Arrived in Geneva yesterday to start the new project. We went for lunch to the World Metereological Organisation building around the corner (we are in an engineering works just like the BREL one around Derby station). From the rooftop restaurant we could see the lake, and the fountain behind other buildings (the same one seen at the beginning of The Champions. Last week it was switched off because of the winds, I've been told). And looking the other way, the old League of Nations building in some grounds I've discovered are the Jardins Botannique.

Our hotel this week is in a village on the lakeside. High class but having difficulty supplying a vegetarian meal (almost any vegetables at all).

Saw a Co-op shop this morning (saving money in any way here could be the difference between survival and destitution) - in fact, had plenty of time to see it as we were sitting in a traffic jam for God knows how many miles into the city. But earlier we sat and saw the sun rise over the lake as we ate breakfast. So, win some, lose some.

Next week the team returns to a hotel in the city. I heard the team leader call the area in which it is located 'le Pigalle de Genève', or as my English colleague described it when looking out of her window last week, 'the red light district'.

La Vie Genevoise – 15th Oct

Yesterday as the cloud drifted about the tops of the buildings we found no table space in the "Restaurant a l'attique', as our favourite dining place calls itself, so we took our trays out onto the balcony and used one of the tables there - it was fresh and reasonable. By the time we had finished most of the tables were in use - someone just had to go first through the exterior doors.

Today the sun is shining behind a thin white cloud

La Vie Genevoise – Some Weeks On - 16th Oct

We broke off from our workshop meeting this morning and I took my cup of water outside to sip in the bright sunshine. There were a few clouds, but they were as high as the aircraft leaving jet trails. In front of us a trailer was being filled with the sign from the roof - on Friday this building is closing and we are moving across town - and as I watched, a large brown butterfly, "une papillon" cried Eric my colleague, settled on the side of the trailer before flying off again. While Eric finished his cigarette I waited, and thought another butterfly was landing but I was deceived - it was a brown, sere leaf. When I returned to the office and looked at the trees across the railway tracks leaves were falling in masses, so that hundreds were in the air at any moment while I watched. Warm as the weather is it cannot stop the natural cycles of life.

We were in the Restaurant a l'Attique in the WMO again today and took our trays out to the tables on the balcony. The floor is wooden slatted, and with the sun shining, the glass sides, the sun blinds folding and flapping above us, we could have been on a great liner out on the lake.

This is the middle of my third week and I think I have become part of the team. At least, they have been asking me to give them the English equivalent of French rude words. While I think I have a reasonable vocabulary this has been stretching - plainly, my previous life in England has not given me enough experience of some of France's more common practices.

Here in Geneva, life is very French - we are very close to the border (part of the airport actually crosses it, probably intentionally to avoid passport problems) and our learning French continues apace (though a very slow pace). The only differences I have noted are that the Swiss park better, and do not give priority to the right on the roads. Both, though, have manic looking police and militia on the streets carrying machine guns, sometimes.

The hotel takes a German language newspaper, and the staff are multilingual in three or four languages (much like our own English hotel staff) and capable of dealing with an Austrian at the desk while answering a telephone query from a Camerounian and giving a guest her key. Coming out of the hotel (for the last two weeks we have been in a good hotel near the airport, part of the Ibis chain - the best one I have stayed in) one sees the signs for Ferney. It is a town I had only heard of before - the French philosopher Voltaire lived there, mainly so he could hop it across the border when the King of France objected to something he wrote. Your memories of the Man in the Iron Mask will remind you of what the King of France could do when he objected to you. Voltaire was the man alleged to have said I disagree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it. The King of France tended to say something more on the lines of I disagree with what you say. To Death!

And having driven around a little, I think Voltaire settled in a very pleasant place.

Some of the shock of the potential bills in our first hotel, the Hotel de Lac in Coppet, quickly wore off and when I was moved to a room at the back of the hotel with its own terrace and view of the lake I forgave them nearly everything. When I discovered that the whole bill was going to the company I DID forgive them everything. The high street of Coppet is lined with ancient houses, some of them still with great barn doors. I guess the people farmed the hills above the village and brought their cattle down to overwinter in the ground floor of the house. Most of them had two, three or four floors above. These days the front doors show two, three, four doorbells, so they have been turned into flats, but I'll bet they have always been multi-occupancy in the sense that the farmer's farmily had the best rooms and the farm workers and servants lived in the rest.

