Florence Wallace, summer 1929, on left

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – My mother would have been 100 today and although she isn’t with us (she lived to a fine age of 95), my three sisters and I are sharing old family photos that Jeanne, the oldest, had scanned and sent to us all on CDs.

They live in three states and I live in Switzerland, which in her youth would have amazed my mother.

We’re chuckling over so many good memories and cringing at a few others, usually where we weren’t at our best for Florence Lonergan, who married our dad Bob Wallace.

My sister Mary recalls her great sense of humour, which stayed with her until the end; she could have the nursing home laughing to the point of tears over her sharp remarks about politicians.

She would have loved to have been around for another US election, and I’m sorry she missed Barack Obama’s win four years ago, but as it was, she lived through interesting times.

The Titanic sank when she was three months old and the Great War started when she was a toddler, although in her Irish-American household in Reinbeck, Iowa the greater excitement was over the Irish-Anglo Treaty that was signed just as she was turning 10 and which ended British rule in Ireland.

She graduated from high school as the world was tottering financially, in the summer of 1929, and dreams of college were pushed off for a bit while everyone counted his money, or what he didn’t have.

The Crash, the Depression, love and war and babies

She fell in love with a handsome and very nice guy in the heart of the Great Depression, and just as it was ending she spent three months watching her first child slowly die of a heart problem that it’s now commonplace to repair. Two small girls came along, but so did another war, and in 1942 her husband headed off to fight in the Pacific for more than two years, out of pride and principle rather than because he had to.

Tough enough for the 50s, 60s, and 4 more decades

Bob Wallace and Florence Lonergan, wedding day 1936

Two more girls came after the war and then Florence the mother had her hands full for several years with ABC and rock ‘n roll parties at the same time. To my enormous admiration today she never lost her sense of self, the sharp edge that made her impatient with any kind of phoniness or people with airs, just as she kept her wonderful trim figure and grand and unswerving moral sense that there’s only one way to live and that is honestly, decently, fairly.

And modestly, which didn’t go down well with me in the freewheeling late 1960s when I bought a forbidden bikini and sneaked off to the beach with my friends; I discovered to my horror that she had sewn a lace ruffle along the top during the night.

And intelligently, which meant that she was forever correcting our grammar and pointing out mind-enriching articles. For years after I left home she clipped every newspaper column on grammar or how to make the world a better place and mailed them to me, with her comments in the margins.

And frugally, so that even when my parents had enough money to travel abroad, long after we kids left home, she still melted scraps of soap to make new bars. I hated our bathroom soap and wondered why we couldn’t have perfumed brand name ones, but she loved saving pennies thanks to Hints from Heloise.

She didn’t believe in leaving margins blank, so her letters were filled on both sides of the paper, then she carried on writing in her untidy scrawl, often with different ink or pencil in all directions in all the margins. And she loved abbreviating words.

Her letters were a challenge to read.

My sister Tara just sent me something she found among her own papers, a Mother’s Day card that I gave to Florence in May 1961.

The Wallace "girls" in Colorado, 1957: Tara, Mary, Jeanne, Florence, Ellen

We didn’t call her Florence, I hasten to add, until she was well into her nineties, and never to her face. The grandchildren knew her as Grandma Flo.

“May 1961

“Dear Mom,

“I love you very much and will try to please you.  I’ll do everything you asked me to do today.  I would like to finish my Memory book for Camp Fire though.  I can’t find my bathing suit so I can’t tell if it fits me.  Anyway the straps are broken and then my suit always falls off.  It was kinda of small last summer.  It probably doesn’t fit me.  You owe me $2.10.”

Tara says the front of the card has “you owe me $2.10 with the amount written several times. Mom wrote in red crayon “Pd.”

Our debt to her will never be repaid, I’m afraid.

