[FMAL-09] A Day Off
Tell me, my friends, what is it that you plan to do with your one wild and precious weekend? My name is Bernard Soubry, and this is what I did with mine, through the intermediary of your favourite newsletter, Fondue, and Maybe a Lake. This is your ninth email.
As a quick sidenote, I foolishly left a couple of charging cables at the venue on Saturday, meaning that I couldn't access them yesterday and therefore send an email. So you're getting two emails today. Overwhelming? Probably.
We finally get to the lake bit, albeit sideways: yesterday, I had a day off.
Part of the trick to feeling good through three weeks of negotiations is abandoning the idea that you are travelling. By which I mean: if you get a day off, where you are free to explore the world and suck the marrow from the bone of life, don’t. For God’s sake, sleep. Eat a minimum of green food. Feed the animal and do what it wants.
Yesterday, I slept until noon. Then I ate all the food left over in my room. And then I went for a walk up a hill.
The Salève is, by Geneva standards, a little hill out in the ‘burbs, which was a perfect subversion of the Grand Tourist inside me who wanted to hop the train to Chamonix and research crampon rentals. You can get there by folding bike, but you still get to cross the (unmonitored!) border into France. The only restaurant nearby is a pizza joint that opens at five in the evening. The walk up the mountain is interrupted by a whole town, which gives you an excellent opportunity to bail.
I stopped at a corner store, stuffed some crackers and tuna into my bag, and climbed the (almost vertical) three kilometres up to the mountain trail through the Pas de l’escalier.
I said hello to the local wildlife.
I said hello a lot, actually, to everybody who was coming down the mountain from a much earlier start: middle-aged couples with running shoes, hardcore-looking trail runners in hydration vests, teenagers with empty bottles of beer rattling in their backpacks. To a couple in high heels and sleek black coats who were totally lost looking for the cable car.
I was the only one wearing shorts. It an easy climb. I thought about very little. It was great.
It led to this, which was a very satisfying way of having spent three hours on a Sunday:
And then I climbed down, biked home, got takeaway pad thai and fell asleep watching an old episode of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Feeding the animal! I can't control it, I just do what it wants.
As a side note: walking is good thinking time, and I realized that there hasn’t been much in this newsletter about the content of the negotiations. This is fine by me – I don't have an agenda for this place, and it's truly more important to me that I'm writing anything than being read or understood at all.
But I do feel for anyone who might be reading this with the desire to, like, get something about UN biodiversity negotiations, so today's second email will hopefully try to shed light on the content of the coming week, diplomacy-wise. (Although the question of whether anyone actually understands it is very much up for grabs.)
Sore-leggedly yours,
Bernard