Car
We got an unexpected upgrade and our hire car was huge, bigger than the American compact I drove in Detroit. It was a people mover type of thing, all new, podlike and silver. There were at least six drinks holders that flipped out slowly on hydraulic joints, arm rests eased up and down, windows opened smoothly, controlled by hidden electronic switches. At first I was afraid that I was doing everything wrong because little alarms pinged discreetly whenever you opened a door without turning off the lights, or undid your seatbelt, or switched off the ignition. After two days I didn't care.

Collection de l'Art Brut
This museum in Lausanne is devoted to Outsider Art. I spent the first 20 minutes crying after reading a couple of artists' biographies and seeing the incredible things they had made, jeezus what a wuss. Without fail, all of those represented in the museum experienced lives of hardship, loss or brutality, but the art they made was vibrant, colourful, full of life and soul. The works are a testament to human strength, the compulsion to create. Often people worked in secret, their life's work coming to light only after they died. There was so much stuff on display, paintings and objects were plastered everywhere. It was overwhelming, awe inspiring, you wanted to know more about the people and the things that they made but your brain can only absorb so much in one go.
Collection de l'Art Brut

Expo
The Expo is a festival of Swiss culture. Although people took it very seriously, it was ridiculous, like the Millennium Dome except popular and crowded. The Expo was spread out along five locations around the Three Lakes region. Two of the Artplages were home to some stunning architecture. The Cloud is a temporary pavillion built on a lake. It is an artificial cloud, a two-storey metal frame covered in water-vapour producing jets. There was a place on the roof where you could taste different mineral waters as you wafted in and out of the mist. It felt as though you were floating. It was incredibly vertiginous. The Monolith is a giant rusty metal cube floating on a lake, accessible only by solar-powered catamaran. Inside are escalators and video projections on a 360-degree screen. Upstairs is the famous cycloramic painting The Battle of Morat. It feels as though you are in a kind of purgatory, or doing carousel in Logan's Run.
Expo

Funiculaire
My favourite word. In Fribourg there is a funiculaire that is powered by raw sewage. The car at the top fills its tanks with shitty water and its loaded weight, as it descends, is heavy enough to pull its empty sister up the hillside. The cars are so elegant, the view across the gorge dizzying, but the smell is appalling.

Gstaad
Diana Rigg, fabulous in white fur, finishes her breathtaking ice routine and skates up to George Lazenby beneath the shadow of the insanely luxe yet ultimately sinister Palace Hotel. Her life is in danger and only he can protect her. Meanwhile, the rich and the famous, and the evil too, sip hot toddies on the balconies of the toothache-sweet chalets they own dotted along the valley floor. The main street has shops selling cashmere and Nebuchadnezzars of champagne. The air is clear, there is money all around.

Boar
Late at night, driving down a dark country lane back to the village where we were staying, Kay and Simon saw a wild boar running by the side of the road. It turned, looked at them and darted off.

Jean Tinguely
The whole city stood still when he died. His widow, the artist Niki de Saint Phalle, led the procession through Fribourg. His exploding car sculpture belched smoke and random bursts of noise, collapsing and sputtering all the way down. It is hard to imagine the death of an artist inspiring such public grief in any place that I've lived.

Storms
We ran through rain which soaked us through to the skin. Lightning forked through the black sky. Our windscreen wipers could not cope with the downpour. We had to keep the blowers on full because of the steam rising from our bodies. We'd drive through a long mountain tunnel and forget about the world outside, and then be surprised by the ferocity of the rain again when we emerged. The roads were streaked with water rushing by. We could have been washed away. We sang songs together. I never wanted it to end, the storm was so thrilling.

Mountain
We saw a group of saffron-robed monks playing a jolly game of cricket in the deserted car park right underneath the mountain. In the winter everything is covered with skiers and snowboarders. In the summer, before the snow melts for good, people slide around on the glacier. In September the highest peak of Les Diablerets is a cloudy pile of scree 3000 metres high. The glacier looked worn, you could see the layers of snow and ice along its edge, packed together by time, like rings inside a tree trunk. The cablecar was empty and had to be weighed down by a huge block of concrete lest it blow away. A chairlift creaked in the wind, operated by a man who switched it on every half an hour for five minutes. We scared ourselves with fantasies of being stuck on it. We crept about the summit, afraid that we might tumble away. Disaster seemed certain. Inside the mountain's ski station there was a restaurant were we drank hot punch but none of us could work the hot water machine. We were all totally unsuited to being on the top of this mighty place. On the way down we pressed our faces against the front of the cablecar, it felt like we were flying as we descended through a stormcloud back down to the ground.

Yverdon
We visited the spa, they call it a Therme, sometimes a Wellness Centre. It had two outdoor pools and one inside. They were fitted with jets, bubbling underwater beds, in fact bubbles in every permutation imaginable. There was a mini-whirlpool that swept the three of us around, and a larger one that swooshed Kay to the other end of the pool. One had chilly water, the other more popular pool was warm. Fierce jets were positioned around the edge of the pool at various heights for necks, shoulders, feet, thighs, lower backs and I'm sure one was aimed at the genitals. Some of the jets were more popular than others so, to ensure fairness, a light would flash every ten minutes and everybody would have to move along to the next station. We bobbed around in the late summer sunlight, the water clear and sparkling and us clean and tired and happy. Even Simon liked it.