Life-lag it's a bit like jet lag......

Geneva’s suburbs are a million miles from London – well I know that’s not technically correct but believe you me it’s a really really long way.

This country of cuckoo clocks and holey cheese, ski-slopes and picture postcard views hides an underbelly of vicious, strangling red-tape….

Did you know that it’s impossible to put on a load of washing before 12.30? That you can’t put your rubbish out even a few hours early without a letter through the door? (Oh yes and they’ll have photocopied anything that proves it is your rubbish and include that in the letter.)
You can sit in your garden on a Sunday, but you aren’t allowed to tackle that weed that is taunting you from the flowerbed, and please don’t think you can run the washing machine on a Sunday…oh no it just won’t turn on at all!

The Swiss are not efficient….they have just settled into a routine and daren’t question it or rock the boat, no one ever complains about the lack of customer service, so in fact I think they have sat still so long they wouldn’t know how to rock the boat.

The house we live in convinces me that they may even be suffering from second world war envy – they have buildings that make the post-war building in the east end look attractive and they don’t have the excuse of town planning by Goering!

I’m not so much suffering from Jet-lag this past week as Life-lag, I am missing my life in London and failing to appreciate the “swiss-way” at all, their never ending bureaucracy drives me mad…..oh and my next door neighbours have no taste or sense of decency – the thing they have put up in the hallway is a form of aesthetic torture, lurking out there in the hallway collecting dust on its fake flowers and little ducks….it must contravene some Swiss law…I must look into it!

We’ve moved here from London, and I have given up my job in order to live here…..and its not the easiest move I’ve ever made, so I’m going Stepford in Switzerland, the land of expensive red meat – can anyone tell me if the Swiss suffer a higher rate of anaemia than other countries in western Europe?