you know, they’ll have drunk all your best port and, outside, the birds will be singing. And the debate will still be raging.
Mark Thatcher is always up there as a hot favourite but Jeffrey Archer is never far behind. More earnest people go for obscure Serbian leaders or Third World dictators and Tony Blair usually gets a mention too, from people on both sides of the political spectrum. I always go for Colin Welland, but can rarely find support on that one.
The game has become so prolonged that we’ve now introduced a new twist. Given a nuclear device, where would you set it off?
This isn’t quite so successful because after just an hour, everyone is usually in full agreement. Japan always starts out as the obvious choice but they’ve had two already so it hardly seems fair to give them a third. Essex always provides some healthy debate too, as do France and Sydney, but it never takes long for someone to sit bolt upright and say ‘Switzerland’.
That’s followed by a pause as everyone weighs up the pros and cons and then, usually, everyone starts to nod. Yes, Switzerland, and not only because this is the only country on earth where everyone has a fallout shelter under their stairs.
It’s strange, this, because on paper, Switzerland has so much in its favour: breathtaking scenery, proper skiing, clean food, nice clocks and, to cap it all, we’ve never had a war with them. Well, they’ve never had a war with anyone, actually.
I think the big problem is jealousy. I mean, here we have a country with one of the highest standards of living in the world, a country with negligible unemployment and a country that’s had the good sense thus far to stay out of the EC and which, as a result, has made its inhabitants rich beyond the dreams of avarice.
Here’s a country with decent services, trains that run on time, bank accounts that are out of bounds to spying tax authorities, pretty lakes and a reputation for fair play. It’s no accident that the Red Cross’s emblem is a reverse of the Swiss flag.
It’s a nice place but that’s nothing to be proud of. I know lots of nice people; liberal, kind-hearted souls who help old ladies across the street and who never have a bad word for anyone. But without exception, they are dull. These are people who can put someone to sleep just by saying hello.
Their life is spent trying to arrange their facial expressions to match the moment, and they end up with no expression at all. And they’re so desperate to avoid causing offence, they never say anything even remotely interesting either.
It’s the same story with Switzerland. Britain has given the world jet engines, concentration camps, hovercrafts, television, skiing as a sport, telephones and football hooligans.
The Swiss haven’t even got round to inventing their own language, preferring instead to butcher that most ridiculous of tongues — German.
The national pastime out there defies belief. Millions of them have taken to collecting the foil tops from UHT-milk cartons. You can see hundreds of full-grown men rummaging around in bins, looking for something unusual to add to their collections.
The shops are full of rarer examples which sell for seven quid a go and the personal ads in the back of newspapers are stuffed full of swapsies. This is for real. The rest of the world is on roller skates and the Swiss are at home, sticking milk-carton tops in photograph albums.
I first became aware of a problem back in the mid eighties when I found myself with an hour or two to kill at Zurich airport, which was closed because of snow. It’s good to see, I thought, that even the most efficient country on earth can screw up sometimes.
And then I started to think more carefully about that efficiency as I strolled round the duty-free shops, smoking. Before I’d even lit the cigarette, I found myself being shadowed by a small man with an overall and a long-handled dustpan and brush. And each time I flicked the ash he was there, sweeping it up, keeping everything nice ’n’ shiny.
A few years later, I was on a skiing holiday in Zermatt, trying to squeeze inside one of the ridiculous milk floats they call taxis. There was a sign saying it was a six-seater but there was no way my left leg, complete with its ski boot, would get inside and this infuriated the driver. The brochure had said it could seat six, and he was damn well going to get six people inside, so he set about my errant leg, kicking it until the door would shut.
This is not what you’d expect from a people whose country plays host to the Red Cross, UNICEF, the World Health Organisation, the Worldwide Fund for Nature, the World Council of Churches and 150 other outfits dedicated to saving lives, not kicking people and having large, flash offices on the shore of Lake Geneva.
But this is only one side to Switzerland. You must not lose sight of the fact that every single male aged between 20 and 42 must spend at least two weeks a year in the army. Some spend more and some, those who’ve been clever enough to lose a limb in a farming accident, are let off, but here we have a fighting force with 400,000 men.
Who get to keep their guns at home. Officially, there are two million licensed weapons in Switzerland but everyone knows the real figure is closer to eight million — not bad for a country that only has six million people.
Everyone also knows that Switzerland is where the world’s terrorists come with a shopping list, and I know why. In my short stay, I was offered a brand-new Kalashnikov with a thousand rounds of ammunition for ?300.
A thousand pounds would have secured the latest piece of laser-sighted hardware from America, or maybe a grenade launcher, complete with instructions on how to get it into Britain.
It is by no means uncommon in Switzerland to see someone walking through the woods with an AK47 slung over one shoulder, but interestingly, only 80 people died violently in 1994 — and a big chunk of those were suicides. The American gun lobby should use Switzerland as proof positive that guns don’t kill people. People kill people.
And the Swiss will kill anyone who tries to take their country by force. Contrary to popular myth, they do have a navy which patrols the lakes, but there are less obvious signs, too. Look carefully at the entrance to various tunnels and you’ll see camouflaged gun emplacements. Peer under some of the graceful motorway bridges and you’ll notice they’ve been mined, ready to be blown up at a moment’s notice.
There’s more. The motorways have been designed to double up as makeshift runways in a time of war and you’re never left in much doubt about the sort of air power Switzerland can muster.
Go hiking in the mountains and you’ll find valleys full of warplanes waiting for the Germans to get bolshy again. And then there are level crossings for jets.
These look just like train-type level crossings but the barriers come down to let Mirage fighters take off. It seems that as planes have needed longer and longer runways, they’ve been extended irrespective of what was in the way.
But what are the Swiss so worried about, for heaven’s sake? I mean, taking the place is a tactical nightmare thanks to all those mountains and what do you end up with if you win? Which you won’t. Some meadows and a cuckoo-clock factory.
Hitler couldn’t even be bothered, though it is said this was because all his wealth was stored there. He even joked about the place, saying that when his armies had conquered Europe, he would take Switzerland with the Berlin fire brigade.
This, of course, was not possible, because you are not allowed to take Switzerland with a fire brigade.
It’s one of many, many things you are not allowed to do in Switzerland, like wash your car on a Sunday, or hang your washing outside or run over a pigeon.
This must be the only country in the world where they have a special sign which is made at great expense and hung up throughout city centres, advising passers-by that roller-skating is not allowed.
I could fill the rest of this chapter with rules that would curl your hair and straighten your pubes but instead, we’ll just concentrate on what Switzerland is doing to make life a misery for the motorist.
In some places, like Zermatt, they have simply banned the car altogether and replaced it with a weird collection of electrically powered boxes on wheels. These sneak up and down the nauseatingly quiet main street, running over everyone who didn’t hear them coming.
But don’t worry. They can’t go quickly because there are still speed bumps all over the place. Do worry, however, if you need an ambulance and they roll up with something from the set of
You get the impression they’d like to ban cars all over Switzerland but even the greenest politician out there
