HEIDI HIGH
WHEN I was six, Santa brought me Heidi by Johanna Spyri. Dad covered it in plastic and wrote my name on the inside cover. It was my favourite book. Orphan Heidi (the story goes) was fobbed off by her career-focused aunt to live with her gruff grandfather high in the Swiss Alps. The two of them drank goat’s milk together and ate warm bread and imbibed the sweet mountain air. Heidi ran wild in the meadows and didn’t have to go to school. To me, the pages of the book smelled of ripe grass and goat hair. And freedom.
I need only think of the book, or encounter a goat, and my heart turns light. A mere whiff of mountain air triggers a cosy nostalgia. So, two years ago I set out to experience this smell, in its full verdantness. The book, I learned, was set outside a small village called,