A canalised stream ran down the side of the hotel into the lake, and looking at the ancient buildings across the road, the stream must have been the outflow from a water mill. No wheel was obvious so it has either been removed or there is an undershot wheel that is completely inside and hidden. A doorway under the enormous covered walkway further along the main street (shelter for shoppers from storms and snow, no doubt, for hundreds or years) had a sign promising the Coppet Museum and a complete reconstruction of a nineteenth century living room, but I would have preferred to see a medieval watermill.

In other ways, both France and Switzerland have reminded me of New England - the spreading out of houses, the mixing of say office blocks and apartment blocks, (gardens surrounded by chain-link fencing, too), and a general openness. American voices we hear in the Restaurant a l'Attique tend to come from people who look comfortable - although, thinking of everyone we see there, what I really mean is that the Americans look as happy as the rest.

Next week we move into another hotel near the city centre and have to find the new workplace. I've been told we'll travel from the hotel to work and back via what is either a super-tram or railcar - it doesn't run on roads at any rate. At the moment, though, I haven't seen any trams running - instead they seem to be the cause of our problems in getting here. Road works put to mockery the Swiss reputation for organisation and structure, and one meets them everywhere, but mainly on the way to the office.

Anyway, with Friday being the day the office is closed, and my airline ticket being non-transferable, I hope to explore. This was the town of John Calvin, the theorist of predestination, so I'll be damned if I don't.

Geneva Exterior 26th Oct

"Extérieur?" asked the girl at the till.

"Extérieur," I admitted, and then in more detail than I needed or could understand she directed me to go to the back of the other queue. To be fair, she might not have not been directing me to go to the back, but to the other queue? Definitely.

The reason? A lunchtime salad is sold by weight in Switzerland. This was true in the Restaurant a l'Attique in the WMO building (fruit salad mostly for me, it was, as there was always a vegetarian choice of main dish), but yesterday we had to set out across the factory yard and the railway lines, through the chain link fence and the carpark and into the headquarters of the Swiss Coop (no hyphen, the Swiss are very economic with their lettering). This enormous building opens its doors to allow anyone from this Zone Industrielle to go upstairs and into the Orangerie restaurant. Each day there are four main courses on offer - one of them today was alpine deer in some shape (obviously a bad one as far as I was concerned), but all of them carniverous. Fortunately, there is also a salad bar. Unfortunately, as I found, only one of the two tills had a scale to weigh my salad.

Yesterday morning we tripped through arrivals, met our two colleagues arrived from Paris and descended into the bowels of the airport building, down to the parking level for the hire cars (like Tolkien's Hobbits in deep Moria, we never ventured to discover what was in the levels even deeper still). Through a circuitous route that involved collecting tickets at one barrier and depositing at them another we found ourselves out on the autoroute, though only for a short trip south before we came off and started to wind through lanes amid warehouses, metal sheet boxes that might be factories or anything, farm houses and homes, searching for the our new place of work where our computers were relocated over the weekend. The declaration of a Zone Industrielle seems to have deposited all these works out in the country while leaving the country lanes - we could see the factory sign and the Coop building for a long time as we circled trying to reach it. Finally on what was noticeably a road in an industrial estate we learned that life is no easier here than back in England - because we had not arrived at the crack of dawn all the parking spaces were taken. We left the hire car half on the pavement and went inside. (Perhaps our driving colleague had a Frenchman's fatalism, perhaps he hoped, if necessary, to do a reverse Voltaire and escape into France if prosecuted).

Long after night had fallen we set off for our hotel. The Swiss clearly have an allergy to roads leading to their desired destinations. The Bougis hotel shone enormous and bright blue beside the autoroute. Unfortunately, the autoroute did not lead to it. We came off and took another drive through country lanes, while the rain falling helped to block the view. Later, when I peered from my hotel room window I could see a swimming pool in the grounds, though only because its lighting shone even more brightly than the floodlights which bathed the walls and windows with their azure hue. The doube, or perhaps even triple glazed window, proved to be soundproof when I shut it - not so lightproof were the curtains when they were drawn, light slipped in around the edges, but not so badly that I did not sleep solidly, even through the floor- rocking thunderstorms that started to rage and shake the building as I cleaned my teeth.

