A Jolly Good Time

After five years, I finally got to go on fieldwork again[1]. This time, it wasn’t a month-long ordeal of Extreme Camping in Greenland, but a day-and-night trip as part of a Master’s course to the Swiss Alps. Specifically, the to Val d’Hérens, south of Sion, in the canton of Valais[2]. We were staying overnight in a large chalet in La Forclaz, at the top of the main valley, where it splits in two, the western branch going up to Arolla, the eastern branch up to Ferpècle. We were also pretty much at the Franco-German language border: the next valley eastwards was German-speaking, but that wasn’t terribly obvious during our stay. I was with 5 members of my research group to look after what turned out to be 6 students, which was a very favourable and, I think, unexpected ratio. The subject of the class was to provide an introduction to glacial geomorphology and dating techniques for determining the age of different features of the landscape. The students had to identify sites to sample, take the samples, and would then be analysing them in the labs and writing it all up over the course of the rest of the term.

Let me be clear, though: for the first time in my academic career, I was going on what I would unequivocally describe as a jolly. I wasn’t actually teaching on this course or required to drive the minibus or do anything really, so had absolutely zero skin in the game; I was purely a supernumerary member of staff along for the ride. As it turned out, one of the scheduled staff members got covid and couldn’t come, so me being there was perhaps more useful than expected, but only marginally. Though, as it turned out, this was the first time there’d been a specialist glaciologist member of staff on the trip, so I did get put on the spot to do some introductory glaciology, including extemporising a five-minute condensed version of one of the undergraduate supervisions I gave at Cambridge. So, in the end, it wasn’t quite a complete jolly, in that I probably usefully contributed for a whole ten minutes over the course of the day. It’s a tough life sometimes.

The day itself was largely spent wandering around the eastern branch of the valley above Ferpècle beneath a perfectly blue sky. After a brief introductory lecture for the students, we drove up to the car park where the road stopped, then walked up – I’d hesitate to qualify it as a hike, given it wasn’t far at all – through the old glacier moraines marking the Little Ice Age maximum extent[3] and subsequent retreat to the point where the valley divides again either side of Mont Miné. The eastern branch is occupied by the Glacier de Ferpècle, the western one by the Glacier de Mont Miné. As part of this, we also passed part of the hydroelectric installations that make up the Grande Dixence HEP scheme[5], which was something that I’d read a lot about and hadn’t realised we were going to be near. So I actually found that one of the more exciting bits of the trip, which was unexpected. We weren’t passing the main dam – the tallest in Europe – or reservoir itself, just one of the secondary installations, but it was still pretty cool. We then walked farther up the western branch of the valley towards the Glacier de Mont Miné, stopping every so often to explain a bit of geomorphology or glaciology. We stopped for lunch, and then had a couple of hours free, while the students were sent off to find sampling sites.

Obviously, we all walked up closer to the glacier. We didn’t actually get to it, because it was a bit far to do in the time we had and also because the Glacier de Mont Miné is now very much split in two. There’s a still pretty thick-looking upper glacier, then a large and steep cliff, with a much reduced lower glacier beneath it. Said lower glacier clearly receives a substantial amount of accumulation from the exposed terminal ice cliff of the upper glacier, so wandering around in a setting where a block of ice might suddenly fall on your head might be considered a tad unwise[6]. We therefore kept a very sensible distance. After that, we headed back down to where we’d arranged to meet the students and returned to where we’d left the vans, avoiding some aggressive-looking cows on the way and deciding on sampling sites for the following day.

Low down the valley near the HEP installation

Where the valley divides; Mont Miné is dead ahead, its eponymous glacier to the right

The HEP installation

You can tell that’s glacial meltwater

The Glacier de Mont Miné

Even closer to the glacier. You can see the upper and lower portions easily

That evening, there was some brief discussion of the sampling strategy for the following morning, before we all decided work was done and sat around having a chat. Then there was a big raclette for dinner for everyone, prepared by the very accommodating owner of the chalet. I even managed to have a shower. All in all, I’d had a very enjoyable day out in the field and able to get to know some of my colleagues a bit better. It turns out fieldwork doesn’t have to be a gruelling insanitary slog on iron rations. Maybe I’ll even get a chance to do some more over the next couple of years….

