Swiss Watching [antikvár]

AUTHOR'S NOTE iT 1 Every book has to begin somewhere, but this book had more than one beginning, each of them needed to reach the end. Its first beginning was getting a job at Holiday Which? magazine. They took a chance on me and helped me become a travel writer. Everything that has gone into this book I learned there; without that, these pages would be blank. Its second beginning was when I met Gregor and became a regular on easyJet flights between London and Switzerland. A long-distance relationship did nothing to improve my bank balance or my dislike of airports, but it gave me the chance to fall in love with another country. Its third beginning was endless illness and my doctor telling me to leave work, leave London, get some fresh air and get better. Goodbye Britain, hello Switzerland! No lakeside sanatorium or exclusive clinic for me; instead I moved to Bern and never looked back. Its fourth beginning was after arriving in Switzerland. Armed with both free time and a railcard, 1 explored the parts I'd never even heard of before. And 1 began to realise there was more to the country than I'd thought. An awful lot more. Its last beginning was in a writers' workshop in Geneva. 1 wrote down a sentence that had been swimming around in my head, and it became a paragraph. Months later the paragraph had turned into a chapter, which secured me an agent, who found me a publisher, who signed me up to write a whole book. So I guess this all began with a girl named Heidi and a man called Ronald. Now, here's the real beginning.