Swiss Watching

by Diccon Bewes

  Swiss notes are rarely tatty or crumpled. They are seldom stuffed into pockets but are treated with care, folded neatly into four or tucked carefully into a wallet. Their bright colours – yellow, red, green and blue – never seem to fade or get dirty; it’s almost as if someone somewhere is washing the money. The fascinating thing about the banknotes is how much is squeezed on to them. Along with the portrait of a Swiss notable (no heads of state allowed), a Swiss cross and the names of the artist and printer is an awful lot in all four languages: the name of the bank, the amount in words and the fact that the note is protected by law. Then come the 15 security features that make it one of the best-protected currencies. Standard things such as serial number, watermark and metal strip seem old hat against eight different ways of showing the note’s numerical value – coloured, microdot, metallic and UV are just half of them. Or giving each note a raised symbol printed on one end (the ten franc has a dot inside a circle), which also helps blind people feel the difference.

  My favourite security trick is invisible to the naked eye. Two tiny sections contain a mini-biography of that note’s notable person. In four languages. It’s written in such small script that it’s only visible with a mega-microscope, or on the Swiss National Bank website. I’m not sure publishing it helps in the fight against forgeries, or indeed having something that’s impossible to verify without a science lab. But it’s interesting to know that Le Corbusier, the Swiss architect who graces the ten-franc note with his face, has the words: ‘As architect, urbanist, painter and theorist, Le Corbusier realised ground-breaking and visionary ideas in construction and town planning.’15 Just as well it’s written in teeny-tiny print.

  CHANGING THE MONEY

  With so many security features on their notes, the Swiss no longer need to print a whole separate set for use in times of crisis. There used to be a reserve supply of Swiss banknotes with a secret design, kept purely for if and when the currency was undermined by mass forgeries. The national bank could then recall all existing notes in circulation and replace them instantly with new ones of a different design. That’s quite some undertaking, and one which exemplifies the Swiss commitment to their franc. Its continued stability and worth are of the greatest national importance, which is possibly why they are happy not to rock the political boat too much. The Swiss franc is strong precisely because it is Swiss: as solid, stable and reliable as the country behind it. The one big difference is that the franc changes far more often. Every twenty years a whole new set of notes is designed, printed and circulated. The last time that happened, in 1995–8, they also decided to change the notes’ size; it’s a wonder the Swiss could cope with such radicalism.

  Swiss francs used to be like pounds and euros, with the notes getting bigger as the value increased. This made it difficult to count them automatically in machines, something the Swiss love to do; with so much cash being used, who can blame them? The practical answer was to make all the notes the same width,16 but still have them getting longer the more they are worth. With typical attention to detail, each note is 11 millimetres longer than the one beneath it (in value terms), so that by the time you reach 1000 francs, the note is a remarkable 181 millimetres long17; at least there’s room for the extra zeros. Having the notes all the same width also means that they fit more neatly into a wallet, with no ugly edges hanging out and getting scruffy. Design, production and upkeep of the notes are the responsibility of the Swiss National Bank. To show how much the Swiss value that, the bank has the most important address in the country: Bundesplatz 1, in Bern. Even parliament can’t compete; it’s merely Bundesplatz 3.

  This ever-changing cycle of notes is possibly a reaction to having coins whose simple design has hardly altered since they were introduced. In all that time the most radical thing to happen was when Helvetia stood up in 1874; until then the Swiss equivalent of Britannia had been depicted sitting, but she’s been standing ever since.18 Then, over 100 years later, the creation of Canton Jura meant that the ring of stars (each one representing a canton) on the 2-franc, 1-franc and 1/2 franc coins had to shift to make room for one more. And that’s about it. Coming from a country that changes its coins seemingly every few years, it’s still decidedly strange for me to use coins that are older than I am. I occasionally get a 1940s coin in my change, causing me to pause and think how many thousands of hands have held it since it was minted. After that, I usually go and wash mine.

