DAY 211 - WALDENBURG TO BASEL: 21.7 MILES (43,400 STEPS)

19 November, 2011

21.7 miles (Total: 2084.7 miles) –43,400 steps (Total: 4,480,401 steps)

It was a long journey back from Mulhouse in France to Waldenburg in Switzerland where I had ended the previous day’s walk. Having had what is euphemistically called ‘a good dinner’ the previous evening in Mulhouse, I wasn’t in a peak state of fitness to take on this tough stretch into Basel from the Jura mountains. The company of Tom and Stephen kept my spirits up as they were shuttling back and forth along Route 12, occasionally searching out shorter routes and always on the look-out for good places to eat.

When I am walking on my own I know that the timing of the first break will dictate the pace and progress of the day. If I can keep going for 3-4 hours then when I stop I will be over half-way and will probably be able to keep going to my destination. If I need to stop after 2-3 hours, then it is probably going to be a 3-4 stop day and at this time of year that almost certainly means walking the final couple of hours in the dark.  Somewhere around Bubendorf after two and a half hours I found that I couldn’t manage to walk much further without a break and co-incidentally that coincided with another great restaurant.

The news that Tom and Stephen brought however, was of even better fare ahead in the form of IKEA! That would be a couple of hours away, so we decided to just have a drink and a chat. I settled down in the warm, cosy lounge with my drink and didn’t want to move despite encouragement from Stephen in particular. Eventually I did heed the encouragement and got going again, but it wasn’t flowing, it was a struggle. The reward however was to make it to Prattein on the outskirts of Basel and to IKEA. I loaded up on meatballs, chips, a chocolate donut and a small bottle of red wine. It doesn’t take much to keep me happy….

I make no apologies for liking IKEA. I like the company. I like the atmosphere and I love the food. Why? When I was at business school in the nineties we did a case study on IKEA and I found it so impressive. IKEA has a complex corporate structure, but essentially it is a not-for profit charitable foundation, which at USD $ 36 billion, is actually larger than the Bill & Miranda Gates Foundation. As a result of it being a not for profit, as opposed to my business which was a ‘not intentionally not for profit, it pays no tax. The downside of the foundation route is that you can’t easily sell it for some mega sum to a private equity house who haven’t the first clue how to run it.

The IKEA company was founded and is still run by Ingvar Kamprad, from which the first two letters of IKEA come. He founded the company at the age of 17 and patiently built it up over fifty years to its current size of 260 stores. He has an aversion to borrowing and believes in controlling costs, despite having a declared current net worth of $6 billion (analysts note that if he chose to change the not for profit foundation into a for profit business, then he would be the richest man in the world with wealth approaching $100 billion).  He lives modestly, works hard even now into his eighties, drives a fifteen year old Volvo, flies only economy and encourages all staff to use both sides of a sheet of paper. He sums up his business approach as “It is not only for cost reasons that we avoid the luxury hotels. We don’t need flashy cars, impressive titles, uniforms or other status symbols. We rely on our strength and our will!”

If the current malaise in capitalist economies need a vaccine to cure it of its excesses, which are on the verge of killing it stone dead, then the vaccine would be IKEA. Control your costs. Avoid waste. Borrow from yourself. Be tough on yourself so you can be generous with your customers. Put something back into the ground from where you took it for future generations. Motivate your staff by values rather than productivity. Be patient and build over a lifetime. Be content with less. And most importantly stay away from bankers and things you, and they, don’t understand.

The company ethos isn’t all that I love about IKEA, there are two other things: First, it is the sense of excitement of seeing young couples and families wandering round the store looking to make a pleasant home without racking up massive debts by buying goods they don’t need with money they don’t have—in this sense the values of the founder flow through the corporation and into the customer, creating a ‘social good’. Secondly, that IKEA reminds me of our very happy early family life when we would visit the store at the Metro Centre in Gateshead with similar aspirations to current customers.

A final thought on the current trend of the ‘Occupy movement’, who are currently making their presence felt around the world as they protest against the bankers and corporate greed which have robbed the new generation of the chance of work. I understand where they are coming from, but wouldn’t it be great if instead of camping out in city squares, a few seventeen year olds decided that they were going to follow the IKEA model of corporation to provide a counter-balance to the consumer culture, the debt culture, and at the same time in the future, provide a job and an income for 127,000 people. The need of the hour is not for more wannabe Chez Guevara’s, but for a new generation of Ingvar Kamprad’s.

