Adolescents Genevois

I’ve just returned from passing a supremely pleasant couple of hours sitting on the bank of Lake Geneva – a place of such both natural and man-made attractiveness that you can’t help but feel it’s showing off and should really just shut the hell up.

You have astonishingly opulent 19th century buildings lining the waterfront, which project the sort of architectural insouciance that comes from not having been built, ever, to a budget. Each is adorned with a logo at the top – invariably some watch brand which produces timepieces costing a year’s average salary or the kind of bank which doesn’t let you through the door unless you’re wearing one of those watches. You cannot help but come to the conclusion that they’re all in cahoots. A lot of people here are making a lot of money. But that’s the Swiss way – and there’s little new to add about that.

Beyond the row of buildings and the tree-lined boulevards is the Lake itself – although it’s only recognisably a Lake when you look at an aerial map. From the ground it is a harbour, complete with seagulls, cafes, people pottering in boats, and cantankerous elderly men sitting under trees, watching the world go by.

So, there I was sitting under a tree watching the world go by, gazing at the distant snow-capped mountains which drop to the water’s edge, when I found myself looking at a group of teenagers on the waterfront just hanging around idly in the way that only groups of teenagers apparently know how.

When I saw them first, I felt the Pavlovian exasperation welling up inside; exasperation that even when you come to a place as cultured and sophisticated as Geneva, you still can’t escape the marauding little brats. (I lived in Kentish Town in north London last year and spent most Saturday nights declining dinner invitations so I could stand at my window and scowl. I am, I fear, trying to stare down middle age and so far I have been the first to break the glance).

But after the initial reaction passed and I stopped sneering, a couple of things struck me. Yes, of course they were dressed like idiots – the boys each porting a metric ton of cheap jewellery, umpteen inches of underwear self-consciously visible and enough hair product to keep OPEC afloat – and yes of course the girls were giggling like pubescent hyenas. But then they started to dance.

Only the guys, and they started performing – without any music – impressively acrobatic dance manoeuvres that I could never hope to imitate without pulling a body-length chain of muscles. And the people taking a stroll along the boardwalk stopped to watch and laugh and smile at them and not for a moment did these pierced chav/punk/ghetto human amalgams care for a moment that they were being watched by anyone but the girls around them. They were completely and utterly unselfconscious.

And the bile which had risen in my belly slunk down again and I smiled into the salty sunny breeze and thought that even though they were dressed like Eurovision rejects, performing what can only be described as a mating ritual and presumably conversing in some godawful nonsense vernacular, I admired them a great deal. I wished I could be them – dancing on a lakeside thoroughfare in the midday sun while tourists like me did nothing but nervously snap away with our cameras.

I should have gone up to them and got to know them a bit, but I didn’t. The next time that happens, I surely will.