Small change

“Wow, this is a really interesting car park!”

It’s the sort of thing I think you’re supposed to say when otherwise engaged with recreational narcotics, but I heard myself uttering this unlikely phrase last Saturday in Konstanz, just over the border in Germany.

It’s a fine town, and popular with Swiss residents who fancy a break from their own, pricey, restricted shops. The massive, majestic lake, Bodensee, turns our own Zurichsee into an embarrassingly insignificant puddle. There are huge, stern statues to creep past, occasional deposits of medieval architecture to blink at, and somewhere, I’m told, evidence of the town’s Roman origins. And did I mention that interesting car park?

We’ve a long menu of cities to sample on this adventure, and this was always likely to be one of the starters. Around 45 minutes drive from where we’re staying, in Oerlikon, on the north side of Zurich, and just a kilometre or two from the Swiss border, it was a day trip waiting to happen.

The statues are all very well, but the true lure of Konstanz is the shops. The average British immigrant finds the small, limited Swiss supermarkets slightly annoying. Some of the frustration had been headed off at the pass by consulting the English Forum, and bringing with us in the car from the UK, two packing cases filled with sentimental delicacies like HP Sauce, Colman’s English mustard, Heinz Baked Beans, and Branston Pickle. Sadly, we weren’t sufficiently temperature-controlled to add Cheddar cheese, unsmoked bacon and proper sausages.

Germany is equally blinkered when it comes to English classics, but at least they have the range we’re used to, and just as important, they’re much cheaper than their moneyed, Alpine neighbours. Bargain of the Day for me was 20 x 0.5L bottles of decent-enough 5.4% Oettinger lager for about £3.90. Yep, 10 litres of bottled lager for the price of a single Central London pint (0.56 L).

Turning down the offer of a few bottles of a 2004 Barbaresco Riserva, going for a £7 song, would have seemed rude. I also picked up a couple of classic Rieslings from neighbouring Alsace, and a trocken (dry) German Riesling from Baden. I confess to preferring the trad medium-sweet Germans to the new-style trockens, but it’s a while since I tried one, so time to reassess. (The bigger truth is that among the huge range of German wines in the chaotic Kaufland, I couldn’t see one single, old-fashioned Spatlese or Auslese — so the dry choice was made for me.)

Then it was back to that interesting, double corkscrew car park: like some vast, deep well, with its outer downward spiral, around which cars were parked diagonally, and its inner upward spiral through which we were able eventually to escape with the spoils of our trip.

After stopping off at some sub-suburban Mama und Papa bar to chomp on schnitzel brot and fries, we got back to Oerlikon just in time for to hear the live music from the Turkish bar immediately beneath us spring into life — if you can call that castration-like wailing “life”.

With the caterwauling still going at 04:50, it was time to phone the police. That’s what you do in Switzerland, where the thought of other people having a good time is totally unacceptable, and will not be tolerated. The borders of insanity are reached by most involuntary Swiss listeners at 10 p.m., so actually, 04:50 didn’t seem like an unreasonable point at which to summon the full apparatus of the Swiss state to locate the revellers’ off switch.

Here’s what happened 1: the police came; the music stopped.

Here’s what happened 2: the police went; the music started.;

Next day, I injected myself with some Rottweiler hormones, and despatched a growly email to the landlords, demanding a 50% refund on the rent.

They replied, offering a bigger apartment for the same rent, and not immediately above the Turkish bar. “Result”, as they say.

Except that the new place is on the 4th floor, and there is no lift.

One day further on, and we start the routine:

• load suitcase and rucksack with domestic crap;
• descend 32 steps;
• walk along street for 50 yards;
• down alley;
• through door;
• ascend 74 steps;
• curse loudly;
• empty suitcase and rucksack of domestic crap;
• descend 74 steps;
• through door;
• down alley;
• walk along street for 50 yards;
• ascend 32 steps;

Repeat 18 times.

Bloody knackered at the end of it. Where are the logistics experts when you need ’em? Eh?

But we are in a better place, and here I will stay for another 5 weeks or so, until Christmas (M leaves before this), and that festive week of packing and loading.

Back to work. After two weeks of commuting by car, it was time to give the train a shot. Early last Saturday morning, before the day out in Konstanz, I ambled through the strong autumnal sunshine to Oerlikon station to buy a monthly season ticket. For the photocard, I used the same, unsmiling image I’d passed off at the Kreisburo for my permit. A shame, I felt, to fix such a grim snap to a card I may have in my wallet for some years to come, though there was no hint of sympathetic regret in the demeanour of the cheery fellow who served me.

He pointed at my surname on the completed form. “You are from Scotland?”

“No”, I explained. “Ireland. Well. My parents are Irish. I was born and brought up in England.”

“Ah! And where in England? London?”

“Yes, London,”

“The centre? Or the… er… the suburb?”

“The suburbs, yes. Wembley. You may have heard of Wembley? Where the stadium is?”

“Aah!” He grinned at me. “The new one is not like the old one. You are having trouble with the…. the grass in the new stadium?”

“The pitch?”

“Ah yes, the pitch. It is not good.”

Football. The international language.

As this cheerful, conversational small change rattled back and forth, I was digging into my wallet to find enough of the real stuff to cover my 230 CHF ticket (somewhere round £150). I made it, and emerged with my monthly pass. This covers all transport in the kanton of Zurich plus the first few miles into the kantons of Zug and Schwyz. Far enough to get me to work.

