Swiss robbery

Forget the theft of gold or precious artwork from Holocaust victims, the biggest crime Switzerland has ever committed is the robbery, with malice aforethought, of my public holidays.

This country, this allegedly advanced and developed nation, deems it a perfectly ok notion to prise from your grasping, desperate hands any public holiday that happens, through absolutely no fault of your own, to fall on a Saturday or Sunday. Makes the bile rise in the back of your throat doesn’t it?

So this Christmas for instance, has suddenly become a mundane normality, falling as it does, exactly slap bang over a weekend, something normally considered a right you’d think of as natural as oxygen. The only difference will be a slightly worse residual Monday hangover. And probably an even greater sense of weighty, crushing depression than is usual for a Monday morning, as you realise that yet another year of wishing whole weeks of your life away in desperate search of the next nourishing, healing weekend looms ahead of you. Merry Christmas!

In light of this, the next few days of holiday seem more valuable than the last nugget of crack to the crackiest of prostitutes. The fact it’s for a wedding is an even greater incentive. I’ve only been to one wedding of friends, and although a brutal reminder of how we are all doing adult things these days, along with buying houses, having babies or ‘not making jokes about paedophiles’, they seem to be great fun.