True or false: Nepal is the only country in the world with a non-rectangular flag?
If you answered false because of Switzerland, you are wrong. And also right. And this is where it gets complicated.

The “Swiss flag Incident”
We were at a pub quiz in Spain recently when that question came up. My husband and I were competing as one team, our eldest son and his girlfriend in another. We all answered false, because obviously there's the Swiss flag. The quizmaster, Matt, read out the answer – true – and we objected immediately. We were so insistent that he pulled up Google and informed us that the International Olympic Committee had required Switzerland to carry a rectangular flag at certain ceremonies, which he seemed to feel settled the matter. We, however, were not to be pacified. The following evening, we returned. Our team names for that evening's quiz? SwissSquareFlag and Square-SwissFlag. (No accusations of pettiness please.) The quiz host introduced us to the room as "the teams from Zurich over there." (We let that one pass.) It was all in good spirit, and we felt that the record, if not corrected, had at least been contested. It was only a couple of days later, when talking it over with a quizzing friend, that the geometric flaw surfaced. Isn't a square actually a rectangle, he asked? Cue embarrassed pause while we checked. In standard geometry, yes. A rectangle is any quadrilateral with four right angles, and a square qualifies on every count. Which means that Nepal does have the only non-rectangular flag. Switzerland's flag is square, and a square is a rectangle, and we had spent two evenings being very loud about something that turned out to be technically incorrect. Oops.

What we know and what we think we know
There is a particular condition that comes from having lived somewhere that is not where you are from. You accumulate knowledge - the history, the geography, the quirks, the flag dimensions - and you're keen to deploy it. I like to think we know things about Switzerland that many non-Swiss do not. We know the canton system, that the capital is Bern, that the Swiss consume the most chocolate per capita. We know the flag is square. We just did not, until recently, know quite enough about quadrilaterals.

Sorry, not sorry
We were, admittedly, wrong on the technicalities. But although a square counts as a rectangle, it is clearly not just any rectangle. Anyone who has ever stood in a room full of flags can see that the Swiss one stands apart there (except, of course, Nepal). So, from my perspective, SwissSquare-Flag stands. And because we’re apparently incapable of doing things by halves, we’ve even sent the quiz host a proper Swiss flag to wave during future Swiss questions. But – irony of ironies – when hunting for ironies – when hunting for one, we were slightly alarmed by how many on sale were rectangular rather than square. But, happily, Cadonau had exactly what we wanted. (Thanks, Cadonau!) And while the quiz master might think he gets the last laugh with his trick questions, we like to think we have evened the score by making sure the flag he waves will now at least be the right shape.

ANNA CHARLES