  While their designs have stayed, the actual coins have had to change with the times. They used to be made of silver, but that was abandoned in 1967 when silver prices were so high that coins were hoarded or smuggled out of the country. And the Swiss don’t really trifle with small change; the one and two rappen19 coins were both abandoned, meaning no .99 prices. Very sensible.

  The coins are such a constant that changes are fiercely debated, most notably in 1895 when a new design for the gold 20-franc coin caused uproar. It showed a Swiss woman with an edelweiss scarf against a mountain backdrop. Not too contentious, you might think, but certain gentlemen took exception to it. Or more precisely to her lock of hair flicked forwards across her forehead, making ‘the woman look like a frivolous hussy’; not at all the image of Switzerland they wanted.20 But ‘Vreneli’, as she is popularly known, was a hit with the public, who clearly didn’t care about her wayward hair. Just as Vreneli is a generic Swiss woman, so the muscular, hooded man on the chunky 5-franc coin is a Swiss Everyman, a simple shepherd. Contrary to popular belief, he is not William Tell.21

  WHERE DEBT IS A FOUR-LETTER WORD

  Cash is king in the Alpine Republic. Credit cards are a means of payment, not a way of life as they are elsewhere. Two-fifths of Swiss consumers don’t have one and two-fifths have only one,22 which they rarely use. Switzerland is a nation of savers who become spenders only when they can afford it; prudence is their middle name. To the Swiss mind, it’s illogical to pay on credit when you can pay now in cash and keep control of your finances. And if you can’t pay now, then don’t buy it. You rarely see ads for buy-now-pay-later or interest-free credit because debt, either national or personal, is not a Swiss word. It’s all about control, meaning that direct debit is not popular and certainly not a must for utility bills. Letting someone else take money automatically from your account does not sound like a good idea to most Swiss.

  This reluctance to get into debt works for retailers too. They know that they can deliver goods without a deposit or credit-card number being taken, because their customers order things only when they can pay for them. And of course, they can be trusted to pay up when asked. For example, at Stauffacher Bookshop books are sent out with a bill rather than pre-paid by card, and customers have a month to settle. It’s like being back in the 1970s. The same principle works for large purchases. When I bought a new fridge, it was delivered and installed without me paying so much as a penny in advance or giving a guarantee; the bill arrived a few days later. All very trusting; though if I didn’t pay up, they knew where I lived.

  The lack of debt also applies to the national economy. That’s usually well in the black, thanks to a healthy trade surplus from precision engineering goods, but also pharmaceuticals and chemicals. Overall, Swiss GDP amounts to $520 billion annually,23 of which financial services account for 11 per cent, a larger share than in most other countries.24 It is now the 19th biggest economy in the world, a crucial position because it means that Switzerland could be part of the G20 but wasn’t invited. That snub still smarts.

  Ironically, the recent economic crisis affected the Swiss far less than many G20 members, mainly because the housing market is as stable as the franc. No big booms or crashes because most people rent not buy. Only 35 per cent of Swiss own their own home, a figure that drops to 11 per cent in cities like Bern,25 almost exactly the opposite of the British market. It’s partly a cultural thing – owning property is not the be-all and end-all of life – but it’s also practical, as you need a 20 per cent deposit. Some people rent the same flat all their lives, but th
at’s seen as a risk-free, sensible option not a waste of money.

  Everyone renting has its advantages. No property ladders mean no snakes, so while you might not make a fortune in houses, you’re unlikely to lose one either. Negative equity, what’s that? Estate agents are not ten a penny on the high streets, newspapers are not full of property ads and television isn’t packed with endless variations of makeover, developing or relocation programmes. You have to watch German TV for those. To buy or not to buy is a question the Swiss ask about lots of things but rarely houses.

  The best thing is that roads are not blighted by a forest of For Sale signs. Instead, you can see what look like four anorexic Martian spaceships sitting in vacant plots of land. These giant wooden or metal tripods show the dimensions of any new building, with their height and position corresponding exactly to that of the proposed building. This rule applies to every construction project in Switzerland, including high-rises, which need special Meccano-style pylons tethered with wires to show how tall they will be. It might look odd, but it gives everyone a good idea of what’s planned and a chance to complain if they object. Planning permission not just by committee but by common consent.