And, as a coda, I had to leave early the following morning to get back to Lausanne for some scheduled teaching I was actually supposed to be doing – the likely subject of a future post once I’ve got further into the course – so I can say nothing about the success or otherwise of the students in obtaining the samples they needed. It was probably fine – they seemed a fairly competent and motivated bunch.

[1] OK, so I wasn’t prevented from going on fieldwork in Grenoble or anything; it was just never very clear what the opportunities were and there were annoying administrative formalities to go through – surprise – so I never quite bothered to get round to it.

[2] Which gives me the opportunity to bring up one of my favourite toponymic facts: Valais takes its name from the same Germanic root that gives us Wales, Cornwall, Wallonia and Wallachia; that root pretty much just means ‘foreign’. Germanic speakers across Europe are seemingly a) not very imaginative and b) quite xenophobic, historically.

[3] This is probably one of those phrases that, working in glaciology, I forget is utterly meaningless to most people. The Little Ice Age was a slightly colder period in Europe – the name is a little grandiose – from roughly the mid-17th century to the mid-19th century, leading to well-recorded glacier advance in the Alps and Scandinavia. The glaciers went into retreat around about 1850 and haven’t looked back (or possibly forward) since[4].

[4] Actually, that’s not true. I’m giving the impression that it’s been a pretty linear retreat for over 150 years. It hasn’t. The glaciers retreated a bit after the end of the LIA, then mostly stabilised, and then really went backwards from the 1970s onwards. But the joke about looking forwards was too good to pass up.

[5] It’s a big hydroelectric scheme that gathers water from five adjacent Alpine valleys for power generation purposes and to help regulate flood risks.

[6] This makes the glacier one of the relatively rare examples of a dry calving glacier, which is itself interesting.

Ten Out Of Tène

Now that I’m in Switzerland armed with my half-fare railcard[1], I thought it was about time I started exploring a bit. And also making my money back on said railcard. In Vaud, the canton that includes Lausanne, there is a convenient long weekend in mid-September[3], so I decided to take a day trip on the Saturday to visit Neuchâtel – I wasn’t feeling up to an overnight stay anywhere yet, mostly because I don’t get paid a Swiss salary till the end of the month and my bank balance could do without the stress of the extra expenditure. Well, I say Neuchâtel – I did go there – but I was going there mostly to visit La Tène, with Neuchâtel as a sort of bonus feature.

Lake Neuchâtel

Now, I am prepared to accept that the name La Tène does not necessarily command instant brand recognition among the majority of the populace[4], so, to explain: La Tène is the type site that gives its name to the late Iron Age Celtic culture prevalent throughout central Europe between about 400 BC and the Romans pushing into the area from the 1st century BC. The early Iron Age equivalent, covering much the same area, is Hallstatt in Austria. In other words, La Tène is one of the most significant archaeological sites in Europe. The modern town is essentially a suburb of the Neuchâtel agglomeration around the shallow north-east end of its namesake lake, but, in Celtic times, it was very special. In quite what way, no one’s entirely sure, but something made the locals want to deposit hoards of weapons and other objects in this marshy bit of lacustrine liminality, where they were very well-preserved. As far as I understand it, the current theory is that is was some sort of memorial site along the lines of the Cenotaph or similar – it certainly wasn’t a normal settlement or religious site – but its exact nature remains somewhat enigmatic, largely because it was initially excavated in the late 19th/early 20th century and the documentation is therefore rather patchy. The resulting finds are also very dispersed, because they got sold, legally or illegally to all sorts of people, making a global synthesis quite challenging.

So, that’s why I wanted to go visit it. I therefore passed right through Neuchâtel town centre and got off farther up the lake shore to go to the Latenium museum, which houses a large proportion of the finds, as well as being the history and archaeology museum for Neuchâtel more generally. And it is a good museum. I spent a couple of hours inside and in the accompanying archaeological park, where there are reconstructions of typical prehistoric dwellings, a Roman garden, and so on. The museum itself, adopting a reverse chronology, goes from the medieval period back to the earliest-known human presence in the region, about 40,000 years ago, though focusing on the Bronze and Iron Ages. Particularly notable is the Roman-era boat found sunk in the lake, which is impressive, as well as the earliest-known human remains in Switzerland, part of a jaw from 40,000 years ago. The thing I found most amusing, however, was an illustration of the Peutinger Table, a medieval copy of a late-Roman road map, in the Roman section of the museum. The accompanying legend, paraphrased, pretty much said ‘The Peutinger Table, a late-Roman road map. There is nowhere in the canton of Neuchâtel mentioned in it’. One suspects a museum of things that have nothing to do with Neuchâtel would be quite a large one…. I also found further excellent evidence for my Hat Theory of the Ancient World, with some very snazzy Bronze Age fashion on display, including an excellent hat. And if the Bronze Age predecessors of the Central European Iron Age type site had big hats, then I can confidently assert that all of Central Europe could be described purely in hat terms back to at least 1000 BC.

