I go for a Swiss walk.

I arrive in Geneva and drop off my things with my charming friend Carolan, who I have come to visit.

The city is different to how I have imagined it. Smaller, certainly - with 185,000 inhabitants about the same size as Portsmouth - but Geneva is no natural beauty, seeming to consist in equal measure of France, Germany and East Berlin in 1973.

There are the most hideous crimes against modern architecture nestled right alongside the most wonderfully Gallic antiqued beauties that could have been taken straight out of Alexandre Dumas’ Paris.

The Swiss people I see are a bit the same – fairly sickeningly good-looking on the whole, but dressed like extras from When Harry Met Sally. Probably because they still get their clothes from C&A, alive and well on the continent.

I get off the tram and head up a cobbled narrow street, which winds ever upwards, trimmed with antique shops and eventually opening out onto the Cour de St. Pierre, a small square in front of the cathedral of the same name. It is compulsory, I decide, to sit on a bench here, shaded from the beating, broiling sun by a friendly arbre inconnu.

I watch the world go by. At least that part of the world on an organised tour of Geneva’s old town. Mainly obnoxiously loud Italian schoolgirls who take hundreds of pictures and swallow up much of the available space with their hair.