The Nearby Elsewhere

Wednesday, Ist October

Last night we stayed at the aire in Bavay, between Valenciennes and Mauberge. Gill's sister and her family live nearby and we met up for a family catch-up and Jackie and Edmond rustled-up dinner to feed the starving wanderers.

Next day it was the start of the long trundle south over the great plain that covers most of the Northeast corner of France. It should be a deadly boring drive, especially as it's a well trodden route for us. However even mundane, work-a-day France is never wholly boring, there is always something you come across that strikes you as delightfully odd. I can't quite recall who coined the phrase ' the nearby elsewhere' perhaps it was Rebecca Solnit, but it does capture the sense that you don't necessarily have to be intrepid to be a traveller; given a keen eye and time to observe, then the nearby can be exotic.

Not everywhere in Northeast France looks like this...it just feels that way at the time.

We have been visiting France regularly for almost forty years, add up all the holidays and in total we have probably been itinerants in residence for over three years. Even so, it's not the same as living there permanently for that time. The place remains, for all its familiarity, slightly eccentric and quirky, not least in its predilection for fancifully designed street furniture and concrete brutalist monstrosities scattered about in the landscape.

Am I the only person that finds gigantic hypermarkert signs against a bright blue sky sublimely beautiful

Or quirky attempts at making public spaces cute, well kind of charming

and that empty sunlit shopping malls exude a dreamlike melancholy....

So, for me, the sense of liberation of being abroad can just as easily be provoked by a giant hypermarket sight against a deep blue sky, or bizarrely designed concrete benches in a public space as the sight of poppy strewn cornfields, poplar lined roads, dark cypresses, or russet tinged vines.

The aire at the Halte Nautique on the banks of the Marne conforms more readily to this postcard vision of France, with drooping branched willows on the river bank reflected in the indolent water, a lock-keepers cottage up-stream, all very bucolic and lovely.

As we took an stroll in the golden evening light, I thought of how privileged I had been to be able to travel as a pastime and not a necessity. This thought was re-inforced by the story on BBC website that a young Eritrean man had been struck down by a train last night in Calais trying to reach the UK. It is so sad that the man's perilous journey from the Horn of Africa came to such a tragic end on the railway tracks at Calais. I remembered yesterday looking at the rolls of barbed wire stretched between the lines, like something from a war zone. There is a great Auden poem written in the 1930s called a 'Summer Night' where he recalls partying with friends under the stars as the threat of war hangs over the continent. I fear we too may be looking towards ever darker times.