The sky was clear when I pulled back the curtains in the morning and I was looking out of the hotel grounds, across fields, across trees in the distance, and beyond all of that - the lake again. Lake Léman, Lake Geneva, and on the far side the hills rising which must be the start of the Alps. We were somewhere above Coppet, the village in which I stayed at the end of September.

Geneva stands at the end of Lake Léman (which is shaped like an inverted banana), crossing the Rhône which flows out and down to Lyon, where is merges with the Saône. Work and residence mean that I am seeing a lot of the outlying areas to the south-east of the city. I only see the Alps in the distance, much closer are the mountains which come down from France - the Jura. They rise above a metal roof now as I gaze away from my typing. This morning in the sunshine I was surprised to see small white specks that must be lying snow (whether early, or very late-lying I do not know), but later today the clouds descended and covered the mountain tops, and then later rose again. The cloud, though, did not rise completely:- along the mountainside in small valleys clouds lay as if glued to the heather and pines and swelled above the rock like icecream swelling above icecream cones. The clouds have dissipated now.

And talking of dissipation I looked at our timetable of future hotels. Next week we are back near the airport, but the week after we are in the city. In the Hotel Des Alpes on the Avenue des Alpes. As I have discovered, though, moutainous swellings take on a new significance when talking of the Avenue des Alpes - it marks the edge of the Genevan redlight district - le Pigalle de Genéve my colleague called it. It seems as if fate is alway throwing me into these, as happened in the rain last Friday. More of that another time, though.

The Day of the Dead – 1st Nov

Today is Toussaint, and a public holiday in France. All of our French colleagues returned yesterday, but we English and Swiss are having to work, which has peeved the English at least. On Wednesday night we asked our colleague at dinner - "What are you going to do on Friday, Eric?" Eric replied, take his parents and go to the grave of his grandparents, clean the tombstone and the grave site, and meet other family members who would also have made the journey. The cemeteries of France would be full of people returning to their home towns and villages to show their respects. In fact, because of this, Hallowe'en is one of the busiest times of the year on the roads in France.

We were suddenly silenced by hearing that a religious festival was still being treated as one - it doesn't happen in Britain. The next public holiday in France is Armistice Day and with most Frenchmen doing National Service until recently I guess that large parts of the country again will be out in parades and services of commemoration. That's returning in Britain but not to the same degree. (Switzerland still has national service and this week, in the local paper, I have been reading about a young man sent to prison because he is a conscientious objector).

When we heard Eric's reply we were shocked into silence, and from a sense of respect. It's learning these little differences that means a lot, and indicates what I think are quite large differences still between the countries of Europe. The shops may be the same, but the life around them will be different.

And I remembered something I have not done for twenty-five years - the visits we used to make to clean the grave of my paternal grandfather (who died before I was born) when we were staying with relatives in north Kent. A year or two ago I was amazed to a look a map of the Stephen Lawrence stabbing and see that it happened in the road outside the cemerery, and wondered what had happened in the last quarter century to change what I remembered as a quiet suburb. Somethings are separated from us by distance, some by time.

Genéve by night – Nov 14th

The lights along the promenade were shining, and their reflections rose and fell on the lake. The ropes on the masts of the yachts slapped against the wood as they rode at anchor. It was eleven in the evening and we were walking off a meal. From the brasserie we had slipped down a street or two and found ourselves on the lakeside drive. We could have turned right and walked along to the bridge between the old and new town, but we didn't intend to cross and we had used that way to take a circular constitutional the previous week. We turned left, and walked in front of the glassy new Hilton Hotel and Casino. A glance into some expensive pavement level shops convinced us to keep walking.

Things began to improve when we found a small park in the triangle of a road junction and studied the bust and memorial to an otherwise unknown Swiss author - The Bistros of Old Geneva seemed to be one of the titles laying his claim to fame. However, the next time I plan a rendez-vous with one of my agents to receive the secret papers I will be able to say, meet at the statue of Jean Marteau in the Rue Jean Marteau as the clocks stirke midday. But that assignation has yet to come.

