Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
when a flash flood raced through the Valtellina valley, sweeping houses and hotels away like matchboxes
before a broom. In the same summer, thirty people died in a landslide at Annecy in France. Without the
mountainsides being denuded of trees for new housing and resorts, neither would have happened.
I was sitting on the wrong side of the train to see the scenery - outside my window there was nothing
but a wall of rock - but a kindly bespectacled lady sitting across the aisle saw me straining to see and
invited me to take the empty seat opposite her. She was Swiss and spoke excellent English. We chatted
brightly about the scenery and our modest lives. She was a bank clerk in Zurich but was visiting her mother
in a village near Domodossala and had just had a day shopping in Locarno. She showed me some flowers
she had bought there. It was wonderful. It seemed like weeks - it
was
weeks - since I had held a normal
conversation with anyone, and I was so taken with the novel experience of issuing sounds through a hole in
my head that I talked and talked, and before long she was fast asleep and I was back once again in my own
quiet little world.
