For some deranged reason I decided to eat my shorts and depart the land of mangoes for $15 a box and head to the northern hemisphere for a traditional Christmas. By traditional I mean cold and grey, but thankfully scattered with fine food, drink, family and friends to make it all worthwhile (though I think a nice warm beach wouldn‘t go amiss!) The weather in Australia did its best to get me acclimatised, leaving a sunny Canberra into a progressively dreary Southern Highlands and cool and windy Sydney. From here it was fifteen hours of purgatory on a crowded plane to Dubai, for a quick nosey around the tax free burka store before connecting on to seven hours of heaven to Gatwick. At a drizzly Gatwick I spent a couple of hours, enough time to reacquaint myself with the world of chavs and M&S sandwiches before flying to Geneva where I could reacquaint myself with cheese and chocolate!
So that’s the journey condensed into a paragraph - such brevity hardly does it justice - and now I can begin with what could be termed the interesting stuff. OK, Geneva and its French environs sure were chilly, with much snow on the ground from recent falls and with the next day dawning clear and sunny it made sense to drag me to the hills to ram home the upside down nature of this world. It sure was beautiful and not as cold as I first feared, aided by some soup and wine afterwards.
Things went downhill, literally as we descended to Annemasse and the pleasures of Geant Casino or la Casino Geant or Casino de la Geant or whatever, a hypermarket full of hyper French Christmas shoppers with geant noses, not really the place to be when you hit the jetlag wall. Hmm, comforting raclette would make me feel better!
Of course I visited this part of the world in a much warmer, brighter time earlier this year and the contrast was interesting to see, none more so than in the pretty village of Yvoire which was practically deserted on a cool, grey Sunday afternoon.
There has been a far greater change in these parts since the summer, with the arrival of my nephew, Guillaume, recipient of tacky Australiana who is eating more and more by the day… clearly his father’s son!
Further time was spent in France and Switzerland combining walks in the snow, trips to the shops, journeys to the fridge and ipod sudoku at 5am (well, for Dad at least though
maybe one day I‘ll get there!) Gradually I was becoming acclimatised with both the weather and time zone and we had a lovely snow walk to Switzerland and back, which sounds exhausting but actually wasn’t too strenuous since it’s just across the road. 
If it had been strenuous perhaps there would have been even more space for the sublime Tartiflette which Michel Alroux created for dinner, the proverbial last supper.
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The next day took Dad and I once more across the border to a dreary, cheerless Geneva, so cold the Jet d’Eau was switched off and there was little Christmas sparkle (it‘s not a good time for Swiss bankers I guess). Solace was found in Manor, home to the finest Swiss chocolate selection and I stocked up to smuggle goods across the border later in the day. Once Dad had gone I had a painful couple of hours to kill with luggage in tow and it was a relief to board my train to Milan, which ran like clockwork through Switzerland before hitting chaos and disorganisation in Italy. Stereotypes, huh. It was dark, late and wet as I arrived in Milan’s mighty Centrale station, connecting to an underground train to somewhere or other full of beautiful people… well, apart from the man with a mullet perm and tracksuit (and they think they‘re so fashionable). And there I was, via a shopping centre food court pizza, at the home of the Ferraris. Here, a rather dull day suddenly sparkled over a bottle of wine, a shot of whisky and two old timers putting the world to rights and remembering the good old days of the distant 1990s. A genuine holiday highlight.
The next morning, Luca with new son Sam, and baby Neil ventured around the streets of Vignate, a small, quiet town outside of Milan, which luckily had a market to liven the place up and get the Italian Mammas out of the kitchen. The espresso shot was a godsend (ah, good coffee… it won’t last), though it must have affected my senses as I failed at my job of turd-spotting, leading to a pram wheel cleaning frenzy through the fresh puddles. Freshly cleaned, the theme of babies, Christmas and shopping continued as we hit the shopping centre for some lunch (mmm, nice traditional Italian kebab) and a wander round the supermarket which was surprisingly much more orderly than la Casino. With that, the day quickly faded from grey to black and it was too soon that I was back at an airport, the extremely boring and slightly dated looking Linate, for a flight heading back to Great Britain.***********************************
Heathrow Terminal 5 is pretty swanky, though not so much more than many other airports across the world. Signs of leaving this swish world for the 150 year old London Underground were evident with the broken escalator and followed up with a 10 minute wait followed by a trawl to central London and out again. It was on this mind-numbing two hour trip that I realised the novelty of this all had worn off. I remember coming back to England after a year in Australia and was captivated by the tube, like some foreign goon who had been in a world of down under suburbia for too long.
This time, however, I was like most underground users and couldn’t wait to get to my final destination, my old stomping ground of Finchley, north London. Maybe it was the four countries in two days but I was keen to put my head down for a good old British slumber.The next day dawned a now familiar grey and my one and only day in London was filled with food and snot, kicking off in the M25 countryside thanks to breakfast with Caroline. I didn’t even bother to order coffee but even the tea was disappointing. At this stage by the way I was also feeling lousy, the effects of climate change, sleep deprivation and lack of sun catching up on me and my ear, which was feeling blocked well before breakfast. The best cure would’ve been bed and some 1:40 Neighbours action but I took the not so hygienic Piccadilly Line into town, popping into Superdrug (yay, a British shop!) and a pub with some old work pals for a pie and pint. It helped (Guinness is medicinal) and propelled me briefly to Oxford Street where I didn’t see any sign of the downturn, followed by a walk along Hampstead Heath to hang around outside a girl‘s school… where my friend Miss Devine teaches of course! We met and walked to the tube, getting off at Finchley Central to purchase a reduced price dinner from Tesco (yay, a British shop!) to wile away the evening.
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And so the baby tour resumed the next morning on the boiling hot express to Preston where I was met by Jenn, Ollie and their new gorgeous girlie, Hayden. We grabbed a guilty McDonalds and soaked up the rain upon Lytham High Street before an evening of comfy pants and British TV. The next day I morphed into Gordon Ramsay, cutting up celery and creating cheese and pickled onions on cocktail sticks - I was so F*!@#*% proud, they went down a treat at the Christmas party that Jenn and Ollie had put on, along with several cans of Carling. It was the first time that things actually felt really Christmassy, I mean what with no sun at all and darkness by 4pm, the Christmas lights were a treat and nothing says Christmas more than a lump of cheese and a pickled onion on a stick! 
Feeling suitably festive, the tots tour 2008 was at an end, the final legs taking me to Manchester Airport where I endured a dreadful and overpriced Chicken Balti (did I expect any less?) and from where a little plane propelled me south and west, further south and west, to the south west and home in time for Christmas. 
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