DAY 210 - SOLOTHURN TO WALDENBURG: 19.2 MILES (38,800 STEPS)

18 November, 2011

19.2 miles (Total: 2063 miles) –38,800 steps (Total: 4,437,001 steps)

There is that moment in the Western movie when all seems lost as the last few hardy souls, who have circled their wagon train and are hopelessly outnumbered, take pot shots at the Indians who are obligingly galloping round the outside. Then the bugle sounds and the cavalry, resplendent in blue uniforms and yellow neck scarves, gallop in and chase the presumptuous native peoples off their own land.

Well, that is how it felt when Tom Hall and Stephen Bates arrived in Batterkinden, to lend a hand for a few days; albeit riding in a Citroën C3 and wearing ‘Walk for Truce’ t-shirts and shades enough to frighten the natives out of this rural Swiss frontier village. Stephen is one of my two cousins, lives in Ashford, works in London and is an academic by instinct as well as by training. If this was an episode of Thunderbirds, then Stephen would be ‘Brains’, carefully analysing all the available options and asking the pertinent questions.  Tom Hall is married to my other cousin, Sarah and is a high flying consultant commuting between palatial home in Newark and office in London. To follow the Thunderbirds theme through then, Tom would be ‘Scott Tracy’ the cool and urbane principal and leader of the International Rescue brothers.  I would probably fit the role of ‘Parker’, Lady Penelope’s faithful, calm, mildly irritating and utterly boring chauffer and butler. The cast was complete and so ‘Thunderbirds were Go!’

Taking to his responsibilities for identifying food and supplies with a particular flare Tom, a connoisseur of fine food and wine, managed to find a fabulous restaurant and of course showed up just in time for lunch….

I should say at this point that it has been a humbling experience to see the way in which family and friends have rallied around in my hour of need (whilst I am unable carry my rucksack on account of my fractured arm and recovering dislocation of the shoulder), all beautifully choreographed by Gary Streeter back in London.  Without my rucksack I am able to travel further and faster each day and so the support teams are really a turbo boost to the walk and the analogy of International Rescue is probably not too far off the mark.

Over lunch we were able to pool our talents enhanced by a few glasses of wine to find a short cut over the Jura hills to Solothurn and so Tom and I set off to try and find the equivalent of the North West Passage whilst Stephen took the car on to meet us in Solothurn. We quickly discovered that an added bonus of Tom and Stephen was that language communication took a quantum leap forward in both French and German, even if our English relapsed mostly into our Geordie mother tongue. All this added to the joy of the reunion as they brought with them news from home and gifts too.

We reached Solothurn just as night was closing and then returned back to Berne where we were booked into a single room, being keen to control costs as a mark of respect to ‘Austerity Britain’. I pondered that news of ‘Top Tory Peer in three in a bed (room) shock’ might spark a few lines of interest in the walk in the press back at home—it is a standard rule of party politics that the only time you are actually called a ‘Top Tory’ is when you have just done something which has brought the Party into disrepute or been sacked. In fairness ‘Unknown Tory in three in a bed (room) shock’ doesn’t quite sell even if in this case it would be more accurate. Wait for that front page splash this weekend in the Gateshead Post!

Heavily incentivised by the snoring of his room-mates, Stephen located a fabulous deal of £30 per room per night at Hotel Ibis in Mulhouse, France including buffet breakfast. Even if it was going to require long drives at the beginning and end of the day, none of us required much persuading of its virtues. It proved to be an inspired choice, especially as a decision to change the route out of Switzerland at Basel up the French side of the Rhine rather than the German, meant that if we kept to schedule then I should end up in Mulhouse by Monday evening

DAY 209 - BERNE TO SOLOTHURN: 23 MILES (46,000 STEPS)

17November, 2011

23 miles (Total: 2043.8 miles) –46,000 steps (Total: 4,398,201 steps)

Before leaving Berne I had the opportunity to visit the Einstein Museum and I am so glad I took it. What a remarkable man. To call him a genius seems almost to understate his mind and achievements.  I hadn’t appreciated that Einstein had lived in Berne and that he actually developed his special theory of relativity E = mc²  and there was so much else I hadn’t appreciated about his life and times either. For instance:

The young Einstein was a late developer and his parents consulted experts because they were worried that he couldn’t speak by the age of three. As I consider my own grandson pronouncing “car” at the age of eighteen months I became quite smug. He rebelled at school against the regimented teaching method and failed to secure even his basic School Leaving Certificate.  He then failed the entrance exam for Zurich Polytechnic, now I am beginning to think that my clutch of CSE Grade 2s’ were not bad, not bad at all. Eventually he did manage to go to Poly, but graduated with mediocre marks, which meant that he was unable to go on to teach or to find a job for two years. He was eventually accepted on a doctoral degree programme and dropped out after two years—I take comfort through having lasted just over two years on mine.

