I was sorry to hear that former US president and Nobel Peace laureate Jimmy Carterhad broken his hip last month. I was not sorry to hear that the incident had ruined his planned turkey hunt in his home state of Georgia. I - like the lion's share of the western world - have a visceral…
Watch this space
The proud boast of the John Lewis Partnership Department Store chain, 'Never knowingly undersold since 1925', is less than impressive when compared with Switzerland's record on international tax. It has never been knowlingly undersold since at least 1872 when one of its cantons signed the world's first every double taxation treaty. I thought of Switzerland when…
Virgin Alpine
Hamlet's outburst at Ophelia to 'get thee to a nunnery' was intentionally ambiguous. In Elizabethan times a nunnery was either a convent or a brothel. Were the Danish Prince alive today, he could merrily get away with the same line aimed at Switzerland. What happened to the once VIP Escort Agency that, on its way to…
Maintaining The Berne Rate
Sorry, sorrowful Switzerland. This pious country, which has been supplying the Vatican with its psychedelic army for the last five centuries, has been forced to take heed of the words of Handel's Messiah (with apologies to Isaiah): 'Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be laid low.' After hundreds of years where, thanks…
Foul!
"I fail to understand why any of you would be interested in twenty-two illiterate young men kicking an inflated pig's bladder around an oblong of grass." A bible-bashing preacher doing the rounds of Lancashire's pubs in late-Victorian England? Not quite. Actually, the headmaster of my school (see previous post) in mid- 1973 berating a hodgepodge of gormless…
Is the clock ticking for Switzerland?
Towards the end of 2010, in one of his last interviews, John F Kennedy's iconic speechwriter, Ted Sorensen, shared a previously unpublicized titbit concerning the 1960 Presidential Election. At 3am on Election Night, Richard Nixon gave a not-exactly- concession speech (he officially conceded the following afternoon). Watching the event on TV, Kennedy turned to Sorensen and…
Tax Break 