously upmarket and fancy until we got a bit carried away, finished half the bottle of gin and ended up sprawled all over the place like a couple of drunks. Aah, the fun of being a sporadic drinker.