London calling

Our new car was delivered today - a silver Nissan Qashqai - which is unfortunate timing for me because I'm off to London tomorrow.




















Perhaps I'm just odd but when I was living in London I used to notice Swiss number plates and think how nice it would be to have one. Not just Swiss number plates either, but specifically those from Geneva with the letters GE. I've no idea why that was, but it does seem strange now looking at them on our own car!

Paul (being a real petrolhead!) thinks a Qashqai is nothing to blog about, but I'm very happy with it, and especially after three years of having to lug heavy bags home from the supermarket almost every day! I can give my two wheeled shopping 'chariot' a well needed rest now! I had a Hyundai Santa Fe before and, again, it was nothing to blog about but it was a lovely car to drive especially for a short person like me, it was a lovely 'fit'. So when we set out to do some test driving a couple of weeks ago (we were very lucky to get the model we wanted, normally there is a waiting list of months) I didn't think I'd find something as nice. The Hyundai dealer is the other side of the lake so that was a bit impractical for servicing. We were on the way to a Seat dealer when we remembered the Nissan dealer is only up the road so we popped in. I didn't expect to be so impressed but it's a lovely thing to drive and it has more extras than I thought was possible to stuff in a car. Deal done! Just in time for winter too because it's absolutely freezing here in Geneva this week!

I hope to have an interesting photo or two to post of London as I'll be meeting up with a man at the weekend and staying in a rather swanky hotel 'a short walk from Harrods'...

Do not adjust your mind...

there is a fault in reality.

That's a quote from a very interesting book I'm reading - or rather dipping into now and again as it's absolutely enormous and packed with ideas and info! - called The Art of Looking Sideways by Alan Fletcher.

The quote came to mind when I read an article in this morning's Telegraph about Damien Hirst's latest exhibition. Well, it's a relief to hear that more people are noticing (check out this lot) that the emperor is indeed wearing no clothes, but on the other hand, it beggars belief that it took so long! Some of us didn't adjust our minds to this skewed reality in the first place.

There are numerous little quotes and snippets from the book that I could post in relation to this but here's one I liked -

Robert Persig: ' We build up whole cultural patterns based on past "facts" which are extremely selective. When a new fact comes in that does not fit the pattern, we don't throw out the pattern. We throw out the fact'.

Based on that, I think it will take a while yet for the so-called experts to admit they were fooled. Actually, that's too much to hope for. No, they'll save face by simply jumping on another money making bandwagon and declare that period so passé. Or they would. It's just that - awkwardly - there is no sign of the next bandwagon on the horizon and in the meantime they've been playing the charade for so long it's hard to keep it up! Things could get interesting...