Let it snow!

When your guardian angel sings out, it happens!



I was supposed to fly to the EUSSR yesterday to see Mum! (Please, no quips about being able to walk thither from Geneva. ;) Thanks to the weather, that so didn't happen. Geneva airport was closed all day and there are no available convenient flights - i.e. daytime, not late at night - until Monday.

Shuffling back to Lausanne for a couple of days eliminates the Geneva accommodation crunch but after all the stresses of rebooking etc. and travelling after rush hour wound up arriving late(ish) at night. Getting accosted by weird druggie types downtown after 10pm is the last thing you need on days like these, although bad though that is, it still beats getting mugged. I speak from experience - isn't life interesting? No, I didn't get mugged in Switzerland. Do we have muggings in Switzerland? Sadly yes but thankfully it's still quite rare. Not as safe as, say, Singapore, but Swiss cities are generally fairly navigable at night if you use some common sense. Juvenile delinquency is probably worse than it was 20 years ago. Switzerland may be undergoing some of the social changes which affected Britain in the 1960s, it's a bit hard to say. I do say that Western societies are far too soft on crime, especially violent offenders. This won't change, however, without serious political gravitas and conviction. The Swiss people voted in a recent referendum for automatic deportation with no right of appeal for foreign criminals, but this won't affect soft sentencing in general. The Swiss yobs who went on a violent drunken rampage in Munich last year and almost murdered one of their victims were eligible for up to ten years in a jerry jail (the highest sentence given was seven, however), whereas the maximum sentence in Switzerland for them would be four years. Not good enough. Prisons are too soft as well, looking after the "human rights" of the crims over and above those of their victims. Not good enough. Even Switzerland is affected by this PC rubbish too. How does being kind to criminals control crime?

Basel and Geneva really are the EUSSR's near abroad - walking distance! The stark contrast between the political systems of these countries is thereby made the more astonishing: the stifling EU dictatorship versus Swiss direct democracy (referendums).