Monet's Pond

En route to the Alps, we stopped off at Claude Monet's house.

I know the impressionists were an important step on the the route to full modernism but my oh my do I find their paintings dull. Best suited to the covers of chocolate boxes and jigsaw puzzles.

It was an intimate affair, just us four, and the twelve thousand other tourists who had visited that day. Everyone queuing on the same bridge to take the same photo, of Monet's boat on his waterlilly pond. Every other photo opportunity made much more difficult by the hordes of camera-toting tourists crowded into the scene.

Actually his house was pretty interesting, with a brilliant sunflower-yellow dining room and a cool cornflower-blue kitchen, but they banned photography inside the house.

In protest, I took a picture of his lilly pond, and drained it. Of colour.