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Looking for Roger
We have been among important people. You can tell they are important by the way they carry themselves. These people, mainly men, can fill a room merely by being there, and how we know they are important is that they exude importance. In a contrived way they appear oblivious to everyone else in the world and make it an art form. Their birthright is superiority; the right to have people defer to them, chauffeurs to open car doors, officials to grace their every wish, expense accounts and endless domestic help. These are the sods that walk side by side with other important people down narrow footpaths forcing oncoming pedestrians like us to take evasive action as though invisible. They swan to the front of queues in the United Nations cafeterias as though no one else is there, and make demands of the staff while still talking loudly on mobile phones, fingers idling on lanyards displaying their significant credentials. They can do this because the world depends on them.
Indeed, we have been inside the UN headquarters in Geneva not quite saving the world, but hanging on the coattails of the New Zealand delegation to the International Labour Organisation’s annual shindig Our friends, Nanette Cormack and Helen Kelly make up the union contingent of the delegation and are staying on the French side of the border in a small town called Ferney-Voltaire. But really we are there so that Kaelene can stalk Roger Federer, apparently home in Switzerland following his historic win in the French Open tennis. Despite his recent marriage and impending fatherhood she still sees a place for him as a potential son-in-law.
But Roger is elusive, and our search takes us through old Geneva past a lineup of legendary Swiss banks, Rolex dealers, a floral clock, and shops selling diamond encrusted mobile phones. On further are the bars where City bankers drink. We lunched with Helen at the splendid Restaurant Le Petit Lac on the southern shores of Lake Geneva, but Roger was not there, nor was he at Restaurant Le Palais de Saigon back in Ferney that evening.
Switzerland is exactly as we imagined. Green countryside dotted with little alpine villages and towns, and tennis courts. One town we visited, Nyon, has its origins back more than 2,000 years, its Roman columns making a perfect frame against the backdrop of lake and deep blue sky. At the town’s centre is an impressive chateau, around five stories high, the top floor and turrets of which until the 1980’s were used to accommodate prisoners. These days the chateau is used as a museum although curiously it contains little history of the building itself and houses mainly porcelain. One thing for sure was that Roger wasn’t there.
Further south, perhaps halfway between Lausanne and Montreaux, is a small village called Grandvaux, reached by way of narrow winding lanes bordered on each side by stone walls and beyond them, acres and acres of grape vines. Perfection itself. Grandvaux is home to what Helen describes as the best restaurant in the world, Le Restaurant de l’Hotel du Monde which looks out over the lake from a height of several hundred feet towards Montreaux in the west and Geneva in the east. Roger wasn’t there, so we made do with a small vat of bubbling cheese fondue which, legend has it, is the only palatable way to eat stale cheese and bread when trapped indoors during the Swiss winter. Our only concern after eating that quantity of cheese was getting back home across the Swiss-French border. Apparently cheese smuggling is policed vigorously and, had we been stopped, sniffer dogs would have marked us for cavity searches - crack cheese being to Switzerland what crack cocaine is to the remainder of the world.
Sadly, as our four days in the land of St Bermard dogs, cow herds and cuckoo clocks came to an end the closest Kaelene came to Roger was the newspaper billboards: Federer: le coup de pouce du destin in La Liberte and Le 7 Juin devrait devenir la St-Federer in Le Matin Bleu. Saint Roger indeed.