All sorts of reasons for choosing a holiday destination. Nowadays so many Irish people fly off to sandy beaches and blue seawater half a world away. And not only the wealthy, as used to be. One of the great benefits of our times. Some people go to a city, just for itself and its art and architectural treasures.
A multiplicity of reasons might draw you to Geneva, Switzerland, on Lac Leman. This smallish city, as a brochure aimed at international big business firms states, combines the elements of a good administrative centre with the amenities of a holiday resort - i.e. the lake and the mountains. You can live the high life or you can eat and drink at modest prices. In restaurant after restaurant along the shores you can lunch and look out over wildlife on the water to the immense white mass of the Mont Blanc. You can swim in clear water. You can take a boat that brings you round the lake. You can wander through lovely parks, donated by previous civic-minded landowners, and see trees which we don't often see. Museums and art galleries, of course, to browse in.
You can admire the city's famous Jet D'eau, a plume of water that is sent to a height of 140 metres, and all the shapes the water creates according to the weather. Sometimes it's a strong jet upwards and descending as a fine screen many times as broad; minute by minute, it seems the descending flow changes its pattern. Could we have one, please, in Dublin Bay? There's plenty of room surely, and a good powerful machine could make it visible from many, many parts of the city. Yes, you'd have to cut it off in very stormy weather, and yachtsmen would complain. But what a treat for our citizens, what a striking symbol for the passenger coming by boat - or craning down from the plane to catch his or her first view of the city. Form an association to promote the idea!
Trees in Geneva, for this visitor mean, above all, the Ginkgo. They line streets in the centre of the city, apparently resisting pollution. The fan-shaped two-lobed leaves are golden in autumn. Some call it the tree "aux milles ecus," a gold-coloured coin of the past apparently. "A weird and way-out tree" 200 million years old, we read in Edlin, The Tree Key. Never managed to grow one to any size. You been luckier?
Maybe more on Geneva another day, but just this last: what a blessing the direct Dublin-Geneva KLM flight is: about two-and-a-half hours. Look forward to the next trip.