There’s an amazing lack of Swiss Roll to be had.

I am back home in Scotland getting ready to head to Glenrothes tomorrow then Perth the next day. While in the car with my Dad on the way back to my house it occurred to me that I haven’t explained how I came to be staying out in sunny Belfaux.

The short version is that my cousin needed someone to look after her four and a half year old daughter and somehow my name came up. I assumed that this would be for a few days, a week at most. But here I am, out in Switzerland for about four months.

That’s not to say that I don’t want to be out there, far from it. It’s brilliant. The air is cleaner; there are fewer cars; the public transport is clean, cheap and VERY reliable and the views of the Alps, which are plentiful around here, are all stunning.
There are lots of little things to love too. The cows wear bells around their necks. The pedestrian crossings are both fantastically fun and immensely lethal. On bank holidays everything closes for the day. And there are also more Ferraris per head in Switzerland than any other country in the world.

The thing I can’t really get my head around is the financial side of things. People are paid more and taxed less (a Zurich bus driver is paid nearly twice as much as the average manager of an average London marketing company), yet food is still very expensive. The aforementioned public transport system makes an amazing loss every year.
Yet Switzerland has an economy with a higher gross national product per capita than any other country in the world thanks to chocolate, cheese, watches, pharmaceuticals, banking and financial services (including insurance), graphic design, engineering and tourism. Switzerland also gave the world the Dadaist art movement, the International Red Cross humanitarian organization and the drug LSD (the creator of which died last week aged roughly 102. Proof that LSD does not shorten your life). But that doesn’t make anything less pricey.

I’m going to quash a couple of falsities here. There are no Zürich Gnomes. The Swiss have never heard of – let alone eaten - Swiss Roll. The Cuckoo Clock was not invented here and William Tell is a myth.

Another thing that amuses me is that I haven’t seen many Swiss Army Knives, although I have seen a shop with bows and arrows, huge Wallace-style swords and several full suits of amour for sale. If I thought I could get one past customs...