Postcards from Paris and Switzerland, February 2026

The waitress in the Paris café was tolerant. My painting things were all over the table. I’d finished my meal some time ago. But she did not hurry me away.

I was travelling by train, arriving many hours later in Geneva.

Trains from Geneva to Lausanne were disrupted because Swiss football supporters had, I learned later, thrown lighted fireworks out of the train windows, onto the tracks. These fireworks had landed in the one place they could do damage: communications cables temporarily exposed while track works were carried out. In local papers there was much finger pointing: the train company condemning irresponsible football supporters, the football club maintaining that it was foolish to have train windows that opened on such a train, and then the train company pointing out that the it was the person behind the lighted firework that was the problem, not the open window.

I reached my destination by a zigzag route involving unfamiliar buses through increasing fog.

Higher up, it was snowing.

The snow fields had geometric simplicity.

Sometimes, sketching from my room was a better idea.

These sketches are all postcards, which I dropped into letterboxes as I travelled. My friend kept them all, and the envelopes.