Don’t think about flushing the toilet after 11pm - this is Switzerland

GATHERED round a table in an apartment in Geneva, each had a horror story. Not about things that go bump in the night, nor crimes and disasters, but about apartment life in Switzerland, where neighbourhood watch is a way of life and the statutory regulations make a Western Isles sabbath seem a libertine affair.

No showers before 7am or after 11pm. No flushing toilets after 11pm and no music after ten. No washing on Sundays and no mowing of lawns at weekends. No children playing on communal grass ... and so the list went on. Most of the people in the room work for international organisations and had come to Geneva to work, unaware of this orchard of forbidden fruit. The Italian in the company told of a neighbour berating children who were playing joyfully on the common green behind his block of flats. Then all fell silent. His doorbell rang. It was the friends he had been expecting. "You have some funny neighbours," they declared. "We met a strange man coming out of the lift who was carrying an axe, and rushed out the back door ..."

The next story came from a Greek-Armenian. Beneath her is a lady who appears to have hyper-sensitive hearing. Even walking on the floor barefoot produces an admonitory rap with a walking stick. Once, she arrived back from a long-haul flight at 5am and took a shower. Next day, a letter arrived, threatening to involve the police. Seeking some form of reconciliation, she arranged for a mutual neighbour to invite them both to tea, but the sourpuss refused the invitation.

My favourite story concerned the couple who held a housewarming and invited all their neighbours. All came. The first guests began to leave at 10pm and at 10:15 the police arrived. They explained there had been a complaint that the 10pm curfew had been infringed. The hosts were bewildered. Who had complained? Why, none other than the neighbours who had left at ten, and had gone straight upstairs to make their call.

Geneva was, of course, the city in which Calvin practised his experiment in "theocracy", but we can hardly blame him for this zealous approach to being neighbour’s keeper. They didn’t have showers and hi-fis in Calvin’s time, and we must also take into account that such restrictive rules apply in other parts of the confederation of cantons which make up this aggressively neutral country in which all able-bodied males are required to do military service. One has the feeling that Switzerland almost enjoys this reputation for sadistic hospitality and armed neutrality. Geneva is home to a host of international organisations, of which the Red Cross is the most famous and the United Nations organisation is the largest. Yet Switzerland is not a member of the UN. Neither, of course, is it a member of the European Union, having voted against joining on more than one occasion. The Swiss are now facing another referendum on joining the UN, but they may simply opt for continuing the policy of eating cake without buying it.

Can we blame them? Their strict regulation of social conduct seems draconian but would be a godsend to those who have endured noisy neighbours who show not a whit of respect for those who share the same apartment building. Loud music, litter, chronic cooking smells are far more offensive than a toilet flushed late at night, but they make life unbearable for many flat dwellers in Britain.

Yet the moral justification for such rules - that they protect our neighbours and encourage respect for them - raises an uncomfortable question for the Swiss in terms of their non-membership of international groupings. These international organisations also have rules and procedures which are designed to protect and respect other countries. They may be far from perfect and the UN is a case in point, but those who benefit from them (as the Swiss do, to the tune of millions of pounds by having them on their doorstep) seem somewhat opportunistic if they do not join the club.

A similar accusation of parasitic practices is made against the Swiss banking system. It has faced many criticisms - from colluding with the Nazis and stealing the money of Holocaust victims, to failing to ask enough questions about the source of large sums of money which arrive for numbered accounts from dubious sources.

If you care at what hours your neighbour washes, perhaps it is not unreasonable to take an interest in how he earns his money. The Swiss may be right to insist that social values should cross our doorsteps and affect the way we live alongside others. But if charity begins at home, it also needs to have an international dimension.