The most sincere compliment you could pay Zurich is to describe it as one of the great bourgeois cities of the world. This might not, of course, seem like a compliment—the word “bourgeois” having become for many, since the outset of the Romantic Movement in the early 19th century, a significant insult. “Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom,” felt Gustave Flaubert, a standard utterance for a mid-19th-century French writer, for whom such disdain was as much a badge of one’s profession as having an affair with an actress and making a trip to the Orient. According to the Romantic value system, which today still dominates the Western imagination, to be bourgeois is synonymous with laboring under an obsession with money, safety, tradition, cleanliness, family, responsibility, prudishness, and (perhaps) bracing walks in the fresh air. Consequently, for about the last 200 years, few places in the Western world have been quite as deeply unfashionable as the city of Zurich.

Zurich is exotic. We normally associate the word “exotic” with camels and pyramids. But perhaps anything different and desirable deserves the word. What I find most exotic about the city is how gloriously boring everything is. No one is being killed by random gunshots, the streets are quiet, the parks are tidy, and, as everyone says (though you don’t see people trying), it is generally so clean you could eat your lunch off the pavement.

What most appeals to me about Zurich is the image of what is entailed in leading an “ordinary” life there. To lead an ordinary life in London is generally not an enviable proposition: “ordinary” hospitals, schools, housing estates, or restaurants are nearly always disappointing. There are, of course, great examples, but they are only for the very wealthy. London is not a bourgeois city. It’s a city of the rich and of the poor.

People are happy to be ordinary in Zurich. The desire to be different depends on what it means to be ordinary. There are countries where the communal provision of housing, transport, education, or health care is such that citizens will naturally seek to escape involvement with the group and barricade themselves behind solid walls. The desire for high status is never stronger than when being ordinary entails leading a life that fails to cater to a median need for dignity and comfort.

Then there are communities, far rarer, where the public realm exudes respect in its principles and architecture, and where the need to escape into a private domain is therefore less intense. Citizens will lose some of their ambitions for personal glory when the public spaces and facilities of a city are themselves glorious to behold. Simply being an ordinary citizen can seem like an adequate destiny.

In Switzerland’s largest city, the urge to own a car and avoid sharing a bus or train with strangers loses some of the urgency it may have in Los Angeles or London, thanks to Zurich’s superlative tram network—clean, safe, warm, and edifying in its punctuality and technical prowess. There is little reason to travel alone when, for only a few francs, an efficient, stately tramway will transport one across the city at a level of comfort an emperor would have envied.

This commitment to the “exalted ordinary” continues in architecture. Zurich has very few iconic buildings. The museums and the opera house are sedate. Nothing is flashy. And yet this is a city with some of the best architecture in the world; ordinary buildings have to them a quality and thoughtfulness at the level of design that in other places would be accorded only to the icons. Visitors will notice beautiful detailing in the window tracery and concrete finish of schools and railway stations. There are parking lots that should be winning prizes, and primary-school buildings that display worldbeating approaches to the innovative use of timber and brick. For a rent that would buy you a dilapidated one-room box in New York, you can live like a merchant prince in a brand-new apartment building.

Zurich’s distinctive lesson to the world lies in its ability to remind us of how truly imaginative and humane it can be to ask of a city that it be nothing other than boring and bourgeois.

After a year of dealing with Korea’s ridiculously strict drug laws -– where a positive blood test for weed is treated as possession –- I was looking forward to enjoying some of Thailand’s sweet sticky icky.

So I went to Thailand for a week with mom and my brother, Daniel. After a year of dealing with Korea’s ridiculously strict drug laws -– a positive blood test for weed is treated as possession –- I was looking forward to enjoying some of Thailand’s sweet sticky icky. Eight months of doing nothing save drink pissy lager in the company of musty Canadian proto-humans had left me keen to enjoy some herbal remedies. Daniel, a veteran of several previous trips to Thailand, assured me they would be freely available.

It’s always a slightly strange vibe to holiday with parents as an adult. You want to morph into full-on, balls-to-the-wall party wreckage mode -– but your parents’ presence often forces your thoughts of getting down like Easy Rider in New Orleans to morph into sitting down in an Easy Chair with a magazine.

My mother and brother strolled down the main drag of Patong, with myself a few steps behind. A Thai man darted out from the shadows and hissed something into my brother’s ear. Daniel ignored him and carried on. The Thai dude was wearing the red waistcoat of a licensed taxi operator. “Cokeweed,” he said.

Jackpot.

I motioned with my head to a small alley off the main street. I made the international sign of the spliff — forefinger and thumb clenched into a circle, lips pursed into a wrinkled pout.

“Weed?” he grinned, pulling out a stack of herb, compressed into highly professional looking cellophane bricks. It looked good — but as with Hungry Man TV dinners, tempting looks are not always a guarantee of quality. I wasn’t going to just hand over my money.

“I want to smell it”, I said. He looked at me. I tapped my left index finger against my nostril.

“Coke?” he said. No, no — I want to smell the weed. We both paused for a second as he tried to work out exactly what I wanted. Then a Thai police officer, mounted on a motorbike, zoomed into the alley.

Fuck.

The officer was blowing his whistle. He had an orange vest with “traffic police” written on it. Surely he was operating outside his realm? Would a court throw out my conviction on the grounds that the arresting officer had been out of his jurisdiction? I doubted it.

Stay calm, I thought. I caught the officer’s eye while he frisked the dealer. Raising my eyebrows, I motioned with my head: Can I go? He pointed at the ground: Stay there. It was worth a try.