  Switzerland has a reputation for being expensive, and while that’s true much of the time, not everything Swiss has a price tag. The Swiss like to say that nothing in life is free but some of the best things are. For example, almost every town has crystal-clear Alpine water gushing from public drinking fountains, many crowned by a colourful ‘middle-aged’ sculpture. That’s not a statue of a man in cardigan and slippers (middle-aged is a common mistranslation of mittelalterlich, or mediaeval) but more likely blind justice or a baby-eating ogre. Then there’s the gift wrapping. The nice thing about Swiss shopping is not the choice of watches or, sadly, the level of service, but the wrapping. This is free, even at Christmas when the wait for the wrapping table is longer than that at the tills; the Swiss are not ones to look a gift-wrapped horse in the mouth. Perhaps that’s why they have ended up as wealthy as they are, by looking after their own – and other people’s – pennies.

  Wealth and health. Historically, these have been the two main reasons for coming to Switzerland for longer than a ski trip. It was all about protecting your wellbeing, be that physical or financial, and dodging the grasp of the Grim Reaper or the taxman. In the nineteenth century there was no place to get bed rest like a Swiss sanatorium. Long before Davos became an economic talking shop, it was one big convalescent home. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote the last part of Treasure Island while recuperating in Davos, and the town went on to have a starring role in Thomas Mann’s sanatorial epic The Magic Mountain. These days a sanatorium is more likely to be called a wellness hotel or spa resort, but the idea is the same: come to Switzerland and get healthy. It worked for me. And now that Swiss banks are going to be playing by something approximating the rules, the taxman will probably catch up with you before the tall man with the scythe.

  The Swiss live long and prosper. They are one of the healthiest and wealthiest nations on earth, where an average life expectancy of 82.3 years, second only to the Japanese,26 is matched by a per capita GDP of $68,000, fourth highest in the world.27 Nevertheless, as we have seen in this chapter, they don’t always make the wisest decisions, sometimes out of necessity or greed, but usually because they trust others to be honest. And in that, are they unrealistic or altruistic? Naive or calculating? Probably all of the above, which makes them no different from most other countries; they just wrap it up more attractively.

  SWISS WATCHING TIP NO 5: NOT AS EASY AS 1-2-3

  Counting in a foreign language should be easy. Even if you are linguistically challenged, you can probably stretch to un, deux, trois from memories of school French. Or uno, dos, tres if you’ve ordered beers in Ibiza, and you might even manage eins, zwei, drei from countless war films. But in Switzerland, mastering 1-2-3 is up there with learning your ABC (for that, see the next chapter).

  The issue is not the multiple languages, which are rarely used together unless you happen to be playing multilingual bingo. Imagine how time consuming that would be: two fat ladies eighty-eight, zwei dicke Frauen achtundachtzig, deux grosses dames quatre-vingt-huit, due grasse donne ottantotto. No, the real issue for number novices is how the Swiss use their numerals. In English, numbers, such as a phone number, are generally given one digit after another: 021 364 7958 (all Swiss phone numbers, including mobiles, are ten digits) is said as ten distinct numbers with a slight pause between the three groups; a Swiss person would say that same number as zero twenty one, three sixty four, seventy nine, fifty eight. Not too difficult to follow in English, but in German, numbers are all backwards: zero one-and-twenty, three four-and-sixty, nine-and-seventy, eight-and-fifty. Try writing that down as someone is saying it and you’re bound to get a wrong number. Literally. You have write the 0, then leave a gap and write 1, go back to the 2, jump over to the 3, over again to the 4, back to the 6 and so on. Perhaps this numerical leapfrog is a way of breaking up otherwise scarily long German numbers. That 364 would be written as dreihundertvierundsechzig, which is quite a mouthful.

