At airports, I must be accompanied at all times by a responsible adult

The following day, on a paddle ferry across the lake, I was beatifically smiled at by a nice woman from Gloucester, who is a fan of some soap I appear in, and we struck up a merry conversation with her and her delightful daughter and policeman son-in-law, which ended dramatically when her husband suddenly collapsed. As mother and daughter were nursing professionals and he was a cancer sufferer I should have stepped back, but sometimes I get a burning tingling right hand and the urge to put it on someone’s painful area is strong, so I wafted my hand over him and he fluttered and opened his eyes. We left the family waiting for an ambulance and I spent the next two days assuming I had killed him.

Finally, we have swapped emails: after a ghastly seven-hour wait in a Swiss A&E hospital with police presence and shouting patients, a failed coffee stand and a bagel machine, they were finally seen and hastily dismissed by an impatient doctor. “Your father’s had a ‘funny turn’,” he said in French. The daughter said it was almost like being back home. Still, back home was where they were now and Dad was feeling OK. My guilt was assuaged.

The thing about Switzerland is that it appears to be so benign with its low crime, cuckoo clocks, chocolate, fondues, neutrality and plebiscite voting but their record on storing Nazi blood money, laundered cash and stolen art under those nice white mountains is a little shady, as is their record on expelling Jews, historically, closing its borders to Jews in the Second World War in 1942 and not taking in refugees.

More than a quarter of Switzerland’s Jewish population of roughly 18,000 live in Geneva, yet the city has almost no proper Jewish burial ground – save a medieval one which is about to be dug up. The official answer seems to be because of an 1876 Geneva law banning denominational cemeteries. Therefore, Jews have, it seems to be buried in the part of the cemetery serving this city that is… well… in France.

Any road up, carefully staying alive and in need of a nice little honeymoon, we got on a nice clean double-decker train to Vevey and then on a number 212 bus to Chaplin. Yes, the former home and museum of Sir Charles Chaplin, the little fellow who turned his Dickensian youth into our perpetual laughter. The genius who will never die. It is a stunning museum, fascinating studio and an exquisite home.

Chaplin was not Jewish, yet in some way he suffered the same slurs. He was driven out of America by scandal, because his fourth wife Oona was 18 and he was 53 when they married in 1943. Nobody’s business but theirs but you know how prurient America was, and is.

They were married for 34 years and had eight children to prove their love. They lived in Switzerland after he was suddenly refused re-entry in the US. He was blacklisted under McCarthyism, for alleged communism, largely it seems because 20 years earlier, in 1939, he made the film The Great Dictator. Charlie studied Hitler’s movements for months before he wrote, directed, produced and wrote the score – as he did with all his movies. He satirised him with sublime skill. It was an innovative anti-fascist film, so he must, in the thinking of the time, be a communist. All the other heads of studios, Jewish to a man, were too busy making propaganda films for the American government to make one which put Hitler, when he saw it, into a violent fury.

I can’t end without commenting on the resignations at the BBC. It took the doctoring of a Trump speech, not bogus documentaries and years of anti-Israel bias to bring down the man who allowed Bob Vylan to spout hatred and the woman who wanted discussions with the “political wing” of Hamas.

In their case, it seems to me, the wheels were already off.