I had no drugs on me — I didn’t even have any money on me. I also knew that things were very, very different in Thailand. The officer kept alternating between searching the dealer and stepping out into the main road, blowing his whistle and trying to attract other officers. He searched my pockets, not particularly thoroughly. I had nothing in them, literally nothing. Three other police officers — also traffic cops –- eventually gathered around. My mom and brother had come back to see what was taking me.

Outwardly, I was calm. I tried to affect the air of a man who has been temporarily mixed-up in some sort of administrative blunder. Inconvenienced, but understanding — after all, the police have their job to do as well. If we could just get this sorted out as quickly as possible…? The air of an innocent man who has nothing to fear.

I was shitting my fucking pants.

My mom demanded to know what was going on.

“This guy showed me some drugs, mom. I walked away and then the police came over. I don’t even have any money.” My mom’s not stupid — she knew I was trying to buy weed — but she backed me up fully. (A measure of just how stupid I am is the fact that I would have had to go and get some money from my mum or brother. Who goes out for the evening without any money?)

“Excuse me”, she said to the officer. I had a sudden memory of buying a coat with her at the age of 11 or 12 and feeling hugely embarrassed as she took a gum-chewing shop girl to task.

“Excuse me.” He ignored her.

“He’s done nothing. He has nothing. Can we go? Can we go?” She was becoming hysterical. Calm down, mom. She started to cry. She told me to step away from him in case he planted something on me. The whole scene was oddly casual. I could definitely have run away if I’d wanted to. Could they shoot me if I tried to run away?

“This is my son. My son.” The officer continued to blank her as he talked with his colleagues. The dealer didn’t look particularly worried.

I spoke to the officer, repeating my lame version of events: I was looking for a taxi, this guy called me over and showed me some drugs. I was walking away and you came over. No drugs, no money. I’m with my mom, would I really try to buy drugs in the street when I’m walking along with my mom?

By now a small crowd had gathered round. It occurred to me that the black eye I was sporting from a Muay Thai match I’d fought in Korea a few days earlier wasn’t helping. Someone took a photo. A large ex-pat — clearly someone who had been in Thailand for some time — asked me in deep, mocking English:

“Ave yoo messed up?”

I hoped that he would turn out to be some local Svengali, a natural fixer, someone with intimate knowledge of dealing with Thai police.

He chuckled and walked away.

Had I messed up? Yes, I had. I really fucking had.

The original detaining officer rode off on his bike with the dealer. The dealer hopped on this back of the officer’s bike and wrapped his arms around him.

Another officer said, “You come police station. Is no problem. Guarantee. No problem. Come police station. Guarantee.”

I thought that “guarantee” probably meant “interview” or “statement,” rather than being the officer’s personal pledge that I would have no more problems. In the UK, I felt sure you couldn’t be arrested without being in possession of drugs — but who knew what the law was in Thailand. And who knew what the police could do if they felt like it.

I was about to climb on his bike.

“No,” my mom said, “We’ll get a taxi.” The officer agreed. He told a taxi driver where we were going. We climbed into a tuk-tuk, an open-backed van-like vehicle. I briefly considered making some sort of getaway. A terrible idea. I said a prayer. We arrived at the station and I was relieved to see it was a kind of police booth, rather than the huge prison.

Approaching the box, I could see the officer who had arrested me posing for a picture with five Italian tourists. I remember thinking that I would give anything, literally anything, to swap places with those people right now. I’d even start wearing dayglo clothes. Happily.

Two plainclothes police men rode up on a motorbike. The dealer bowed deeply to them. The other officers showed them the Thai guy’s ID card, and two handfuls of coke and weed. The original officer stepped forward, holding a single brick of weed in his hand. For a single crazy instant I thought he was offering me the weed, that the whole thing was some sort of hugely elaborate joint operation between police and dealers. This was stupid, of course.

I stepped back from him and flung my hands up. No money, no drugs, I said. My mantra. His eyes sparkled. I was sweating bullets. I’m not built for the heat.

“This marijuana”, he said. He pronounced marijuana with an h rather than an w, like marihuana. “It’s okay. You go to jail. It’s okay.”

My inner idiot wanted to contradict him, wanted to say, “It’s not okay actually. I’d rather not go to jail.”

My mom broke down. Daniel embraced her. I stood my ground. “Look. I was walking along. That guy showed me some drugs. I went like this” — I pantomimed a gesture of disgust, of non-involvement — “and I walked away. Then you came along. Would I really buy drugs when I’m with my mom? I don’t even have any money.”

I don’t know how much of my story he understood or how much he believed. Understood most of it and believed none of it, I suspect. If he had waited
five minutes more he would have caught me red-handed and I think he was annoyed that I had some wiggle room. He turned away.

“It’s up to captain”, he said, pointing at another officer. The captain spoke to my sobbing mother.

“This your son?”

“Yes,” she choked out. “He’s done nothing.”

“Where you from?”

“Ireland.”

“Him?”

“Ireland too.”

“Okay.” He paused for a second, apparently unconcerned.

“You can go.”

Was I released because I hadn’t actually broken the letter of Thai law? Or did they take pity on a mother who was clearly buckling under the strain of dealing with an imbecile of an adult son? What would have happened if they’d caught me five minutes later?

I’ve since learned that buying drugs on the street in Thailand is a notorious con worked out between police and “drug” dealers, and that only the most dim-witted tourists, like myself, fall for it. The drugs are probably just oregano and table salt, and the whole thing is based around getting the hapless foreigner to pay big money for a speedy release.