I’ll bake a pie in her memory this weekend, since she loved pies almost as much as she loved donuts. And tonight we’re eating a Florence special from the 1950s, hardly changed and still a hugely popular family meal: tuna casserole (critics abstain – it’s great!). It’s a frugal, intelligently tasty, modest dish which any honest person can decently enjoy.

Here’s to you, Mother!

BERN, SWITZERLAND – A lot of travelers’ blogs run past me during any given week, but few reflect the sheer joie de vivre of Marie-Michele Gagnon‘s pause in Bern, shared on her blog. The 22-year-old ski racer from Quebec is photographing and filming her world travels and she has just done a fine job in Bern where, of course, the famous bears were nowhere to be seen. Chances are that a skier will only be passing through when the bears hibernate but here is hoping their schedules match at some point.

Gymnaestrada 2011 opening ceremony in Lausanne (photo ©2011 Daniel Burion)

LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – How could we not say “hat’s off” to Alstonville, Australia hat manufacturer Jack Cunningham, who is still beaming, according to his local paper, the Northern Star, after 400 Australian gymnasts wore his Cutuna Hat Company original designs for the opening ceremony of the Gymnaestrada world event in Lausanne. The crowd of 20,000 gymnasts who participated, plus the thousands of spectators, must be a hatmaker’s dream for showing off his wares.

Cunningham says 90 percent of the company’s business now comes from the Internet, so he was surprised and very pleased to be contacted directly for the order. The Australian team was looking for wide-brimmed hats, which turned out to be useful during the rainy ceremony. “It was a pretty standard design and the hardest thing we had to do was add a chin strap,” he told the local paper.

It’s the end of the week, and a good chuckle or two as we head into the weekend is always appreciated. Mine today come from an anonymous designer and Wired, over wikinonsense.

Warmer weather is here, so I pulled out a pair of comfortable, loose linen trousers for work earlier in the week. This morning I checked the label for washing instructions on these American-bought but made-in-Lithuania pants and found a little additional label tucked away in the seam that said “I am open and receptive to all people”.

I was still smiling, I read Wired‘s story, picked up from David Allen Green’s blog at the New Statesman, on the latest from WikiLeaks, which wins today’s prize for irony: its contributors, or leakers, now risk up to $20 million in fines if they are responsible for a significant leak of unpublished material provided to WikiLeaks. For those who want to believe that WikiLeaks is all about making information freely available for the greater community good, the disclaimer agreement may come as a surprise, showing as it does that WikiLeaks considers its work a commercial operation.

Here’s news to some of us: Lake Geneva holds some fine trout. To be specific: trout that weigh in at 5.3kg. The trout fishing season opened 18 January on the lake and 20 Minutes carries a photo of the hefty fish caught by Steve Jorris and Régis Pot at Le Bouveret, at the Vaud end of the lake.

Ever have a day when you wake up and think you’d like to do something totally different in life, maybe switch from banking in Geneva to running a coffee and pancake shop in Alaska, or change from managing a big public relations department in Lausanne to repairing bicycles on the shoreline north of Copenhagen?

I like to keep an eye out for lifestyle-changing jobs, just in case. Here’s the latest, and it’s in Bern. I’m sharing it because although it appeals to me I’ve never driven a truck and I am a little afraid of horses. But if you can handle a truck and you love horses, it might be just the thing. “Car and living” is included. You’ve got the weekend to think about how the grass is always greener, etc.

“I’m looking for a hard working, reliable groom (f) to look after my showjumpers. sole charge in private yard
All stable duties, clipping, lunging, riding, travel to shows etc.
driving licence necessary, lorrydriver would be perfect”

Subject matter of the Swiss national anthem

Poor Norway, not knowing the Swiss National Anthem (hymn, it’s called in Switzerland) and playing the wrong tune when Swiss President Doris Leuthard was in town Thursday 14 October.

Norwegians can take a bit of solace from the fact that very few Swiss can whip out the song and sing it on demand, perhaps partly because it comes in four language versions.

