We Swiss keep getting it in the neck for being dull, feather-capped automatons who remain stubbornly indifferent to the better things in life, like shagging, pugilism and getting blotto. The only thing Johnny Foreigner concedes to us is okay chocolate, over-priced watches and the odd vale of ‘sublime’ scenery – a meagre consolation, even if you share our ardour for punctuality and strenuous hiking. William Wordsworth stopped off here on his 1790 walking tour of Europe, and summed the place up in his customary glibness: ‘Bliss it was in that dawn to be waking up and leaving for Germany. To be young in Switzerland was very Hell.’
This sentiment seems to have stuck among his smug compatriots; mores the pity, for I, a son of genteel Geneva, am the living proof of otherwise: Who else, I ask you, would build themselves a monster – eight feet tall, stacked like a brick shit house and ugly as a Frenchman – out of disparate body parts filched from dissecting rooms and grave yards, and bring the hulking fucker to life by plugging him into the mains socket and slapping him about the face a bit with a wet flannel. And all for my own bloody amusement and because I damn well can. I play by nobody’s rules but my own, bitch. But not only that: no sir. I also reanimated my dead wife Elizabeth (who was also my first cousin; yeah, you heard me right) after my badass monster viciously strangled her to death in her own bed – just so I could pork the woman one last time. That, my friends, is how I roll.
So, is that raucous enough for you English snobs? Not so keen to call me a yodelling pansy now, are you? Huh, huh? Come to Switzerland, bitches; it’s insane – promise.
Victor Frankenstein, the Frozen Wastes of the Arctic, 1818.
This sentiment seems to have stuck among his smug compatriots; mores the pity, for I, a son of genteel Geneva, am the living proof of otherwise: Who else, I ask you, would build themselves a monster – eight feet tall, stacked like a brick shit house and ugly as a Frenchman – out of disparate body parts filched from dissecting rooms and grave yards, and bring the hulking fucker to life by plugging him into the mains socket and slapping him about the face a bit with a wet flannel. And all for my own bloody amusement and because I damn well can. I play by nobody’s rules but my own, bitch. But not only that: no sir. I also reanimated my dead wife Elizabeth (who was also my first cousin; yeah, you heard me right) after my badass monster viciously strangled her to death in her own bed – just so I could pork the woman one last time. That, my friends, is how I roll.
So, is that raucous enough for you English snobs? Not so keen to call me a yodelling pansy now, are you? Huh, huh? Come to Switzerland, bitches; it’s insane – promise.
Victor Frankenstein, the Frozen Wastes of the Arctic, 1818.
