Other legends are slightly more gruesome. Pilatus was said to be the home to a race of malformed and malevolent subhumans, its peaks inhabited by demons of every kind. Once Pontius Pilate had committed suicide rather than face the wrath of Tiberius, his body was weighed down with rocks and hurled into the Tiber. That’s when the weather turned bad and Rome saw the kind of rain that London experienced this month. That’s when the wise Romans recovered his body and took it to Vienna, where it was thrown into the river. Again, storms and floods and tempests ensued, and once again the wise Viennese fished him out and took him to Lausanne, where he was thrown into Lac Léman. Once again a catastrophe followed and once again he was removed, this time to a lake above Geneva. His wife Procla was also dumped into a nearby lake. The storms have been phenomenal ever since, including those of last week.

Until 1741 people believed that dragons inhabited the Alps. Reliable witnesses compiled a list of what these dragons looked like. One had a snake’s body and a cat’s head. Others were snakes with a bat’s wings. Some had scaly legs and a two-pronged tail. Their eyes sparkled horribly. Then two fool Englishmen went up and reported that the tails were glaciers, the eyes were mountain lightning, and the curled-up tail was La Mer de Glace. Leave it to two English bores to ruin Mont Blanc forever by exposing it to something far worse than dragons with scaly legs: mass tourism. It’s been downhill ever since.

Just like Taki. Already crippled by severe arthritis on both ankles after 60 years of high-end sport, I tried a rather fancy mawashi geri (round kick) last week, and the terrible sound of ligament, muscle, and bone being ripped apart was heard all the way to Lausanne. The standing leg collapsed, my knee gone for the duration. It could have been a dragon let loose by some avalanche that got me. Pontius Pilate’s curse yet again.

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