The bear in question is called Boston. At least, that’s probably how I’d spell his name, but you pronounce it as if it were spelt “Boast-on”. It seems to me a very peculiar sort of name for a bear, but it was christened by my little cousin who is going to be five in a couple of weeks. Boston, or Boaston, or whatever we’re going to call him, started life in a shop which is seemingly no longer known as the Bear Factory but which I’m sure used to be called that not so very long ago. It’s the sort of shop where you go and choose the body parts of your bear and then sit and watch whilst they sew it up in front of your eyes, something which always seemed like a rather strange idea to me, but which is apparently popular with small children. The same shop also does an extensive range of clothing for bears, and it was something along these lines which I have been directed towards purchasing as a present.

Having finally located the appropriate shop in the Bull Ring, I was relieved to find that all the clothes are one-size-fits-all, and so I didn’t have to worry about measurements. That, however, was where the good news ended. I had envisaged that this would be a fairly simple shopping trip – walk into the store, pick up a bear-shaped woolly jumper and walk out again – and so I was in no way prepared for the excessive choice which confronted me

Relatively secure in the knowledge that I was dealing with a boy-bear, I managed to rule out a whole wall of dresses in one fell swoop. Phew. That only left several hundred outfits to examine… The first one I picked up was a T shirt embroidered with “Happy Birthday”. This immediately struck me as an appropriate sort of choice, so I picked it up for a closer look. £6 – hmmm. It didn’t look very substantial for £6, and it occured to me that I had no idea whether Boston’s birthday was the same as my cousin’s birthday. Perhaps not.

The next thing I examined was a Batman outfit. I thought this was quite cool, but I don’t think my cousin is anywhere near old enough to be allowed to watch Batman, so it wouldn’t be terribly helpful. Next to the Batman outfit was a red costume with horns. I picked it up for closer examination, and as far as I could ascertain it was to dress your bear up as a devil. I decided that wasn’t a costume which would go down very well in a Catholic household, and moved on to what looked to me like a Bear-goes-to-work-in-a-food-processing-plant outfit, seeing as it seemed like it included a hairnet. Closer inspection revealed that it was a mummy-outfit.

Feeling that that wouldn’t go down too well either, I moved on to look at the shoes. There was quite a wonderful selection of shoes; there were some brown suede boots with white fur tops which I was quite taken with, as well as some Converse pumps which looked quite cool. I refused to contemplate buying Crocs, even for a bear. There followed a display of clothes which were actually very sweet; a fisherman’s outfit, a policeman’s outfit, a fireman’s outfit, a chef’s outfit. The problem was just that there was so much choice, I simply couldn’t decide what my cousin would prefer…

It was when I moved back to the clothes display and found a rack of High School Musical outfits for bears, that I began to feel a little sick. These were next to the football kits; you can buy the latest football shirt for your bear, so long as he supports Chelsea or Man United. Such an outfit ranges from between £10 and £14. Now I don’t know if I am just particularly stingy – probably I am – but there is something inside me which objects very strongly to the thought of paying £14 on a top for a *bear*, when I would be hesitant to spend that much money on a top for *myself*. It occurred to me that I could probably get three or four T shirts for myself from Primark for the same price as an England shirt for this teddybear, and it all began to seem terribly wrong It’s cute that you can buy clothes for bears – when I was little I had a bear I wanted clothes for too – but I don’t know if it makes any sense if I say I found the whole shop disgustingly capitalist. Perhaps it doesn’t. What I mean is that it just seemed set up to exploit people; it sells very cute bears, which clearly small children are going to adore, and these in themselves are reasonably priced. But then it tries to lure families back in again and again by selling a ridiculous amount of novelty clothes for the said bears, which are horrendously overpriced. I don’t believe in paying vast quantities of money for children to have clothes with logos or football colours on; I certainly don’t believe in paying similiar prices for their bears to have them too. My bear used to wear a knitted jumper and trousers, and he never complained

Sigh. It was at the point where I saw the display of Union Jack underpants for bears that I ended up walking out. I mean, honestly… for a start I debate the necessity of a bear having underpants, and those in the colours of the Union Jack just seem so… I don’t know… “common”, I guess. I know they wouldn’t sell such things if there wasn’t a market for them, but I really do think that anyone who pays £6 for a pair of bear-sized Union Jack underpants has taken leave of their senses.