Each morning this ticket sweeps me along the edge of the lake. It took me 2 or 3 days to work out where to sit. I started out thinking I needed to stick to the left hand side on the top floor of the double-decker train. But once we emerged from the darkened bowels of Zurich, and into the big wide world, I was suddenly on the wrong side again, and travelling backwards. How could this be?

On Day 3, I resisted the Kindle temptation, keeping my head and eyes up as we clanked through the city’s inner suburbs, and towards the cathedral dedicated to the nation’s railways. Zurich Hauptbahnhof, or Zurich HB, with its mighty vaulted ceilings, its colonnades and arches, and its shops, bars and restaurants, and soon, its Christmas Market, is a fine place to lose half a day — and half a week’s wages.

It’s also a place to lose what you think is the perfect vantage point on the train. What I’d not noticed on the first day or two was that the S2 service goes into Zurich HB, stops to disgorge and recruit, then heads back out in reverse direction. So what you think is the best seat in the house, quickly becomes a restricted view. Instead of being within feet-kissing distance of Bob Dylan, you find yourself just one too many mornin’s, and ten thousand hoisted lighters behind.

That said, there are worse commuting fates than watching these bright green hillsides slide past with their Hansel and Gretelesque chalets and melancholy cattle. It’s just that the movie playing in the opposite window: silvery lake and distant, snowy mountain ranges, seems even better.

How nice to sail to work on the train as it glides along the water’s edge. After all those years being steam-and pressure-cooked on the London Underground, this is payback time.

In 30 years of commuting, there are 3 routines that stand out. One belongs to someone else, but as I accompanied him several times while he did it, I’ll stake a claim. It was the domain of my old university mate James, as we chugged between his home on Lantau Island, and Hong Kong Island. The ferry took 30 minutes or so, and for a visitor, was a joy.

The second was the road from Huddersfield to Cheshire ‘over the tops’, as they say in that part of the world. No, not the M62, but that road through Holmfirth, Holme, Glossop, and the northern Peak District. The A6024 is one of the wildest, remotest, and most stunning roads in England. Some mornings I would stop at a layby and stand for 10 minutes looking across the moors into the caverns of distant Derbyshire, with no other cars in sight, and no sounds for comfort but the plangent wind and the lonesome cry of the curlew.

And the third has to be this one: my daily 15 mile (or so) trip around the south-western edge of Zurichsee. It’s not just the sight of the shimmering water, and those darned mountains. It’s the daily reminder that this is a surreal and privileged existence.

About 8 miles out, we pass through Horgen, my home-to-be. As the train accelerates out of the area, my eye tries to follow the narrow trail that runs around the very edge of the lake. I imagine running this path in the late spring and summer months that follow the snow, and in the autumn months that precede it. When I do so, I will remember these first few train journeys, and these first few weeks in Switzerland.

We get to Wadenswil, and change onto the smaller, slower, local train. The S13 is the transition from Zurich to Schwyz. Here we slip through the gap in the wall, and into the Secret Garden. Here we move from city to country; from sophistication to simplicity; from glitz to Adelstropian backwater.

The train is silent, and empty – apart from the odd local. We move away from the lake, and are suddenly jerked upwards into the hills. It’s like that moment on the rollercoaster when, after a minute or two of deceptive complacency, the adventure gets an upward jolt, and the girls behind you start to whimper and squeal and cling to each other.

Except here, it’s not fearsome in the slightest, but quite the opposite: strangely reassuring.

I like my job. Three weeks in, and how nice it is to feel valued and respected. I can’t get over how welcoming and supportive my new colleagues are, and how refreshingly uncynical.

The job itself is genuinely interesting. They want me to write (hurrah!), and they trust me to organise and recommend. For the first time in too long, I can feel my eyes shining.

Thanks. I’m not a worn-out cog in a big rickety wheel that some over-promoted exec wants to restructure yet again, in order to hit an arbitrary target. But that’s British and American corporate life these days: a grim, chaotic, Bosch-like nightmare landscape. Thump some sucker on the back of the skull with a lump hammer, and drag their blood-gushing corpse into a ditch. Before they sneak up and do the same to you. Nasty business.

Things are different here: I’ve even started to feel ambitious again, after having such risible impulses crushed out of me in my last two jobs.

People behave the way you treat them. Was there ever a better motto than this?

On the way home from work each evening, I wait for my connection at Wadenswil once more, which gives me a few minutes to look around. Blankets of dense, freezing fog roll across the lake in the early evening. Alongside the Zurich-bound Wadenswil platform, between me and the lake, is an outdoor ice rink. How nice to see dozens of teenage kids skating and flirting after school. All I hear is laughter. No aggression or angst.

Coming from England, it’s disorientating. For so long, the world I’ve inhabited seems to have been drifting downwards. I hate to sound negative about the old country, but there is a general sense that things are getting worse. Each year, we decline further and further, deeper and deeper. As individuals, we appear to follow that descent. At some points along the way, if we’re lucky, we spot an opportunity, and we grab it. We park ourselves there, and watch as countless others coast past, down and down and down until they vanish.

But take heart. Just as we all seem to be locked into this ineluctable drop, we know that some are spotting gaps, finding refuge and grasping a self-preserving stasis. Even better: every spiral descent must be an upward one too. As many go down, many come up.

And that’s why, last Saturday evening, as we hauled ourselves up through the intestines of Konstanz, I heard myself saying: “Wow, this is a really interesting car park!”

It was more than an interesting car park.

It was the bloody human condition.