Lake Geneva

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so if you imagine a long valley, uh, the normal route starts at the head of the valley and finishes in Lake Geneva.

But to do the 360, you start in Lake Geneva, go one side of the valley, and come back the other way.

So, um, yeah, that's just mental, isn't it?

It is mental.

The first appearance of their distant snows stirred her as no emotion ever had, so that she came to date her life by these appearances rather than by the calendar of months and days.

The morning when from the hotel windows at Glion she had first seen the twin peaks of the Dent de Midi towering in silver high above a blue corner of the Lake of Geneva formed one memorable date.

Once, too, in the wintertime, as the Rome Express stopped at three o'clock in the morning at the frontier on the Italian side of the Mont Cenis Tunnel, she had carefully lifted the blind on the right-hand side of the sleeping compartment and had seen a great wall of mountains tower up in a clear, frosty moonlight from great buttresses of black rock to delicate pinnacles of ice soaring infinite miles away into a cloudless sky of blue.

She had come near to tears that night as she looked from the window.

The first appearance of their distant snows stirred her as no emotion ever had, so that she came to date her life by these appearances rather than by the calendar of months and days.

The morning when from the hotel windows at Glion she had first seen the twin peaks of the Dent du Midi towering in silver high above a blue corner of the Lake of Geneva formed one memorable date.

Once, too, in the wintertime, as the Rome Express stopped at three o'clock in the morning at the frontier on the Italian side of the Mont Cenis tunnel, she had carefully lifted the blind on the right-hand side of the sleeping compartment and had seen a great wall of mountains tower up in a clear, frosty moonlight from great buttresses of black rock to delicate pinnacles of ice soaring infinite miles away into a cloudless sky of blue.

She had come near to tears that night as she looked from the window, such a tumult of vague longings rushed suddenly in upon her and uplifted her.

We gratefully take in long breaths of air which, hot and dry as it is, are, we are well aware, more fresh and sweet than any we are likely to obtain during the next twenty-four hours.

For only personal experience of the stifling heat of that unrivalled hollow can make it possible to realise that six and a half million tons of water which fall into the Dead Sea, a basin about the size of Lake Geneva, but with no outlet, have to be daily evaporated.

Far away southward is the great salt district, where the salt deposit, coated with chalky limestone and clay, takes many weird forms, among which the Arabs point out Bint Shekluth, the woman of Sheklot.

Of whose wickedness even to this day the wasteland that smoketh is a testimony, and plants bearing fruit that never come to ripeness, and a standing pillar of salt is a monument of an unbelieving soul.

The water boils at 221 degrees Fahrenheit, but the presence of chloride of magnesium makes it incredibly nauseous, while the oily quality, which it derives from the chloride of calcium, makes any accidental splash upon the garments very destructive.

We gratefully take in long breaths of air, which, hot and dry as it is, are, we are well aware, more fresh and sweet than any we are likely to obtain during the next 24 hours, for only personal experience of the stifling heat of that unrivalled hollow can make it possible to realise that six and a half million tons of water which fall into the Dead Sea, a basin about the size of Lake Geneva, but with no outlet, have to be daily evaporated.

Far away southward is the great salt district, where the salt deposit, coated with chalky limestone and clay, takes many weird forms, among which the Arabs point out Bint Shekluth, the woman of Sheklot.

Of whose wickedness even to this day the wasteland that smoketh is a testimony, and plants bearing fruit that never come to ripeness, and a standing pillar of salt is a monument of an unbelieving soul.

So we pulled it up.

and uh we wrote the biographical story of the making of the album in montreux as in we all came out to montreux on the lake geneva shoreline blah blah blah so that became the song interestingly after the album was released it kind of got forgotten um because it was seven minutes long it never got played on the radio or anything And a guy called Rush Shaw from Warner Brothers came along to see us one day and saw the crowd reaction to Smoke and took a second look at it, went back, did an edit, cut it down to three minutes 20.

And what was your uncle? It became the most played rock song ever in history on the radio.

Incredible.

Because as you say, once the racing was going, it was great to watch, I thought.

Yeah, and I think we roll on to Geneva, Abu Dhabi and Dubai if the Straits of Hormuz are open.

All can be light weather events, but you're kind of safe in the knowledge that these boats can now take that.

I'm sort of a little bit sceptical on the whole motorised issue and the booster issue that Russell was talking about.

And, you know, if you're Andrea to say and you're Carl Langford, you're now going, OK, we can do this.

We're not just the whipping boys.

And look, we've got Geneva, Abu Dhabi and Dubai to come up.

you know, we could actually have a good end of the season.