Law and disorder

I was led to believe before I arrived here, that Switzerland would be a crimeless paradise, populated entirely by friendly nuns. People, I imagined, would spend months tracking me down to return small change, they would leave their cars and houses unlocked, children would be allowed to play wherever they wanted, with parents untainted by the belief that a leering paedophile is waiting on every corner for the faintest of opportunities. Generally I was expecting the entire populace to spend each day holding hands and skipping together against a scenic, rainbowed backdrop.

This, astoundingly, has turned out to not quite be the case. There is certainly a more secure feeling in general, helped most likely by the undercurrent of stern authority which has you suspecting that if caught crossing the road in the wrong place, you´d be put up against a wall and shot. However, after experiencing no worse than the odd drive-by tutting for the first few months here, my bike got stolen. As did the replacement a few weeks later. I´ve never felt such untethered rage. I wanted the bastards strung up and publicly disembowled.

Despite this, it still makes me laugh hysterically when I say where I live in Zurich, and locals respond with concerned faces and encourage me to take care. Apparently our flat is on the edge of a ´dangerous´ area. I come from Streatham, I tell them. There, it was perfectly normal to step over piles of knifed corpses each morning on the way to the train station, where you would be mugged first by the local heroin addicts and then again by South West Trains ticket pricing policy. Here, I tell them, is a blissful utopia by comparison.

Their concerns stem from the fact that a nearby road is well known for its use by prostitutes and drug dealers. These concerns never seem to be entirely diminished when I assure them that I considered this to be a major plus in my decision to take the place.