Travel doesn’t just broaden the mind, it puts a bomb under everything you’ve ever known and detonates it in slow motion. The above headline should have been more startling than it was when I spotted it recently on www.swissinfo.ch. It’s all about the the burning of the Böögg, naturally: the climax to the annual spring parade in Zürich. The poor chap is stuffed with fireworks and set on fire in a ritual that’s watched with keen interest because the shorter the time taken for his head to explode, the longer and hotter the summer will be.
The question is what can we do with that summer? Switzerland is famously, or notoriously, thought of as a highly efficient sort of society. Things get done well, and get done quickly. Shortly after I moved here I spotted a picture in the local free paper, showing the aftermath of an avalanche. A fractured railway line lay broken and twisted on a snowy mountainside, along with a derailed passenger train that lay on its side, dangling over the edge. The news item quoted a railway company spokesperson reassuring commuters that the line would be operational again “within a few days”. I was struck by the contrast with most countries where it would have taken months, perhaps years, to restore.
Being fair, it partly depends on the inevitability of particular problems. When it snows heavily overnight, as it frequently does, we wake hust after dawn to the sound of the local farmers bouncing along on their snow ploughs, clearing the roads for the buses and commuter traffic. In the UK, heavy snow (in the south at least) is treated as some sort of calamity, an existential crisis that might take days or even weeks to confront and overcome. But who can blame the country for this? With snow making only a very occasional Gareth Bale-like spectacular appearance, it would make little sense to buy and maintain specialist vehicles and staff. So I try not to blame them for unpreparedness.
Using the same logic — and maybe this is an over-generous response — I suppose this partly explains why the Covid pandemic has turned Switzerland and nearly all other countries of mainland Europe into something resembling a herd of rabbits frozen in the headlights. Leaving aside Covid politics, the upshot is that we still don’t know what we’ll do with our summer because we don’t yet know if we’ll have one. Museums and non-essential shops reopened at the beginning of March, since when infections and deaths have started to climb once again. Even though it’s not clear whether there’s a causal link between these two things, with al fresco restaurant dining due to restart in a week or two, the signs are not that good.
I avoid tunnelling too deeply into Blighty news but I get the impression that there’s some dissatisfaction there with pandemic management. I won’t defend or attack the UK government’s response but it’s worth recording that pretty much every country on this side of the Channel is similarly self-harming. Flicking through the French, German and Italian news channels, you don’t have to be a polyglot to note that the continent is in a lather of discontent. Most of us are in our second or third lockdown, and the PR battle over the best strategy continues to rage on TV, through newspapers, and on social media. Closing borders creates instant crisis. Switzerland may gain most of its subterranean wealth from banking and pharma, but luxury manufactured goods and tourism form a sort of commercial topsoil that prettifies the economy, and gives it that additional flourish. So banning visitors creates quite a kerfuffle. But as in the UK, it’s damned if they do, damned if they don’t. Unlike the old country, a swift and well-oiled vaccine rollout programme is not something we have yet, despite those memories of derailed trains hanging off a mountainside, and noisy snow ploughs maintaining the status quo. With outdoor wrestling and yodelling verboten, our main sport these days is the blame game. A polite email to my doctor a few weeks ago, asking innocently about vaccine arrangements, provoked a bad-tempered response, railing at central government for failing to secure enough supplies in time, at Cantonal authorities for failing to arrange vaccine centres, and at people like me for having unreasonable expectations.
And so the idea of watching the Böögg self-destruct seems doubly pointless. Regardless of length or intensity, it looks like we may not have any summer to enjoy. And after the last twelve months, watching another head exploding live on TV would seem strangely superfluous.
