How I got a taste of what it's like to be a foreigner stuck in a strange land – Stephen Jardine

Since this column is called “food for thought”, let’s clear one thing up. I’m never ever going to eat fondue again.

Stephen Jardine will never eat fondue again after finding himself stuck in Switzerland following the theft of his passport (Picture: Stefan Wermuth/AFP via Getty Images)

That’s because all this week I’ve been stuck in Switzerland where the gooey cheese mess fills the air like a teenage boy’s sock drawer. When I say stuck, what I really mean is marooned, properly stranded.

That is because on my first foreign trip in two years, someone stole my rucksack on a train in the Alps and, with it, my passport. Now this in itself is interesting because officially, crime doesn’t really exist in Switzerland.

Regularly ranked as one of the safest countries in Europe, the Swiss like to look down on surrounding countries as crime-ridden plague spots.

The reality is rather different. The internet is full of stories of people being robbed on the same train as me and the police confirmed it happens all the time. The Swiss just prefer to pretend it doesn’t happen.

I guess they don’t want to discourage visitors and based on my experience of what happens when your passport is taken, I can well understand why.

In the past, I might have managed to get home with a driving licence and some smooth talking but that time is now in the past.

Instead I needed emergency travel documents. They can be requested online after a tortuous process but to actually get them in my hand, I had to make the long journey to the British Embassy which is handily located in Berne. You won’t have been there because nobody has since you can’t fly there from the UK, making it a very odd location for a UK Embassy.

I arrived to discover my documents were ready but the Embassy was closed on a Tuesday for “staffing reasons”. Presumably those resolved around skiing and eating fondue.

When the Embassy eventually opened the next day, I received my emergency passport with the kind of sniffy disdain they reserve for anyone who dares to disrupt the downhill slalom and cheese consumption.

Bright blue in colour and with “Emergency Passport” stamped on the front, it looks like the kind of thing you would make with a John Bull printing set, which they may well have done.

The whole thing taught me a valuable lesson, never ever let your passport out of your sight for even a second.

In future, I’m going to carry mine internally to avoid this ever happening again.

In these days of electronic technology where everything is possible with a smart phone, a passport remains the one traditional document you simply cannot do without.

We take our British Passports for granted as the key to the world. Have passport, then travel, no questions asked. It is a badge of privilege and access that opens doors and makes things possible but others are not so lucky.

Watching those poor souls in Ukraine this week was a sobering reminder of what it is like to be a refugee with nowhere to call home and no documents to help smooth your way.

I was inconvenienced but I eventually made it home. For those fleeing the Russian advance there is only fear, uncertainty and confusion ahead.

My little Swiss adventure will soon be forgotten but the images from Ukraine will linger much, much longer.

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