Further on, the grand buildings start, each with their name plaque - Belle Regarde, Beau Rivage - all names justified by their outlooks. Two or three in a row were confusing - were they apartment blocks, offices, or what? One had a doctor's plaque by one of its doors - perhaps as in Lyon, professionals take their rooms on the lower floors of apartment buildings. That building, though, had a second set of doors and a name above them "Bank". Another building was just as impressive, and more astonishing were the curves of the windows, the flowery shapes of the balacony ironworks - it looked more Art Nouveau than Art Deco, and almost had the strange organic shapes of Gaudi's Church of the Holy Family in Barcelona. What could these be? We turned a corner and started to walk up hill, having reached the furthest point of our walk, and beginning to square off on our way back. Up the side of the building any sign of Art Nouveau disappeared. In fact, on the ground floor, with its signs for "pneus" and "gaz", there was a garage, constructed with the best and most functional lines of Art Deco. Perhaps the architect was a functionalist at heart but had had to supply the tastes of his clients as to frontages, or perhaps his building went on through the nineteen-twenties. (For by a strange co-incidence, when I finally climbed into bed last night and read a few pages of my book, I found a throw-away line that reminded me that Art Deco took its name from the 1925 Paris Exhibition of Art Decoratif). I wondered if the frontage was built before and the rest of the building completed after the world exploded with simple lines and gleaming wood veneers (such as we saw in the entrance halls of these palaces). Simple lines must have been the vogue in Geneva for garage erectors, since we saw another across the road - its lines even straighter, as if Bauhaus (the architectural movement a little later, not the Eighties pop group) had come to the city. There was a sports car up on a ramp and left for the night - evidence that the garage was still functioning seventy years on as it had always done.

The small size of Geneva's zone of toleration can be gauged from the fact that we circumnavigated it in our walk with almost no awareness. The shop that we saw selling helmets, chain mail, gauntlets, swords and darts was for fans of ancient history with a taste for dressing up, not for anything more clearly of the night. We took one short cut around a corner, to hear a lady in the shadows of a nightclub door talking to us in intimate tones. I would, of course, have preferred her to do this to me alone, as I have no desire for a threesome involving my colleague. We tried to keep away from said lady, but two cars with their lights on had stopped in the road and we were forced to cross to the pavement outside the nightclub, which allowed me to see that all those delightful sounds were being directed into a mobile telephone at the lady's ear. We went on down on sidestreet so that my colleague could return to a shop window we first saw last week.

There in a narrow shop window, its sign telling us that it was open only from two till seven each day or by appointment, some exceptional Genevoise had the glamour of yesterday available. Brass window displays and counter-weighted porcelain light-fittings revealed the silks and satins of forty years ago (then of course to be hidden beneath A-line frocks and New Look Suits - though these looked unworn), and still-in-their-cellophane packs of hosiery, and in its long flat cardboard box, one pink corset. And high up in the window a couple of dresses that might have been modelled by Patty Boyd or Catherine Deneuve. I did not question my colleague closely as to what had had drawn her back, nor induce her further disappointment by indicating the opening times that we shall never be free to use.

Most shops were dark, and only a few lights shone in the bars above the counters where the staff were cashing up. It was almost an hour short of midnight but Geneva was ready for bed. And I was relieved, for triple glazed as the windows are in my room they don't close properly and the street noise comes hissing in through the gap. Only a quiet night could give me sleep. I and my friends, I find, supply enough to keep me awake without needing intenvention from outside.

Geneva – These Things I Saw 21st Nov

Landing at Geneva airport with a headache I went to the pharmacy. Like all Swiss and French pharmacies the shelves were loaded with homeopathic remedies for night sweats, loss of libido, loss of toenails and many more things I could not translate nor wish to understand. There were also bandages and sticking plasters, air ionisers and a wide selection of colognes. Nowhere - not even behind the counter - could I see an aspirin. I was foolish to stop and look, for by the time I approached it, at the counter in front of me was a lady buying the equivalent of the Algerian health service for her family of four. I hope she was flying out, it would show little faith in the medical services of Switzerland, if she had just landed like me.

