The Vandal – Derek Haines

For those readers who may not know, I’m an old Aussie transplanted slap-bang in the middle of Europe – Switzerland in fact. It’s now been ten years but I still recall two expressions I read just after arriving in 2001. ‘You know you’ve been in Switzerland too long when ….’, which was the introduction to a very long list of Swiss quirks that one finds unusual to begin with, but rather like after some time. The second, ‘Switzerland is like a bumble bee. It shouldn’t fly. But it does.’ This is so true as there are so many aspects of this country that just should not work; but somehow they

It is now just over a year since I started my ‘live in’ job as the Personal Assistant and Fitness Coach to The Vandal and his alter ego ageing author. To say he was a handful at the beginning would be an understatement. He had no routine, was criminally lazy and lacking in any form of healthy exercise. My first months were spent re-training him and bringing some semblance of order to his days and drilling him into a new work ethic. A seven day working week. While he resisted at first, I found that excessive barking, random defecatory initiatives and sock stealing brought him around to a new realisation