The early bird catches the ... bread? Shopping in Switzerland can be a very strange experience. For example, in reality there are only two main supermarket chains. This lack of choice leads to a rather surreal experience--when you are around other people's flats you'll see a lot of stuff that you own too.

It also makes it too hard for the police to convict burglars for possession of stolen goods, so they prefer to concentrate more on policing noise after 22:00.

(Random thought: have you ever noticed that, fittingly, only one company is allowed to make the Monopoly board game? Of course, if they allowed others to make it they'd have to rename it Oligopoly, which just ain't the same.)

However, it is the store opening times that I really want to talk about this month. There is a phenomenon in the German-speaking part of Switzerland called Torschlusspanik (literally: fear of the doors closing). This affects people who are late going shopping on a Saturday afternoon and women in their 50s for some reason.

The perils of weekend shopping

When I first arrived here I used to go shopping on Saturday afternoons. Time and again I found bread to be completely sold out, or, if I were (un)lucky, only some dark bread made by hippies from Soya beans and seaweed.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

So I did what any reasonable person would do, I resolved to do my weekend shop a little earlier. (Of course the store could simply order more bread and solve this problem but that passes for revolutionary talk in Switzerland.)

At the start it went reasonably well. While I never had a complete range of breads to choose from, as I sometimes get up as late as 10:00 on the weekend(!), I managed to avoid further filling the coffers of The Hippy Bread Co. (Switzerland).

Proud as punch, I stupidly told my neighbour about my new fortune with weekend bread. The thought of me happily munching on fresh bread while he made do with cornflakes was obviously too much for him. On the sly, he started getting up even earlier than me to ensure he snared better bread from our local store.

Thanks to a tip off from the old lady who monitors everyone's comings and goings in the building, I started setting my alarm clock for even earlier on Saturday mornings. (In Switzerland it's Old Lady and not Big Brother who is watching you, which explains why there are practically no surveillance cameras here compared to other countries. There are plenty of Old Ladies though ...)

Of course, the lady told him about my early mornings, so he retaliated by getting up even earlier. It just escalated from there. Thanks to Old Lady and her extensive senior citizens' network, the whole apartment block got wind of what was going on and they all started getting up early too. It then spread to the neighbouring buildings, along the street and finally to the rest of the town.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Now on Saturday mornings a queue forms outside our small supermarket long before it opens. We all get up earlier on the weekend than we do for work during the week. With hideous bags under our eyes we look like crazed pandas as we demand to be let in to buy bread.

I don't mind telling you, I think some of my neighbours might be crazy!