I’ve just returned from spending a few days in Switzerland after years. I rarely visit my old stomping grounds, especially since stomping is frowned upon in quiet alpine villages with wooden floors, but it was a family occasion, and one shows up for a family occasion, if only to justify the eight thousand email and WhatsApp messages leading up to it.
You know how, in childhood, you associate each of your aunts and uncles with one main trait, and grow up thinking of that thing as normal—telling good jokes, say, or climbing mountains, or taking off your bra without removing
