This morning was a time of continued frustration. Having installed the latest Java update all my Java applications stopped working. This is when I discovered that even the Encyclopaedia Britannica was a Java application and refused to run. So I had to go to Wikipedia to discover that William Tell and Herr Gessler were probably fictional characters, based on a Danish story. And I believed all that 50s television stuff, about how Tell led the Swiss against the Austrians, just like Robin Hood did against the Normans (slightly more evidence for him, but why the story portrays Richard as a wonderful king when he only spent 9 months in England I’ll never understand). Anyway, I found various sites saying that the problem was caused by Prosoft’s Data Backup. Not relevant to me, thought I, I don’t have it. Then I had a mad thought—what if I installed the demo version and then uninstalled it? So I did and now Java is working again and I could smell the coffee.

However, this took till past midday, and Marianne wanted to go out. So I suggested we just got on whichever train going north arrived first. It was just before 2 o’clock going to Basel, and 1 hour 45 minutes later were were getting off the train in that city. Pointing out to Marianne how long it would take to get back, we stayed in Basel for a whole five minutes, jumping onto a double-deck train

bound for Interlaken via Bern (the one in the picture is at Geneva). It’s a strange feeling going upstairs on a train. Probably worse downstairs as the seats are lower down than usual. It’s possible to build trains like this on the continent as they follow the Bern gauge. The British gauge (that’s the maximum height and width of a train, not the space between the rails which is the same at home as here, a very metric 4ft 8½in) is lower and narrower—though the Great Western broad gauge was always more generous, and the Great Central was built to the Bern gauge with a view to running channel tunnel trains. The Great Central was closed north of Aylesbury in 1972.

There are a lot of long tunnels south of Basel, and it looks to be a new high-speed line, so Bern (left) was arrived at by about a quarter to five, plenty of time to cross platforms and catch the train to Lausanne just after five. This train was a lot slower, but we seemed to twist and turn a lot more and the gradients, though still gentle by mountain standards, were not very steep at all. The scenery was magnificent, though photography through a train window on a sunny day (lots more cloud, but still plenty of blue sky) meant picking up reflections inside the carriage.

We arrived at Lausanne at 6.15, giving us half an hour before the train to Yverdon, where we arrived 4 minutes late, the only late arrival of the whole journey. We nearly went on to Neuchatel again as the door refused to open. A line of passengers traipsed through first class to find a door that worked.

The whole trip took place in what could be described as the lowlands of Switzerland. Everything was very green and fertile with grapes being grown everywhere as well as sweetcorn. Yet all around in the distance were high mountains. The heat was causing a haze at those distances, so they could not be seen as clearly as on a colder day, but still a magnificent sight. Strange to consider that the mountains, and the rocks that make them up, are a reminder of God’s judgement on the world at the time of Noah.

Back in the kitchen Marianne experimented cooking some Swiss chard from the garden (pictured here). It’s like a combination of beetroot and spinach and quite delicious (she says).

And at the end of the day, trying to respond to an e-mail (I’m reading it on the machine at home remotely), Timbuktu, the software that allows me to connect to home, decided to slow to a crawl. Power cut at home? No, I could connect to the router. So adjusted the router settings to get Back to my Mac working (a feature of Mac OS X 10.5) and miraculously it worked. I’d failed miserably before. So this is a cause of cheer after discovering that I’d not brought the pair of jeans with me that I thought I’d packed—or boots—and Anne is taking us to her Alpine apartment tomorrow to go mountain climbing and mushrooming! Amazingly her son’s feet are the same size as mine . . .