Ariel 'Foreign Bureau'

By Imogen Foulkes, correspondent, Switzerland, 25 January 2005

From my window I can see the Eiger, the Mönch and the Jungfrau, three of Switzerland’s most spectacular mountains.

I’m lucky enough to live on the side of a hill (hardly anywhere is truly flat in Switzerland) south of the capital Berne and, even after several years, that view still takes my breath away. At the moment the mountains are covered in snow and my skis in the cellar are begging to be used.

Everyone skis here; the schools even have a week’s break for skiing in February, and you feel a bit left out if you don’t do it.

There’s something truly uplifting about spending the whole day in the Alps, in the winter sun and the cold fresh air even if, like me, you don’t ski with the same speed and elegance as the Swiss.

The day is often rounded off by a traditional cheese fondue, a simple dish, but something the Swiss take very seriously.

Stirring facts and figures

Trying to help friends prepare fondue, I’ve often had the spoon snatched from my hand and been scolded for not stirring the melted cheese in the regulation figure of eight pattern.

Apparently it only works if you stir it like that… in fact, when not supervised by Swiss citizens, I’ve tried all the numbers from 1-9 – and they all work.

Reporting from Switzerland is an interesting split. The main news stories come from the United Nations in Geneva.

There is always one aid agency or another with something important to say – it could be the UN refugee agency on the situation of people fleeing the fighting in, say, Ivory Coast, or the Red Cross reacting to allegations of prisoner abuse in Iraq. It means that on average three days a week I take the train from Berne to Geneva, a journey of an hour and a half which I usually enjoy.

Swiss trains are fabulous, big sleek double deckers, with comfy chairs, and business carriages where you can plug in your laptop and mobile and get to work. I do an awful lot of writing and editing on the train.

The other thing about the journey is the way it reveals this country.

Linguistic faults

Switzerland is only half the size of Scotland, but there are four national languages (German, French, Italian and Romantsch) and the cultures to go with them.

Half way from Berne to Geneva you cross a sort of linguistic fault line: the train announcements are in French, not German, and the drinks trolley man starts offering ‘boissons’ instead of ‘getränke’.

In Geneva, there’s a relaxed atmosphere that you don’t find so easily in Berne or Zurich; people laugh more loudly and more often, and the tram that takes me to the BBC bureau at the UN does not run with the same nano-second precision as the one that takes me to parliament in Berne.

This diversity is what makes this little country so interesting. Stories from Switzerland may rarely make the core news bulletins, but they are great feature material.

Why do the Swiss stay so firmly out of the European Union, for example, when they have cultural and language ties to three major EU members? And why is their strict neutrality still so important?

Then there are social or environmental stories, where the Swiss are quite radical.

It all adds up to a varied work life. For example, I might spend a day at the UN, followed by a day in Zurich reporting on the heroin prescription programme and then a day in the Alps looking at new ways of predicting avalanches.

It can be hard work because the BBC presence in Switzerland is just one person, with no luxuries such as producers or anything, but it’s also great fun. The only problem is, it reduces my skiing time.

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