Good morning. Is all well in your corner of the world? How’s winter in Wellington? Waiting for longer, sunnier days in Melbourne? What about the Monocle crowd in the Med? All good on Antiparos (our casual correspondents report that the Beach House, now under management of The Rooster, is doing a fine job) and on the terraces of Cadiz? Here in Zürich, summer seems to be holding after two months of almost non-stop rain but there’s an air of grumpiness because Switzerland’s biggest city will not be hosting the 2025 edition of Eurovision. I know, right? What on earth is the country’s state broadcaster thinking? The race is now between Geneva and Basel to see which of the two can do the better job of looking after thousands of artists, their entourages and fans from around the world. It’s a silly decision but is very much in line with the spirit of inclusion that too often prevails over pragmatism and good old common sense these days.

Now let’s get this Sunday under way by rewinding the tape to this time last week, when much of what was being reported out of the US was a call from both Democrats and Republicans to dial down the divisive rhetoric, come together as a nation, seek unity and put aside differences. Some politicians suggested that there should be a shift in language, that not only the tone should be softened but perhaps a few less hysterical descriptors could go far in lowering the temperature. Go back 24 hours and I thought the same, as many of the world’s airports suspended operations and our screens clogged with images of queuing passengers as a technical reboot put a halt to holiday travel in the northern hemisphere. While I don’t fully buy that this was an innocent software update that went pear-shaped (if you were an intelligence agency skilled in the art of ass-covering, would you admit that your guard was down and this was an attack you weren’t prepared for?), it also wasn’t quite as it was portrayed on the tickers and home pages of many news outlets either. Just as we don’t need to hear inflammatory language from jumped-up Democrats and Republicans, we also don’t need headlines about “blue screens of death”, “horror scenes at airports”, “stricken passengers” and “appalling scenes at terminals”. No doubt, many people didn’t make it to their cousin’s wedding on time yesterday or ferry connections from Genoa on Friday but we need to put a few words in the drawer for a while and bring them out at the appropriate hour. To be clear, a blank departure screen at a US or Australian airport isn’t death or a horror scene. If planes had been falling from the sky yesterday, such words might have been employed but this was not the case. In the ugly race to own clicks and scroll time, much of the English-language media has found itself in a place where everything is toxic and horrific and, as a result, everyone is in a constant state of devastation and outrage. Enough, please. How about more moderate terms such as “ill-timed”, “unfortunate” and “less-than-ideal” to explain technology glitches, mundane daily accidents and myriad other things that are part of something called being alive.

Here’s a final thought on digital implosions. What happened on Friday was mild, with perhaps too much emphasis placed on spoilt plans rather than what happens when people no longer have access to their funds and global payment systems freeze. It’s for this reason that I always like to have a couple hundred francs and euros in my wallet for moments when terminals don’t work. On a recent Eurostar journey from Paris to London, the card readers froze up in the dining car. When the train manager announced that it was going to be cash only for the next two hours, you would have thought that most passengers were about to face appalling scenes of hunger on a death train. This moment was a tiny snapshot of what happens when society no longer has a back-up plan and our dependence on a fragile network of servers, clouds, cables and sticky tape unravels. The Swiss federal government still advises you to keep a supply of cash at home (CHF1,000 is the average) for occasions that go far beyond software updates that go to shit. They also advise you to have nine litres of water per person and ample amounts of pasta, rice, muesli, batteries, chocolate (of course), coffee (Nespresso capsules optional), UHT milk, hard cheese and dried meats. The list is a rather long one and has given our household a little project for the weekend. Is it time to buy a safe and fill it with a few blocks of crisp CHF100 notes? Most definitely.