I came to this country in the first place needing to piece myself together, hoping there could be attachments. By twenty-one years of age I’d lived in several countries before returning with my mother, father and sister to Switzerland, where I was born. But I didn’t think of Switzerland as my country either. Nor was it the home country of my mother or my father. It’s where my dad’s work base was, and still is – for now. It’s where some of the best ski slopes are. It’s the home of several international organisations for which my mother works as a translator. Languages are her thing.

What sort of a name is Daniel, I asked my discontented self. A name neither here nor there, pronounced this way or that depending which country you happened to find yourself in.

And what sort of a country was Switzerland anyway, I thought. So neutral. So cuckoo. So heavy with banks and the world’s money, it’s a wonder the ground didn’t crack open beneath it all.

Stones.

There are the mountains, nature’s organisation of stones and great for viewing, but there’s only so much mountain one can take, only so much skiing one can do unless you are an addict like my father or have ability like my sister. We’d shifted from place to place too many times for me to become a Winter Olympics prospect, too often for me to have made lifelong friends.

What was there to see in Rome, Madrid, Tübingen, Athens, Turin, but stones ancient and dusty, piled one on top of the other, cemented, plastered, corniced in the making of castles, cathedrals, barns, bridges, fortifications, museums, universities – or laid out to make roads. That was my state of mind while studying German literature at one of Germany’s ancient universities.

I am a stone, I thought. I am clay. Or I am dust blowing anywhere or nowhere.

Our mother was just our mother once, when we were little, who tucked us into our beds, kissed sore knees, read to us, filled the kitchen with smells of baking, had us up beside her at the benches to cut out and decorate biscuit figures for Christmas. She wrapped us and played outside with us in the snow. And while doing so her voice tinkled all about us like ice crackling, ‘Oh I always wanted to do this.’ Her pink cheeks. Her shiny eyes. ‘Make snowballs, go sledging. We had a sledge, pulled by a horse, but not snow. We had nīkau palm slides which we sat our backsides in, pulling the fronds up between our legs and whooshing down dry-grass hillsides.’ When she rocked herself back and forth and said, ‘Whoosh,’ and ‘Whee,’ I tried to imagine it all.