Overheard in Geneva this morning

"It's a beatiful lawn Darling. Very rare. You would be the only person to have one like this in the whole of Switzerland. It's got the kind of green you get in the West of Scotland, or the South of Ireland. You know, that deep deep luscious green. And they can import the whole lot in one day, and it would be laid down within a week. There's also very little mowing to do since the grass has been genetically modified to grow slowly. Barely a centimetre in a month. Which gives plently of time to pop off for a while and not find that a jungle has grown in our backyard when we get back home. Isn't that just wonderful? What is more, as a gift, they're offering a small remote control lawn mower. So there will be no more grass cutting to do at all."

in between

He was not drunk.
But he was not sober.
He had reached that foggy frontier where his eyes were looking at something which wasn't there,
where thoughts came rolling in slowly from a very far away land,
and their formulation stumbled out of a moist mouth whose lips were numbed with confusion.

a true story

He told the little girl about his travels to China. And how he had been offered every part of a duck to eat.

Its skin.

Its tongue.

Its feet.

Its liver.

Its brain.

"The brain?!" said the little girl, "And did it still have ideas in it?"

a scientist all the way from California

He pulled a chair out, sat on the edge of it with his legs spread out in front of him, the back of the seat bent as far back as possible, his elbow on the table and his hand waving madly as he talked about the research he was doing, elaborated ideas he had thought about, described what he had discovered and how happy he was with what he had done, in a monotonous voice which seemed to have got trapped somewhere just beneath his Adam's apple.

the lesson

I was walking past a building when I heard classical music drifting out of an open window and a woman's voice counting: "... one, two, three and .... up ... and turn ..." And eight pairs of little hands appeared at the bottom of the window and danced in slow circles.

but adolescents are the same

A conversation I overheard today, on people sharing views about their new lives with a baby:

"It's so tiring."
"Head-wrecking."
"They cry and you don't know why."
"They scream and you don't know why."
"You try and help them but it just makes them howl some more."

about a bit of lawn

As I walk to the office - on office days - I cross a bit of lawn clad with dogs' doings , which lets off the most nauseating whiffs during the summer months. The whole of Geneva walks their dogs on a green spot which is barely the size of a large sitting-room. It is a well-known fact now that you are supposed to wrap your dog's stools in little brown plastic bags and then dispose of them. Many people do. Many don't. And some only half do what they are supposed to. The result is a patch of grass which is covered with intact excrements of all shapes and sizes, little bits of fresh stuff the greatest part of which was put into a bag and thrown away, and bags full of brown turds which did not make it to the bin but were left to their own fates on the lawn.

I usually cross this particular patch of grass at the same time as a woman whose necklaces are as large as her dog is small. She never cleans up what her dog does. It must be the only time of the day, in fact, when she pretends that her dog is not hers. After having dragged it across the street too fast for it to sniff a lamp post, lift a leg or deposit a shite, she lets it off the lead the moment she touches the grass. The poor thing is so desperate that it looks for a spot where it can perform, with its arse already at the level of the ground and the beginnings of its creation on its way out, while its mistress saunters distractedly across the lawn, looking with great intent at the clouds forming above or the intriguing architecture on the buildings opposite.