I have an urge to go home and start knitting wholesome bear-shaped jumpers. Unfortunately, I think I may have got rid of my knitting needles a couple of years ago. Instead, I guess I will have to go home and ask for guidance from the rest of my family as to what bear-outfit they believe will be most appropriate, and return to the shop tomorrow, forcing myself to make a purchase

It was actually a beautiful train journey. For over forty five minutes to Lausanne we travelled along the length of Lake Geneva, which is actually shockingly big. The weather still wasn’t amazing, but as the journey progressed further we were able to get occasional glimpses of the Alps in the Bernese Oberland and even when we couldn’t, the hilly countryside outside Geneva was pleasant enough. I spent ages what the weird little trees they were growing in all the fields were, until my boyfriend confirmed he thought they were vines. En route the train passed through Fribourg/Freiburg which is a town that fascinates me, by virtue of the fact that it sits right on the Röstigraben, the imaginary trench which divides German speaking Switzerland (where they eat Rösti) from French speaking Switzerland (where they do not). At one point I nearly booked for us to stay there but in the end I decided against because the accommodation wasn’t substantially cheaper than in Geneva, and the location less convenient.

Arriving in Bern I was struck again by what a bizarrely uncapitallike capital it is. I suspect that even a lot of people who can successfully differentiate Switzerland from Sweden have no idea that Bern is the capital city, and indeed if you were picked up off the street by a gigantic hand and transported there, you could probably walk around the place all day without realising, returning home with the impression that Bern was nothing more than a sleepy little town.

The reason, from what I understand, that Bern is the capital is that the French speaking Swiss felt Zurich was too Germanic a city. Germanic or not, Zurich is at any rate not an attractive city despite being situated next to a naturally beautiful expanse of water, and it is a place where I have never felt particularly safe. Bern is much more pleasant and inoffensive and quite possible to explore on foot in a day even without a town plan, which the tourist office are too mercenary to give away for free.

There is no lake in the town but there is however the river Aare which flows through the southern half of the city centre at a very fast pace. It is not the sort of river you would want to fall into. It is also not the sort of river which is very conducive to playing Pooh-sticks, although when I made this observation to my boyfriend he looked at me in blank incomprehension as his poor little mind went into overdrive trying to figure out what a Pooh-stick might be! Nevertheless it’s a pretty river, and we had a little walk along it en route from visiting the main attraction of Bern;the bear pits.

The population of Bern have been keeping pet bears outside the city for hundreds of years now. Currently they only have two, another couple having recently died, and they are in the middle of renovating the existing pits and turning them into something more modern. We were able to jostle with schoolchildren for a few minutes to watch the two gorgeous female bears pacing around and catching pieces of carrot which were being thrown to them. They looked very amiable, despite their size, but it is a fact that within the last five or so years a drunken reveller on his way home from a night out had the misfortune to fall down a bear pit, and there was precious little remaining of him come the morning

Other than that, the sights of Bern are not terribly exciting. We saw the Swiss Parliament building which has some really cool little water jet fountains outside it, but otherwise is quite understated. We also had a look around the cathedral, although we didn’t pay to go up the tower, and strolled for a while up and down the strange little side streets with their covered walkways. My boyfriend came across a shop called Dick which appealed to his sense of humour, and we found another department store restaurant to eat in. We also succeeded in buying some stamps to send our postcards (i say succeed because it was a rather confusing post office!), but the most exciting purchases of the day were in an amazing little second hand bookshop we discovered in Rathausplatz. A lot of the books were antique looking and beyond our price range, but some others were unbelievably cheap and the most exciting thing was the breadth of languages which were represented. I picked up an anthology of Swiss literature for a couple of francs; just the sort of thing I’ve been looking for to give me a better indication of what to try and buy when I’m out there, and the fact that it dates from the year I was born doesn’t matter to me. Rather excitingly, my boyfriend picked up a copy of the Hound of the Baskervilles in French I am hopeful that maybe one day my French will be good enough to read it too; I know the story well in English and have already read it in Esperanto too, so that would be quite cool.

The train journey back passed quickly on account of our new reading material, and we were able to head back to the hostel to eat some rather tasteless slices of meat before heading out for a twilight walk round the streets of Geneva. We actually found the main shopping street, identifiable by a large Starbucks, which we had somehow managed to miss on all previous excursions The weather in Geneva was set to improve tomorrow, and I had managed to convince my boyfriend that he wanted to go up a little cable car