Blind Ferrets In Switzerland

In medieval times I would have been assigned the role of the village idiot. Forever falling into wells and tripping over the King's retainers, I might have been a lot like Happy Smurf. This is the general feeling I get when I step into the Cornerhouse in Manchester - an exclusive arthouse cinema/indie café/contemporary art gallery tucked in between Chinatown and the city centre. I have a generally anti-mainstream outlook when it comes to film, so the stuff they show is right up my street - today I saw A Serious Man, the new flick from the Coens. But as much as I'd love to be a member of the high-brow culture club, the liberal intelligensia - I'm not really cut out for it. 60% of my thoughts are along the lines of "What if a polar bear and a visually impaired ferret had a fight with David Gest...?", not, as required to be a true hipster; "The films of David Lynch really inspire me". That's not to say I don't like David Lynch - I recently watched Lost Highway - it just means I'm far too easily distracted to keep up.

Someone from the London School of Economics called Simon Hix (I'm imagining a francophobe version of the Nutty Professor) complained in a Guardian article that the EU would "it would rather be a super-sized Switzerland". There's one problem with this comment: Switzerland is awesome! Apart from its somewhat ridiculous-sounding name, it is the perfect model for just about any country. They never go to war, they don't get bullied by America, they get to speak whatever language they want, and they always have a white Christmas. On top of that, they have an excellent democratic system and famously efficient trains. Our trains are shit, and they smell like old people's urine. Does Mr Hix really want to trade the quaint utopia of the Alps and Lake Geneva for council flats and the Birmingham ring road?

This is why I should never enter professional politics - however much you love me for it, I'm an idiot.

**Update - Switzerland is no longer perfect, since they voted to ban minarets. You can look at this either way - I can't be bothered analysing why and what effect this will have on Europe, but needless to say it's taken the edge off the Alps for me.