Lake Geneva.

This is the view from my hotel room at sunset. Boss, isn't it? Lake Geneva is one of the most beautiful places I've been too. Here you can see the shadow of the French Alps on the left across the water. This is where Evian is made in a huge industrial plant where it's wrung out of the rock like orange juice. That's why it's so pure. That, and all the chemicals they put in it to make it transparent and to get rid of the rock-mites.

Montreux is a pretty town, snug between the lakeshore and the moutains. It feels like nothing bad can happen in Montreux. Sometimes its hard to be agnostic with all this majesty in evidence.

However, if there's one thing to make me think that the universe is Godless it's jazz and blues and The Montreux Jazz Festival was in full effect. Aside from a few old duffers, who plays blues well? No one, right? People only like playing it because it's easy to do badly. All those pointless tossers blathering on and on about being down....BB King, Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson - what did you do to us! I mean, those guys sang the blues, but these days people are at best only moping. And Jazz...what's wrong with the right notes in the right order, eh?

I went swiming in Lake Geneva on the day that we left. The water was warm and fresh and I could swim and stare up at the Alps with the sun on my face. The air was so calm and still it felt like all of Switzerland was whispering so as not to distrub the beauty of the day. Then some selfish wanker started playing a gig on the outdoor stage behind our hotel. I think it was the deaf bastard son of George Benson pushing a barrow load of smooth jazz guitars off an Alp and scatting over the top of it. When I climbed out of the lake I noticed a strange thing....people were listening. What's up with that? And scratch that thing I said about nothing bad happening in Montreux...