Why is life such a ridiculous game of game of compare and contrast, as we constantly measure ourselves against others. Whilst rejoicing a little too loudly that my grandson is saying ‘car’ I was told by another friend that his two year old granddaughter had just started learning to play the violin. We seem to spend so much time observing others that we fail to fully discover ourselves. The secret of all happiness, all contentment and all success is to know yourself and to accept yourself.  If you can’t accept and even like yourself then you will lack the inner security to allow you to like, accept and love others.

Meanwhile young Albert’s personal life was causing his parents some concern too: he renounced his German citizenship in order to avoid military service becoming a Swiss citizen and had a child out of wedlock with Mileva Maric, which in 1902 was very much a social taboo. In 1903, through the intervention of a friend he managed eventually to secure a clerical job in the Swiss Patent Office in Berne, which he used to support Mileva and their son.

Now, stop the clock: Give me your assessment of Albert Einstein at the age of twenty-four. What would you say? Scientifically, based on the available evidence the report card might say something like: Albert has not made the best use of the limited talents available to him. He finds it difficult to apply himself to study and to complete courses upon which he has embarked. His personal life raises some moral questions marks about his self-discipline and his career choice displays a considerable lack of ambition.  At best, it would seem, he can aspire only to mediocrity and a life of disappointment and underachievement.

Fortunately for mankind the clock didn’t stop there, why? Because young Albert had a dream that he wanted to become a ‘Professor of Physics’ and even though all the evidence would point to this being a flight of fancy; he never gave up on his dream and his dream never gave up on him.

During his time in the Patent Office he contemplated a simple question which had confounded all physicists for centuries namely: Our everyday common sense tells us that if while standing on a moving barge we hit a golf ball off the front, the speed of the barge adds to the speed of the golf ball. If we were to shine a flashlight in the same direction as we had hit the ball we would find that the speed of the barge does not add to the speed of the light beam. Its speed would be the same as if the barge were not moving at all. Because nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.

His simple and yet utterly profound equation stunned the scientific world, as much for its radical suggestion that the speed of light is relative to each of us and not constant, as it was for its source—a Patent Office Clerk from Berne.

Immediately a vigorous debate broke out amongst the ‘great’ physicists of the time as they tried desperately to disprove Einstein’s equation. Really what was at the heart of it was pride—that with all their stellar academic qualifications, publications and pedigree that this simple truth should have been revealed to a clerk, of no standing, and no qualifications.

It must have been analogous to Jesus, a carpenter from Nazareth, telling the Pharisees and Scribes in Jerusalem that the beautiful equation for life is simply to ‘love God and love each other’.  They hated it for its simplicity and its source, for it mocked their complex and convoluted laws which tied the people up in knots and it mocked their credentials.

But the equation and the dream stood the test of time and within two years Einstein had been appointed Professor of Experimental Physics at the University of Zurich and was courted by universities around the globe to come and undertake further research and hold tenured posts in the most prestigious academic institutions.  He went on to apply his theory to explain the movement of light through space and time which literally unlocked the secrets of the universe and opened up an entirely new field of science called quantum mechanics. He became a prodigious academic publishing 300 scientific articles and 150 non-scientific articles.

In 1921 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. In 1999 Time Magazine named Albert Einstein ‘Person of the Century’. In 1952, despite at that time being a citizen of the United States, he was asked to become President of the State of Israel because, as the prime minister of Israel put it, Einstein “embodies the deepest respect which the Jewish people can repose in any of its sons.”—he declined the offer due to poor health.

At the end of his life Einstein reflected: “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.” Even over fifty years since his death Einstein is still willing to teach those who are willing to listen.

More wisdom from Albert Einstein:

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

“Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding.”

“Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.”

 ”I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”

“Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.”

“He who joyfully marches to music rank and file, has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action. It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.”

“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”