The president consoled herself by warm conversation with the king of Norway, over lunch.

Here is the missing tune in French, with the Villars-sur-Glane vocal ensemble led by PG Roubaty. A slightly more rousing and language-free orchestral version by the Orchestre Suisse Romande can be downloaded from the government web site.

cantique_1 1, French version, but my favourite is the reverberating Romantsch version (they are after all in the mountains), Nationalhymne_rumantsch

The Swiss federal government has it on tap in four languages, for diplomats who want it handy for future reference.

How not to store your hat collection:

Summer hats: too many, too light, too high

Winter hats: too many, too jumbled, too few hat boxes

Not fit for a queen - her loss, I say

Hats off! is not a blog about hats, most of the time. It’s about us whipping off our hats and bowing deeply to interesting people or things people do, or sometimes to animals or events. Three cheers! Bravo! Well done!

But for once, it’s about hats, because it’s high time to say hats off! to one of my favorite web sites, Mad Hattery. If you’re looking for deep and meaningful, turn away now: this is one for hat buffs like me, who love feeling weighed down by frivolity on our heads.

Mad Hattery describes its mission in life as “primarily about snarking on royal hats”, and this is where you’ll find that one picture you just have to see again to believe.

Getting onto the royal scales with silk, but brim too restrained

I went hunting for a photo of Camilla, wife of Prince P across the water, because I caught a glimpse of her in something that looked a bit like a sailboat in a storm, at Westminster Abbey, when the pope visited last weekend. Sure enough, here it is on Mad Hattery, and you can have another peek or two at it on the Royal Family website. MH might be right: it’s a weathervane, not a boat.

I’ll confess to a couple follies of my own in the hat department, shown here, but all the queen’s gold couldn’t buy most of us the kind of head rags the royals wear.

I can’t quite decide if it is a dream or a nightmare, but I sometimes fantasize about having this job where I get up in the morning and learn that one of the majesties has just ordered another hat, but forgot to send instructions or details. Off I go to gather up the jewels of my own choice for this particular crown. A bird’s egg that fell out of a tree for a touch of nature, a small plastic pig for good luck, bits from my collection of broken jewelry and earrings missing mates, for a bit of history, scarves in need of events for that special something, and the list goes on.

I whip up this delightful headdress and then come upon the pièce de résistance, a small Mexican man in a sombrero to create a hat within a hat look.

Hats off! author Ellen Wallace sporting real butterflies who landed on the hat in Arizona (photo: M Tiegreen)

That’s when I wake up because I realize that the art of royal hat-making is surely all about glue and stitches: how to keep the royal’s head up, hat on and hair in place. And I don’t know the secret! So I guess it is a nightmare, after all. There must be something called Queen Glue, even tougher than superglue.

Nevertheless, here are my ingredients for a royal hat:

A favorite bit of Betty Boops cloth

A black velvet bowtie

Some old English sweets, size of a pinhead

Scarves looking for an event

Sensible yellow swimming cap

Bits and bobs of old jewelry, earrings without partners

One small good luck plastic pig with a smile

A hat within a hat man wearing sombrero (apologies for the broken arm, Highness)

I was in China for the finals of the Chinese Bridges international competition for university students of Chinese in early August. I was amazed by the language and drama skills of the top 12, who performed to an audience of 100 million TV viewers.

But I’d only heard about, hadn’t seen, one of the pre-finals “tests” the students had to take, making it through Hunan TV’s water maze. Now I think learning to speak Chinese looks easy, compared to this!

Video is from the web site of Li-mu, who is my son, aka Liam Bates, but who was also one of the three top winners, taking the prize for “eloquence”. I’m not too sure how eloquent he was while doing the maze to shouts and a clock counting down!

Allow time for the video to load. The “test” to get through the maze starts after about 40 seconds of video.

And here’s a link to TSR’s interview with Liam, in French. The Swiss public TV station sent a team from Beijing to film the finals and interview the local lad.