Where All The Sparrows Went

A couple of years ago, people were lamenting the lost sparrows of London. I can confirm that they are all in Lausanne, outside the Lausanne Youth Hostel where a cacophony of chatter can be heard at seven o'clock in the morning in January. Some of them are at Lausanne Metro station too, eating crumbs on the platform.
Yesterday I got up early and had a wander around the city as it woke up. The mountains across the lake were invisible again, hidden by January lake mists, but the air in the city was clear and sharp. The streets of Lausanne are steep and cobbled, with a fresh fruit and vegetable market thriving just outside smart chocolate shops. This is French Switzerland, although it seemed like a miniature version of Vienna. In a large department store, posh ladies and gentlemen drank coffee and ate cakes at high benches in the quiet that only money can buy.
The aisles were full of every shape, colour, size and permutation of chocolate. I passed on the churn of chocolates that moos when you open it. Alas, there was no room in my bag, and anyway I still haven't opened the red plastic Christmas SFX device that I bought on a whim in the January sales.
One of the best things was that the train back to Geneva airport was a double decker one!
Through the distant mist, you could see skeletons of trees with no green summer flesh to soften them, layered and silhouetted against the water, with fields of vine stubs crouched over like rows of leaping stoats, next to the tracks. As on Thursday, there were odd juxtapositions: a crazy golf game being played right next to what looked like an enormous power-station, for example.
The plane landed like a feather on a lawn. Coming through Stansted was sad. There was a replacement bus service to Liverpool Street and it was more cheerful to travel with a coach load of people speaking French; it's amazing how easily you become used to another language being spoken around you, and if you don't strain to translate all the time, the music of the speech.

Insect home, UNIL; babbling brook with turquoise water; guitar shop (closed, alas); mooing churn; narnas; spuggy on the Metro; ceiling at Geneva airport (these babies grow to full-size planes in twenty years); shoe shop sign.