Eventually I was served and I explained my need for something for a mal-de- tête. The white-coated assistant interrogated me fiercely to ascertain that I had only a mal-de-tête and then from a drawer produced a small cardboard box. I received a large bank loan, paid and left. Running tight for time, I never opened the packet, but drank extra water when I arrived at work. So a pack of Swiss analgesics now rests beside a battered box of plasters and something for a gippy tummy in my bathroom cupboard.

The till receipt is before me now - "PP Pharmacie" it is headed, and gives the name of the assistant who served me. Like someone in a photograph with a black bar across the face, she is identified only as "Madame Béatrice C." Knowing her first name, but also told that she is unobtainably married I can only dream. These Swiss can be so cruel.

Unlike Madame Beatrice C, the items in my medical cabinet remain may one day be taken.

**

Much as there is to admire in Switzerland, on only the third day of our travelling by rail the train was ten minutes late departing.

I shall never forget.

**

For the first week of our arrival at the Gare Zimeysa - the halt in the middle of Zone Industrielle Meyrin-Vernier - we walked to and from this building along the road beside the Co-Op (the Swiss, like the Bostonians, call it the Coop. I am inserting the hyphen), and then took the long foot passage under the railway to the ticket machine. It is like one of the underground chambers in which the Greeks and Romans celebrated the Eleusinian Mysteries - a garish riot of colour, from which nightmarish human-like figures leer out.

The spray painting graffiti artists have been at work.

We can now see that the stop before ours is just above the concrete underpass through which we drove in our first weeks in this building. There - the concrete strips even wider and higher - many seem to have been at work, as if perhaps the authorities had turned loose the painters to decorate, each given their own square meterage to cover. As each piece is different, each artist can be described honestly as incomparable.

Every day passing drivers realise that both authorities and artists still have much to learn.

**

The word "baiser" means "kiss". However, It ends in "...er" so might be thought to be a verb, "to kiss". Don't believe it. A week after my colleague made this mistake the rude French men in the team were still repeating her error.

We still have much to learn.

French speakers must be aware of the chance for double-entendres. When Radio Nostalgie played the Brotherhood of Man's Save Your Kisses For Me, the announcer translated "kisses" as "bisoux". I shall always do the same.

**

I don't know if Radio Nostalgie is based in France or here in French speaking Switzerland, but it follows the French language laws on broadcasting - it plays no more than one hit sung in English before it plays a hit in French. The English hits everybody knows, I am not sure that even the French know all the alleged French hits.

Here's how you can have the experience of listening to Radio Nostalgie without being here - rise for an early breakfast on Saturday morning and listen to Brian Matthew on Radio 2. When he plays one of the thousands of records released in the early sixties that was heard once on Saturday Club or Thank Your Lucky Stars and then disappeared - that is the sound of Radio Nostalgie.

**

Words that can be wrongly identified and translated are called "faux amies" (false friends). For instance, "ponctuel" means "sometimes", the opposite of its apparent meaning.

On a noticeboard in Lyon I saw someone offering puppies to good homes - "labrador sable". "Oh," I said, "Black Labradors", thinking of the fur colour. "Golden," corrected my French colleague, just back from his coach tour of Scotland. "'Sable' is sand." Our address now is "Rue de les Sablieres" - Sandpit Street. I guess that the Zone Industrielle was built on an area of reclaimed gravel pits - the train passes one still in operation on our way here.

Geneva – Bridges Across the Rhône – 23rd Nov

You may have noticed - I have - a new and attractive style in bikini bottoms. Not a triangle of material - the design I have in mind is a no more than a triangle of cords defining the outside of the garment, with another cross-piece one third of the way down, while only the lowest third is flesh-covering, rather than outlining, fabric.

Can you envisage what I'm talking about? - ignore any waistbands or back. Think tease.

Now that you have the picture you have had a birds-eye of the bridges across the Rhone, where the bridges of Geneva span the narrow V as Lake Leman flows away through the city. The bridge furthest away from the lake is the most solid. After using it several times I am still not sure that this crossing does not consist of an island in the middle of the river (perhaps artificial) to which one or more bridges on each side join from the old and new towns respectively. On the island are several buildings, and on the bridge on the new town side is a large and dull bus-stop. Not only is this stop used by many buses, but they tend to be long, bendy buses requiring a long kerb at which to board.

