Holidays broaden mind – and underline why you love home

If you want to think holidays in France are cheap, start your break in Switzerland. Suddenly paying eight quid for a pint seems like a bargain. And lunch for three people – with one drink – can easily top the ton.

That’s why my eyes lit up at the price of a ferry trip in Basle; less than two Swiss Francs seemed like a steal . . . until you discovered that it took you from one side of the Rhine to the other on a hook line and a journey that was like your honeymoon night – all expectation and over in seconds.

Only at the end of this particular experience, you were back on dry land.

I’d never been in Switzerland before this summer, although I have in-laws who kept asking me, despite the fact they know me.

So this year we went – and it was worth the wait; the mountains, the lakes, the weather, the welcome . . . and the sort of the hygiene we used to get when the nuns ran our hospitals.

If Switzerland were any cleaner you’d think there had been a national outbreak of OCD, because you’d have more chance of finding litter on the streets than a winning Lotto ticket blowing in the wind.

The prevailing smell is money, because wages are off the scale; but they’d want to be because you could wipe out the average Irish weekly wage at lunchtime – and that’s presuming you don’t have drink.

Your average home is around a million and you wouldn’t find more new cars on a garage forecourt.

All-Ireland Final day isn’t high on the social calendar in Basle, but there’s an oasis in every desert. This watering hole was called Flanagan’s, and it was a sea of maroon and green.

Ironically, the green outnumbered the maroon for one primary reason; because Neil Boyle – Moycullen man and Jes graduate – is the owner of a global plane hire company called Jet Aviation.

And he hired a load of guys who used to work in Shannon.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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