  The Swiss way of saying phone numbers may sound odd, but at least as far as the languages go, it’s logical. The same can’t be said for the emergency numbers. In a country where everything is organised to the last millimetre, how is it possible that each emergency service has its own number? That’s federalism taken to ridiculous lengths. You have to ring 117 for the police, 118 for the fire brigade and 144 for an ambulance. What happens if you dial the wrong one by mistake? And if you need a policeman and a fireman, do you have to ring twice? It would be laughable if it weren’t so serious. Plus the fact that directory enquiries is 1818; no surprise that the fire service sometimes get callers asking for the number of the local pizzeria.

  It’s not only phone numbers that are all over the place but addresses too. In Swiss terms, the British Prime Minister lives at Downing Street 10, as the number comes after the street (except for holiday chalets, Swiss houses rarely have names since that would be too individual for the house as much as the owner). But the postcode then comes before the town name: the Stauffacher Bookshop where I used to work can be found at Neuengasse 25-37, 3001 Bern. So much for Swiss logic.

  Dispensing with written digits and using your fingers instead may not help either, as Swiss people use a thumb rather than index finger for number one. So four is shown with the thumb and first three fingers, instead of folding the thumb into the palm and holding up all four fingers. And that’s not the only use the Swiss have for their thumbs. The first time a friend proffered me his fist clenched around his thumb, I didn’t quite know how to respond. He was too old to be fist bumping and too polite to be itching for a fight. All he wanted to do was wish me good luck. For that, the Swiss don’t cross fingers, they hold a thumb.

  Making things more complicated are the local variations on normal numbers. Until I came to Switzerland I thought I could count in French and German. To show that they are really Swiss and not some French province, the people of Romandie have their own versions of 70 to 99. In the bingo example above, the frankly ridiculous quatre-vingt-huit would be huitante-huit in Switzerland. Easy once you know. As for Swiss German numbers, they were the cause of one of my more embarrassing expat moments. A newish friend was giving me his mobile number, patiently saying each number in turn, but in his Bernese dialect. The last three digits were 896, which sounded something like achty-noony-sechsy. All I heard was ‘afternoon sex’. Unaccustomed as I am to being propositioned in the vegetable aisle of the Coop, my face went as red as the tomatoes behind me. Apart from my blushes, the other outcome was me learning Swiss numbers asap. The one that still makes me smile is five: in Bern the ugly German fünf becomes füüfi, which brings a little white poodle to mind.

  However, there are even bigger number problems than that. The Swiss, like most other Europeans, use a comma for a decimal point, so inflation might be 3,4%. To complicate things further, an apostrophe is used to
replace the comma in numbers over four digits, so this book might sell 1’000’000 copies. Then, if it were to sell a thousand times that number (that is, 1 plus 9 zeros), in Switzerland that would be a milliard; a Swiss billion is a million million (1 plus 12 zeros). That means it’s scarily easy to mistranslate numbers, and that much harder to become a Swiss billionaire.

  Time can also get lost in translation. For example, friends would arrange to meet me at halb sieben, which was easy enough to understand as half seven, and I’d be an hour late. The next time, I’d clarify the time in both English and German, as my mastery of German numbers was clearly not quite beyond kindergarten level, and the same would happen. To be an hour late once is a misfortune; to manage it twice looks like carelessness, as Lady Bracknell might have said if she’d been Swiss. It all comes down to the mistranslation of time idioms. There I was simply translating halb sieben to half seven and presuming that it meant 7.30. Silly me. Halb sieben actually translates as half six. Obvious, isn’t it? Translate the number and deduct one.

  The problem is that in English half seven is a shortened form of half-past seven, whereas in German halb sieben translates as halfway to seven o’clock, 6.30. A whole hour earlier. And even with other English speakers there’s a chance they mistake an English half seven for a translated Swiss one; once you’ve been here long enough, that’s how your mind starts to work. My solution? Switch to saying six thirty, or better yet arrange everything for on the hour. Seven o’clock is crystal clear to everyone – or is it? Many Swiss tend to use the 24-hour clock, even in speech (it must be from reading all those train timetables), so I have taken to saying neunzehn Uhr, or 19.00, so there’s no outside chance of anyone being 12 hours late. It makes me sound very military, or maybe just very Swiss.