Madame Fromage

One of the first people I met in Switzerland, who I was thoroughly entertained by, was a shop owner who I would like to call Madame Fromage. Tall with a Parisienne swan-long neck, she tossed around her arms as she chatted away faster than a TGV train racing between Paris and Zurich. Eine Schauspielerin (an actress) by nature, her shop named Pain et Fromage (Bread and Cheese) was not a place where you could duck-in and out of to purchase last minute ingredients.

Luckily, I was not in a rush. Having just landed in Zurich, I had all the time in the world, or at least four hours, to wonder the streets near my temporary home. I walked into her shop wanting to sniff out her wares, and was granted much more than olfactory experience. Her sales face was like a theatrical mask; she wore bright red lipstick, 100-strokes of mascara and had breasts perked up to her chin. With these she flirted and charmed -or at least tried to- both her male and female customers. However, there is only so much Rose Syrup that you can smell and sample before you realise once again that the queue has not moved; you look up and there she is, languorously draped across the counter poetically espousing the creaminess of Sheep-milk cheese. She is a French version of the domestic goddess Nigella Lawson, minus the curves. And like the majority of French women, it looks like she has never eaten anything other than celerey.

After promising to give the customer a special tour of the shop in her afterhours, suddenly the eyes, lips, boobs and cheese-stroking fingers of Madame Fromage are focused on me. She is physically striking with an accent as thick as bricks and her cheese selection is delectable partly because it is native solely to France. Proud and patriotic,the innocent question of whether the cheese is a product from the Swiss Jura is met with an indignant galluf! Of course it is not!

France, however, is not completely perfect in her mind either and she describes the Côte d'Azur as touristy and kitsch, whilst wearing sequin-pocked skyscraper heels at ten am in the morning.