The museum is also part of the Alpine Lake Villages World Heritage Site. Actually, the English name might be slightly different, but I can’t be bothered to look it up.

The Peutinger Table. Nothing to do with Neuchâtel.

A big old Roman lake boat.

BRONZE AGE BRAINS!!!

In Switzerland, we give our prehistoric standing stones faces.

The height of Swiss Bronze Age fashion. Also , HAT.

The earliest human remains found in Switzerland.

A small selection of the very many iron jobbies found at La Tène

I passed lunchtime in the museum café, because it was already fairly late and I wanted to eat sooner, not later, and then walked the 2.5 miles or so into Neuchâtel proper along the lake shore. Or, at least as along the lake shore as the footpath lets you go. Which is maybe half the time, to avoid the marinas, rowing clubs, lakefront hotels and so on. Still, a pleasant walk, nonetheless. I walked up through the town centre of Neuchâtel, which is quaint and also quite uphill, to get to the castle at the top of the hill that gave the town its name. Neuchâtel is, as the name might indicate, not mega-old – it was founded in the 11th century by Rudolph III of Burgundy, who built a castle on top of a Roman villa that had been sited on the hilltop. The town then grew up around the castle and associated church. The current castle is, though, mostly 15th century, with a 19th-century addition to house the parliament of what was then the newly constituted canton of Neuchâtel[5], because the old castle burned down. It also remains the centre of government for the town and canton, as it has been since its foundation, and guided tours are offered for those interested. Which I was, so I paid a pretty nominal fee and got taken round the castle and the adjoining church – the closest thing to a cathedral Neuchâtel has – in 45 minutes. It’s pretty interesting, and the inside of the castle is worth seeing – you can’t get in any other way, unless you actually have government business to attend to.

The church. Difficult to get a good view of.

The prison tower, one of the oldest remaining bits of architecture in Neuchâtel.

The lake from the castle.

Also the lake from the castle.

The castle.

These small pillars are apparently the only bit of the pre-15th-century chateau to survive the fire.

More lake.

After that, I wandered around the town centre a little more, bought some Swiss chocolate, because why wouldn’t you?, and then headed back to Lausanne on the train. All in all, a pretty successful day out. There was maybe one other museum I might have gone to in Neuchâtel, but I wasn’t too bothered and didn’t feel like it. Definitely a nice little city worth visiting, but it’s very much a one-day wonder unless you want to be particularly thorough or spend a lot of time on or in the lake. It is well-located though for seeing other towns and places, and it’s certainly a nice place to hang around.

[1] The indispensable Swiss travel companion. For 185 CHF a year (160 CHF in the second and subsequent years), you get 50% off (almost) all Swiss rail fares. As a result, your train tickets cost a sensible amount – probably even a bit cheaper than, say, the French equivalents[2] – rather than costing stupid Swiss prices. Also, the card works on the vast majority of Swiss public transport, so you can get 50% off buses and boats too, which is handy if you want to go somewhere really out of the way.

[2] Obviously they’re cheaper than the British equivalents. That goes without saying.

[3] In fact, the public holiday coincided with the Queen’s funeral, which rather put paid to my plan to scrounge an extra pity day of holiday because I was so overcome with grief, etc. I’ll just have to claim I’m so exorbitantly excited about the coronation when it comes round that I can’t come in that day. Though, to be honest, I am looking forward to the sheer insanity of the coronation. There are a lot of good hats.

[4] It certainly didn’t when I talked about it at work as part of the ‘what are you doing with your long weekend?’ discussion.

