Low life | 25 June 2011

Early on Sunday morning the phone rang. Trev. He could hardly speak because his ribs hurt so much, he said. And I should see his face. One eye was closed, he had a deep gash across his forehead and a chunk had been taken out of the top of his nose. But how had it happened? One minute he was walking home alone from the disco, and the next he’d woken up in bed and found himself in this terrible state. Did I know what had happened to him? And where did I disappear to, anyway? One minute I was there, he said, next to him on the dance floor, and the next I was gone.

I’d left early to catch the night sleeper to Paddington, then the Heathrow Express to Terminal 1, I said. I was sorry, I said, but I had absolutely no idea what had happened to him. I last saw him on the dance floor, throwing shapes.

‘So where are you now?’ he said. I looked out of the train carriage window at the spark-ling blue lake and the mountains beyond. ‘Lake Geneva,’ I said. ‘Oh. Right,’ he said. He sounded disappointed. ‘Where’s that?’ ‘Switzerland,’ I said. ‘Oh,’ he said.

Three hours later our travelling party was having lunch outside a wooden 18th-century farmer’s hut in a sunny meadow overlooking Gstaad. Our hosts were Andrea and Laura Scherz, owners of the Gstaad Palace hotel. The hut’s interior was equipped simply and cosily as a kind of romantic hideaway available to their hotel guests.

The conversation was lively and gay in the thin air. Mrs Scherz was funny, describing a visit with her young children to a pop concert at the O2 stadium last October, while all manner of meats, hot and cold, were deftly forked on to our plates by an Italian waiter wearing a smock embroidered with meadow flowers; then we helped ourselves to local cheeses, pastries, ice cream and strawberries.