On Tuesday night - again, dinner was over - we set out, and this time our feet took us down to the lakeside, along and across the bridge and island. We looked at the river below our feet, as we tried to escape the crowds still waiting for their rides home, and saw that it was pouring through. None of the three bridges here is very high above the river - no more than ten or fifteen feet I'd say, which surprised me, as this is the same river which flows through Lyon where the riverside roads and bridges must be thirty feet above the water (even when we saw it at the time it was flooding Avignon and towns further south). The water may have been just as high the last time I crossed, but I suppose that it can't have been running as fast or I would have noticed it. Perhaps all the rain that has been falling on the hills around the lakes has run off and now can only escape by streaming beneath these bridges and away to the south.

Across the river we turned left and started to walk along what is the beginning of Geneva's high class shopping street - rather boringly it starts with private banks, watch and shoe shops, enough of which I have seen (only the right companion could make them interesting again). A couple of side streets passed and then an open square between the riverside buildings showed us that we had reached the second bridge.

This is a broad footbridge, though a wide one - motor traffic may have used it once - on pillars across the river. We started back on ourselves - there was little wind and the night was brightly moonlit, adding to the lamplight on the bridge and gleam of the neon signs on the roofs of the buildings all along this end of the lake. We looked down at the base of a down-river pillar and saw two swans asleep on the water. There at the centre of the bridge we realised that it opened onto a small island on the up-river side and I lead the way. On the stone foundations above the water line more swans and geese or ducks were asleep and then looking before us we realised that about the base of the island there were fences in the water (quite recent from the shining metal) and these contained many more swans. This was a swan colony, with an open gateway from which the white giants could emerge if they chose, but that night at that time, like most Genevans, they were already asleep.

The third bridge was close, but not touching as I first mistakenly thought, and carried a constant stream of traffic. Perhaps built recently, if "recently" means within the last twenty or thirty years or so, unfortunately it spoils what must be an attractive feature of the pedestrian's island - not the swans on the downriver side, but the vista of the lake. The small island ended in a point where were set out seats so that the lake could be surveyed, and to one side a small restaurant with an open air dining room (closed for the night if not the season, we could not tell which). Perhaps that small area plays another role as well, for at the centre of the seating area is a larger-than-life-sized statue of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, another liberal thinker of an intolerant age who lived in Geneva. Or perhaps Geneva has no need of the "Speaker's Corner" that Jean-Jacques would exemplify elsewhere. Before the third bridge was built I can imagine people going to the point, breathing in the lakeside air and feeling the waters rush about them, like the couple in "Titanic" standing on more solid ground.

Back across the river we walked along the lakeside road to the bottom of the Rue des Alpes, most of the buildings we passed being expensive hotels, with their street level dining rooms almost empty. It seemed that the few people left were couples gazing into each others eyes (in each hotel the maitre'd seemed to have identified these couples early on and placed them at window tables), while lone elderly men in lounge suits sat against inside walls and sipped liqueurs as uniformed waiting staff flapped brushes over tablecloths and planned future seating.

The walk up the Rue des Alpes was dull - much of the property on the lower length of the street is being redeveloped while the rest of the windows seemed intent on being filled with Swiss army knives and carved wooden cows. So I had time to think.

The Rhone must rush because it is shallow as it flows through Geneva - two thousand years ago in 58 BC Julius Caesar's army was able to ford it, but those bridges, now so important on the city's bus-routes, must have been an important stage to opening the two sides of the city to each other. On the walls of the brasserie last week there was a painting of a large group of people in seventeenth century costume greeting each other, and in the distance behind them one could make out the two lakesides stretching away. Perhaps it portrays the ceremonial opening of the first bridge, held on the island, achieved after much effort, some important event in the history of the city.

Now I have to discover if the swans also have some significance to the city. They do not appear on the city (or canton or state - Geneva is all three) flag, but I wonder if they are to Geneva as ravens are to the Tower of London or apes to the Rock of Gibraltar, and so are encouraged to stay. Where shall I go to find out?
... I went.
... I came back.

What I thought might be an artificial island is not - it is the ancient heart of the city. None of the bus-stops of Geneva are particularly picturesque, but there the city has managed to put one of its least attractive within sight of the Tour d'Ile, the city's oldest building.