[5] To give a very brief synopsis of the canton’s history: it was an independent county within the Holy Roman Empire, mostly under Savoyard influence, then ended up as a French vassal when the comital title passed to a bastard line of the French royal family, before ending up as a personal possession of the Prussian monarchs in the early 18th century. This was the result of the direct line of succession dying out and there being a lot of claimants, all with somewhat tenuous claims, so the locals got to pick their new ruler. Sensibly, they picked someone both powerful and also conveniently far away, maximising their local autonomy and minimising the chance of getting bothered by any of their neighbours. Napoleon then shook everything up, but the territory ended up back under Prussian control after the Congress of Vienna. At the same time, it also joined the Swiss Confederation as a canton, creating what turned out to be a bit too much tension. As a result, in 1848, the locals politely told the Prussian officials to sod off and proclaimed a republic, leaving the canton as it is today. It was one of the most polite revolutions in history. In fact, the canton seems to have been remarkably pacific: no major battles seem to have been fought on its territory in the last thousand years, and their legendary military heroes are even more legendary than most.

His Chazesty, The King.

The major discovery of the past week for me is that I’m a crypto-royalist. Because, in an entirely expected move, a 96-year-old-woman died. What was unexpected for me was quite how sad I was about it. I’d always known that, of course, the Queen would die, but somehow I’d never actually thought it would really happen. And then it did and the feeling of dislocation, loss and general malaise I experienced surprised me. I’m not sure I would ever have considered myself a monarchist, though neither would I have said I was a republican, but if my feelings are anything to go on, I’d have been giving Charles II a boost up into that oak at Worcester quicker than you could say ‘God save the king’.

I spent a large portion of the end of last week wanting to go buy a flag, purely so I could fly it at half-mast. The only reason I wasn’t going around dressed in black is because I don’t actually own any black tops – at the very least, though, I deliberately didn’t wear any bright colours on the Friday. I also half-seriously considered getting the train back to the UK[0]. Not to do anything in particular, but out of a vague feeling that I should just be there, possibly standing around in Trafalgar Square for no obvious reason. And all because someone I’d never met and who represents a system of government that is, at best, distinctly hidebound, had died. I suspect being emotionally involved with the Royal Family despite being ostensibly lukewarm about them may be one of those British values various governments have been banging on about for years. None of these progressive concepts such as freedom or liberty, just an underlying conservatism and attachment to an institution that has, for good or for ill, through thick and thin, been there for over a millennium. Sure, Britain now is a bit different to what it was under Athelstan[1], but the monarchy has endured. I suppose I would say it means something, even if I’m not entirely sure I could define what that something is.

And I know that, as a good progressive liberal meritocrat, I should reject traditional hereditary authority and look forward to a bright republican future. But I’ve never really been able to be all that enthusiastic about republicanism. There is something to be said for having an apolitical unifying figure as your Head of State, something that any kind of republic will struggle to produce consistently[2]. Constitutional monarchy done well, despite its undoubted theoretical issues, seems to me to, practically, tend to work out pretty decently and gives a sense of stability that can be lacking in places where your Head of State changes every few years[3]. So yeah, I suppose I’ve always kind of been in favour of the monarchy, but recent events have made me realise quite how deeply.

And looking forward, we can hope King Charles III does better than either of his two eponymous predecessors. Given that the bar for this is not starting a civil war and managing to have a legitimate heir, he’s already halfway there. But it really does feel to me as if the new reign marks a new age in Britain. In my more pessimistic moments, I might say it feels like the last nail in a coffin already pretty much entirely consisting of nails driven in by Brexit and the unedifying spectacle of the last few years of government, but, equally, maybe it’ll give the country a bit of a kick towards something better. We’ll have to see. Let’s try to be optimistic. And, ultimately, Charles can’t hang around that long, so we’ll be doing this all again soon enough.

Hopefully I will have continued to resist the urge to buy a Union Jack waistcoat. And got used to saying ‘God save the king’ by then.

[0] It’s been quite weird hearing about it through another country’s media. Possibly for the better, though, because it’s less wall-to-wall and sycophantic. You also get to find out such exciting facts as that the Swiss like Charles because he has a Swiss-made watch and pair of secateurs. See what I mean about it being weird?

[1] England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales now restrict their warfare to sporting fixtures rather than actually raiding each other all the time. And today’s immigrants are less likely to attack Lindisfarne.

[2] Some republics get much closer than others, though. Republics where you directly elect the President and the President actually has power completely fail at this; those where the President is basically a figurehead or is perhaps chosen in some other way tend to get closer. But the people who get chosen as President often tend to be chosen based on their political credentials, so even then it doesn’t necessarily work.

