You’ll find most British newspapers on sale the same day (from 3pm) in main train stations and some city kiosks in Geneva, Lausanne, Zürich, Basel and Bern, as well as in well-touristed resorts such as Zermatt, Gstaad and Interlaken, and a day late in some other towns. Prices for the normal papers are extraordinary – up to Fr.5.50 for the broadsheets – but you can find The Guardian’s condensed European edition, the International Herald Tribune, USA Today, and a handful of financial heavyweights for less.

If a hotel room has a TV it’s almost certain to be hooked up to cable or satellite, giving you the dubious pleasure of 30 or 40 channels covering the panoply of European languages, plus a few more exotic offerings such as Turkish or Arabic. CNN is the only English-language dead cert wherever you are, although many places have BBC Prime, showing British drama and comedy.

As for radio, the BBC World Service is on 648kHz medium wave more or less all day and most of the night, but in practice it seems that the mountains can quite often block reception, forcing you onto short wave instead (12.095, 9.760, 9.410, 7.325, 6.195, 5.975 or 3.955MHz). If your hotel has cable or satellite TV, it will also receive a host of crystal-clear radio stations, including one or all of BBC World Service, domestic Radios 1 to 4, various British music stations and Voice of America (although these may not be piped into every room).