All of us need the occasional Swiss period in our lives. It would be a time when everything went according to plan; when you kept all your appointments punctually, and found plumbers, partners and public transport turning up exactly when they were scheduled to appear; when friends proved reassuring and reliable rather than neurotic and needy; when flatpack wardrobe kits always included exactly the right number of wotsits, thingies and oojumaflips; when you mustered the willpower not to eat and drink too much of the stuff that would make you very ill the next morning; when you managed to steer clear of vexatious individuals, family rows and bouts of office back-stabbing; and when nobody got pregnant by accident, or reversed into a bollard, or deleted irreplaceable computer files by mistake, or sliced through their extension cable while mowing the lawn. And even if they did, they would prudently have taken out insurance to cover every conceivable eventuality.
I have felt in need of a Swiss period for years. Possibly even decades.
Luckily, I have spent the past week in a place where they specialise in that sort of thing. It’s called Switzerland.
What a nation! No, nation is the wrong word. Nations are messy, noisy, turbulent, fractious entities, for ever buffeted by power struggles within and without, and full of contradictory aspirations that tug them one way and then t’other. Nations, in other words, are like people — wayward, vulnerable and prone to get themselves into lots of completely avoidable trouble. Switzerland, by contrast, is much more like Le Corbusier’s definition of a house. It’s a machine for living in.
And all the clichés are true! I made six railway journeys while I was there, and on every one of them the train pulled into and out of the station within ten seconds — yes, ten seconds! — of its scheduled time.
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Household gadgets work. Living standards are high. There’s no such thing as litter, because the Swiss have an inbuilt abhorrence of mess. They recycle everything. And they are just as careful about how they use the small part of their country that isn’t lakes or mountains. Not a square inch is wasted.
Most of all, they behave like grown-ups. Even the children. The aura of calm and courtesy is overwhelming and infectious. And the reason isn’t hard to fathom. It’s not that they have renounced their ethnic characteristics.
On the contrary. As you move from French to German to Italian Switzerland you notice striking differences of mood, customs and cuisine.
No, it’s more that everyone sees the logic of acting and thinking Swiss.
That means not wasting time, money and lives on picking pointless rows with people. It means conserving and growing what you already have, rather than trying to snatch what’s not yours, or attempting to put the world to rights. And it means preferring order, neutrality, controlled emotions and the preservation of an established status quo to the hurly-burly of continual change or unpredictable leaps of inspiration or intuition.
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Of course, a country in which heads so conspicuously rule hearts, and where the triumph of pragmaticism over passion has been elevated to the status of a creed, is bound to have unsettling voids in its collective psyche. You need something of a moral bypass, to put it mildly, to play banker to the Nazis — especially when the latter are intent on banking the stolen gold of their murdered victims — and then to keep up the game of “client confidentiality” 50 years after the event. God knows how many vile present-day dictators have quietly stashed their ill-gotten gains in the vaults of Zurich.
And if a country so consistently downplays passion in public life, it’s possible that it also jeopardises the creative instinct that triggers great art and literature. I don’t totally concur with Harry Lime’s celebrated quip in The Third Man. There’s more to Swiss creativity than cuckoo-clocks.
But this isn’t a country that produces Beethovens or Michelangelos.
All this I acknowledge. And at other times in my life I would probably have found the very calm of Swiss life — the studious renunciation of excitement and unpredictability — unbearably stifling. I daresay that, were I to live in Switzerland for a few months, I would pretty soon be gagging for a Jamaican period, when I would drift along in an anarchic haze of hedonistic delight and not give a damn about time or money. Or perhaps for a Russian period, when I would feast on amazing food for the soul, even if there wasn’t any actual food on the table.
But right now, back in a Britain where the simplest journey takes for ever, where we are racked with anxieties because of our pathological inability to refrain from meddling in other people’s wars, and where the balance between work, family and fun seems to get more and more askew with every passing year, the prospect of infinitely extending my Swiss period is very tempting. More fondue, anyone?
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Feat of Klee for art collectors
In Lucerne I met the amazing Angela Rosengart — age unknown, but she was one of Picasso’s favourite subjects. Since 2002 her Foundation in Lucerne has permanently displayed the hundreds of Picassos, Klees, Monets, Mirós and Matisses that she has accumulated over a lifetime of art collecting.
How, I asked, did she get started? In her teens, she replied, she fell in love with a little Paul Klee drawing, and asked the dealer how much it would cost. “How much do you earn in a month?” he asked. “Fifty francs,” she replied. “Would you be willing to give up a month’s salary to buy it?” he asked her. “Of course,” she replied. “Then you can have it for 50 francs,” he declared.
It’s rather a good formula. I would guess that the super-rich art collectors of our era enjoy incomes of about a million quid a month — which is roughly the going rate for a Paul Klee these days.
Blast from the past
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Travelling to Edinburgh via Stansted airport on Sunday made going to the dentist or filling in one’s tax return seem like hugely desirable pastimes. It was like a scene out of Dante, minus the jokes. But what most struck me was how quaint it felt, after I had dutifully packed my mobile into my suitcase and had my Biro confiscated (“it’s got liquid in, sir”) to be using payphones again. You mean you have to put old-fashioned coins into this slot-machine to make a call? How prehistoric. And how exciting! I felt a bit like Thor Heyerdahl crossing the Pacific on Kon-Tiki.