Excellent info, chrisild.

Let's hurtle back to the 1980s now. Here is a nice photo to set the scene. By now Switzerland was a very rich country, partly thanks to the "Gnomes of Zürich": the bankers and finance capitalists. (The Swiss franc is THE hard currency par excellence). It was also still a sparsely populated and very beautiful country. Chocolate box scenery abounds, and it is utterly clean. I just never saw dirt or litter or architectural ugliness when I visited Switzerland.
The country has a mainly ethnically German population that is very peaceful and lives in harmony with its Francophone and Italian-speaking compatriots. It operates direct democracy, in which the populace requests frequent referenda, yet without the problems that the UK has struggled with. Switzerland is not a member of the EU and remains a neutral country. It enjoys exactly the sort of splendid isolation, despite being at the heart of Europe, that many a current Brexiter would envy. Instead, of course, the Brexiters tend to envy Norway, perhaps because it has a large coastline and is, like Britain, a long and thin country.

I can name no Swiss politician, yet one or two names from the cultural sphere stand out. One is
Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Another is
Albert Hofmann, who first synthesised LSD. He later had rather a strange time of it after absorbing some through his fingertips.

All in all, Switzerland is something of a fairy tale country, almost too good to be true.