The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg

With a non-debilitating but noticeable hang-over from yesterdays surrender to freedom I rose early and ventured up to the skybar where petit déjeuner was now served. Maybe the view was worth the thirty bucks: a city with cliffs, castles, and streets on five strata with trains and trams threading through on bridges and viaducts presented itself in the grey drizzle.

Towns built on multiple levels have a special quality, a vertical logic that intersects with and extends the layout of the streets. There is an extra narrative when seeing a city spread out vertically in front of you, an extra experiential dimension, an extra level of mystery that comes from looking down on a café patio or up to a tram passing overhead.

Fortified by breakfast and with two hours before the Phoenix was scheduled to reappear and transfer us to Rockhal I cycled across La Pessrelle Viaduct up towards the cathedral with the cobbled streets and stone bridges of the old town laced around the snaking River Alzette 50 metres below.

The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg seems to be famous for two things; being the richest (or second richest, depending on which sources you consult) country in the world by GDP and its lax legislation with regard to money laundering—rumour has it that Kim Jong Un leader of the Workers Party of Korea and as such defacto ruler of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea holds $4 billion dollars of personal cash and securities here—nice work if you can get it.

The city centre isn't paved with gold, but flâneuring about on the Airimal I did start to wonder if that was a matter of taste rather than cost for the Grand Duke and his Prime Minister. There were retail outlets for brands that were so exclusive that I'd never heard of them. The Louis Vuitton store nestled as vulgar and ugly as you'd expect between two über refined clothes shops that might be exclusive to the Grand Duchy. I ventured into none of them. Nor did I venture into any of the three large watch stores—Breitling®, Rolex® and Omega® that occupied three of the four corners of the central crossroads.

I suppose this was, and might still be, the wet dream of Lizz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng (and all of their gang of intellectually and morally unhinged Britannia Unchainers)—remove "financial red tape" and the resulting free trade and the influx of capital extracted by shareholder driven resource stripping and stolen from defenceless populations by despotic regimes would transform Redcar into the Monaco of the north. What could possibly go wrong?