[3] Admittedly, this can happen in monarchies too, but the chances of the monarch catching dysentery on campaign or getting poleaxed in battle have much reduced these last 300 years. Incidentally, and because I can’t work out where to put this, so it’s going on the end of this footnote, I also got sidetracked, given it’s been a while since Charles II, into working out what the longest gap between British monarchs of successive regnal names has been. And it seems the nearly 600 years between William II and William III is the winner. A record that is likely to be safe for a good long while unless, unexpectedly, we see a King John II or Stephen II. Or possibly a King Edmund, if we go back to the House of Wessex. The chances of any of the other Anglo-Saxon names (ignoring Edward, because that got co-opted by the Plantagenets) being adopted, though, seems to my mind, negligible. Edgar, Edwy or Aethelred aren’t so likely, after all.

The French Conundrum

Now I’m at the end of my time in France, and temporarily facing an administrative doldrum as I wait for the storm of moving to break, I can reflect a bit on the experience of living here. I think it’s fair to say that, overall, I’m not so keen on living in France. Visiting France, yes; living here, no.

First off, though, the positives: the food is genuinely great[1], as is the social safety net[2]. The healthcare system is also at least potentially pretty good, though it can be a bit hard to navigate and there are definitely signs that it’s coming apart at the seams a bit[3]. The weather’s better too, even if I personally find Grenoble itself to be a bit on the hot side[4]. And the public transport is way better than in the UK too, meaning you can easily visit lots of interesting and beautiful places.

On the other hand, there are a few problems, I find. The administrative requirements of the French state are burdensome to say the least, and are intractable if you don’t speak French. There’s also often very little explanation of the procedures to follow or little indication of who to contact should you need to speak to someone, and there’s consequently always the possibility of falling into some Kafka-esque black hole of administrative obtuseness. And, just generally, any administrative matter with the state or with a company often seems to be unnecessarily complicated and wilfully unclear. The political situation is also increasingly polarised and a bit concerning, making me a little apprehensive about the direction the country might go in over the coming years.

Perhaps the thing I found most difficult, though, was my perception of the French mindset. Everything tends to turn into an endless debate, but nothing ever actually happens. British people like to moan, but also tend to have more of a can-do attitude, I feel. Whereas French culture has an undercurrent of fatalism and heaviness that means the debating and moaning never ends, but no one really does much about it. And I find this very frustrating, being someone who likes to fix problems. This comes out most obviously in how French people seem to perceive the French state: they expect it to be there to provide all sorts of generous benefits and help for them, but at the same time they object to it asking anything of them in turn and moan about how it works badly constantly.

I also find that France is much worse at multiculturalism than the UK, possibly linked to the fact that the far-right has a worrying amount of support. Despite the explicit universalist values of the French republic, it feels to me that there’s a large section of French society that believes they only apply to white native French speakers. So, immigrants are relegated to the ghettos and, no matter how hard they, their children or their grandchildren try, they can never really be French. I’m not saying the UK is some sort of multicultural Promised Land, but it does feel to me to be considerably better at it than France. And this feeds in to a lot of the political issues in France, driving violence and anti-immigrant sentiment.

So yeah, I think France is a really great country to visit, and is very attractive on the surface; but to live in and underneath, it’s a bit less pleasant, I feel. This doesn’t mean I haven’t enjoyed living here for two years, but I think I’m pretty confident now that it’s not somewhere I want to live long-term. Which is useful to know. I think heading back towards Northern Europe might be a good idea – I suspect I’d feel more at home there.

[1] Unless you’re on some sort of alternative diet. Vegetarianism is just about OK now, but trying to explain that you can’t eat gluten or dairy for whatever reason, as I saw with some of my friends, is unlikely to go very far. If you’re happy to eat large chunks of meat, pastry and cream, France is great. If you’re not, they sort of look at you like you’re mad and think you’re just being weird.

[2] Not that I experienced it myself directly that much, but having read about it and heard about it, it’s really very generous. You can certainly be fully compensated by the state for any medical expenses linked to a long-term health condition, for instance.

[3] Finding a doctor in Grenoble is borderline mission impossible. Finding a dentist in Grenoble is actually mission impossible. Even Tom Cruise couldn’t do it.

[4] I’m understating a lot here. Grenoble is ridiculously hot.