It’s hard to swallow, but we are now almost in the middle of January in Switzerland. We are ankle deep in snow with elongated icicles hanging from the balcony and I think it’s fair to say, it won’t get much more “winter”. I wanted to buy my son a pair of winter boots in one of the most normal shoe shops in the land.

Guess what? There are no more men’s boots on sale. Inevitably, they are clearing the shelves for the Easter bunny – because the show must go on and we must anticipate sales for spring. But, unfortunately, we are where we are and his old boots gave up the ghost. Now seasons come and go – more or less predictably, and after all, we are living in Switzerland, and not the Bahamas. Well – it’s all over for another year, and he can slosh his way through the winter conditions in summer shoes, and enjoy some winter boots when they reappear in retail, next August.

That can’t be said for the Christmas biscuits. Now the Swiss love their Christmas biscuits – a tradition I find hard to embrace. The shop-bought biscuits are a mass-produced article, available from about mid-November for those too busy to aspire to baking. Well, we are almost in the middle of January, and one of the two most prominent supermarkets in the land, has presented their surplus biscuits for sale at an enormous discount. Not only are they old, tired and dusty, but they are a little worse off for their recent life-extending transport. There are massive containers bursting with “goodies”, which the average Swiss is now trying to work off at the gym. Crowds are accumulating around the crates of biscuits, trying to digest the concept of this mass of unwanted produce, that most folk can no longer even look at.

So we have a deficiency in boots, which would be essential for every man in the middle of winter, and a massive surplus of ancient biscuits that no one would ever need/want or buy, unless they crumbled them for their bird-house.

Photo: pixelio.de / Eugen Haug