High life | 18 August 2012

Gstaad

My chalet lies far above the village of Gstaad, but I happened to be ‘en ville’ when I heard the pleasant sounds of an oompah band and saw the Swiss burghers dressed up in their finest Lederhosen marching through. It was a magnificent morning, the mountains glistening in the sun, the air fresh and clean, the kind of day Papa Hemingway could describe like no other. An elderly but very friendly American man asked me if a war had been declared. Nothing special, I told him, just the day the cows are brought down from their pastures up high. In America they call it fife and drums, which has a military angle to it, hence the question of the Yank, who was obviously joking. Seven hundred years of armed neutrality has kept the Swiss out of European wars and — unlike the neocon-inspired American foreign disasters — the Swiss mind their own business and do not engage in faraway adventures trying to introduce democracy and other such alien notions to people who chop off thieving hands and cover up their women.