The island further out with the statue of Rousseau is the Ile Rousseau, renamed in honour of the man who took much of his exercise there. The statue dates back to the 1820s, so could have been carved by a man who knew him, though memories would have been stretched as Jean-Jacques died before the French Revolution. Geneva must have been at peace long before, for in the middle ages this island was fortified and protected the city from naval attacks from the lake. No sign of battlements or gun-emplacements remained for us to see.

And the swans?

There is a swan or bird sanctuary only in the sense that the hunting of birds is forbidden along the Swiss Rhone, but the birds have long been part of the city and ancient legend says they are the re-incarnations of suicides, their new lives now at peace. I cannot imagine that the city would let them go.

Geneva – Mine is the Morning – 4th Dec

Our hotel lies near the top of the Rue des Alpes - a road which neither leads to the mountains (there's a lake in the way), nor allows any room in the hotel a view of those mountains. In a chamber at the front of the hotel again, I open my curtains in the morning and gaze down the Rue Chaponniere which is directly opposite. It's a short road, mostly lined with restaurants. You might almost think it had been strictly "zoned", as if no two restaurants of the same type were permitted. Along the upper side of the street, with a small general store with food in the window which says that it has Iranian specialities among them, there's a Chinese, a Greek, an Italian, a Thai, an Algerian and finally a Mexican restaurant. We have yet to visit the Greek and Thai - but our team has now done the rest of them mutliple times (though I declined to return to the Chinese, whose tofu dishes seemed to have an uncanny resemblance to giblets*. Just as in Lyon I discovered that any dish - even a goats' cheese salad - was likely to have 'lardons' - ham chunks - added unless one was quick, so this particularly ethnic Chinese restaurant seemed to add giblet-looking things to all their dishes). The other side of the street has a wider range of uses - not just restaurants, but a bar or two, some shops, and the "Twin's Club" (I am not sure that the Swiss fully understand the use of the apostrophe). The Twin's Club's doors are curtained, and what would be two of its three street-front windows are blocked with film posters (the latest James Bond I noticed last night). The third window shows another poster, but with no special film connection - it is a bronzed, muscular male chest. While my colleagues were called back to the Mexican restaurant to sort out a credit card bill I waited and watched the entrance of the club, hoping to see something of its clientele entering and leaving. But it must have been an usually quiet night on the Rue Chaponniere - just as we got a table with no waiting and just as the other restaurants had empty places, no one entered or left the Twin's Club while I watched. I have yet to discover what or who goes on or inside there.

The significance of those restaurants to my opening the curtains this morning is this: their neon lights were bright, the street lamps were still illuminated, and all were reflected from the rain-soaked pavements. On a grey morning there are few more depressing sights than neon signs mirrored in puddles while commuters hurry by to their buses and trains and this morning there were none.

Twenty minutes later everything had changed.

Stepping from the train at our halt, we followed the footpath between the chain link fences - before our eyes the Jura mountains. Somewhere behind us and above the lake the sun had just risen and the sky was close to cloudless. The sun made the snowcapped mountain tops glow pink - all before us, running from north to south, the soft red of the snow gleamed into the sky and the forest below the treeline was a wamer colour than its normal self.

Imagine a Christmas cake some days after Christmas - much still remains, but it is cut open revealing its dark brown interior - the top is still white-iced, but on the cake tray crumbs and white fragments of icing lie mixed. That would one vision of the forests and snowcap of the Jura as we have seen it. Today, though, calls for another image. Think of slabs of marshmallow or nougat - one side white, one side pink. For a time this morning the mountains seemed to have become a giant sweetshop, its contents laid out for us to admire.

The clouds have returned now and the red sky has passed. Tonight I am sure that the neon lights of the Rue Chaponniere will be shining again when we return. We will, though, be carrying the sight of the Jura within us like silver bullets to fire against the vampiric city.

* "Instead of being my deliverance,
She had a strange resemblance
To a cat named Frankenstein"
- you may remember Same Cooke or Cat Stevens singing these words. I thought the dinners had more resemblance to Frankenstein's cat than was healthy. Or perhaps I just had an unhealthily active imagination.