I was once almost flattened by a Danish Parachutist, called Lars Plugg; he had a tiny nose, but a hell of an expanse of forehead: you could have landed a helicopter between his eyes without him even blinking.
I had a brief if somewhat dramatic brush with Plugg, in Switzerland, one day last summer. I was munching Toblerone beneath the Lautabraunnen Falls (the big Swiss sneeze, where Sherlock Holmes and his arch enemy, Professor Moriaty, fell to their deaths in a deadly struggle), I had a triangle of Toblerone wedged in my cheek, when ‘Plugg’ dropped out of the sky and landed almost on top of me. I shudder to think of the consequences of a direct hit from a Viking – a fast descending Dane - from above: the triangle of Toblerone would have been forced through the skin beneath my chin (like a chocolate-face version of John Hurt’s stomach exploding, in Alien)!
I was in Switzerland to investigate the strange case of ‘The suicidal cows of Lautabraunnen’. Local police were baffled when dozens of suicidal cows threw themselves – for no apparent reason - off a cliff in the Alps. In the space of three days 28 cows and a bull mysteriously died after they plunged hundreds of meters off a cliff down into the picturesque valley below. Local mountain rescue services using a helicopter had to be called in to remove the bodies.
Strange thing about that triangle of light under the chin: if you were to trace it, it would cover the nose almost exactly; a patch of light, the perfect nose guard against the sun. I can see the advertisement now: ‘the right guard is the light guard: the light-guard against the sun is the nose-of-light under your chin’. Warning: don’t use triangle of Toblerone to protect against the sun. Not unless you want a brown nose. And what drove the cows to suicide? Who knows?
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