Pays de Gex

After a slow start to the day, necessitated by the heat, we headed out across the border into the Pays de Gex around lunchtime in the direction of Divonne les Bains. This area was our back yard, so to speak, when we lived in Geneva. We both have happy memories of cycling through the wheat fields and fruit orchards which have characterised the landscape since Roman times. 

The CERN Large Hadron Collider circular tunnel is set beneath this largely flat landscape at the foot of the forested Jura mountain range, where we used to do Ski de Fond in the snowy season. It's such a special region in its own right, with its own distinct history and culture, that it really annoys me when the media locate the LHC under Geneva or even under the Swiss Alps, unashamedly advertising the geographical ignorance and careless verification practices that are typical of what media consumers have to put up with.

The Pays de Gex is rural, but increasingly a suburbanised region, from which international workers in UN agencies and global companies commute to work. There are still large numbers of gessien village dwellings and farm houses in use for dairy farming, but also new exclusive estates of substantial modern houses, springing up in pasture lands deemed to be less than profitable in new social and economic conditions. 

We took our usual route on the back roads to Divonne les Bains, where we bought a picnic lunch of bread, cherry tomatoes and smoked salmon from a sleepy lunchtime supermarket, and then consumed it in a quiet corner under cooling trees at the edge of Lac de Divonne watching dragonflies dance along the water's edge, as a family of moorhen sailed about their business just a few yards away.

Afterwards we made the short journey to Vésenex on the eastern boundary of Divonne, to visit our friends Julia and Philippe, for a leisurely chat and a swim in their garden pool in those perfect conditions you can only dream about in mid-winter when you're shut in and shivering.

Although it's ten years since we lived hereabouts, I feel the place just as much a part of me as Llandaff Fields, but with many more happy memories and associations. I would love to have retired here, but could never have afforded it. Part of the secret of happiness, however, is to love what you have, rather than have what you love.