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Wednesday 25 May 2016

Feeling endish

Wednesday 24th May, 2016


'Endish' is how Gill described her current state of mind in a recent email she sent to her sister. I think it's a great way of describing that vague, but all pervasive sense of anti-climax you get towards journeys' end, and it has been a bit of a trip as a few swift autosums on the spreadsheet revealed yesterday evening:
Miles travelled - 6885
Days - 161
Places we stayed - 91
Furthest point east - Poros
Furthest point south - a boulder to the south of Kamares Beach on the eastern shore of the Mani in the Peloponnese, which, if you look at the GPS co-ordinates, is around 9 miles south of Punta Braccetto, the furthest point south we reached in Sicily.
Most miles covered in one day: 284 - a desperate drive from Brindisi to Rosano.
Worst moment - reversing into the aforementioned boulder south of Kamares Beach and damaging Maisy's back end.
Best moment - lots of great moments, but for me, swimming in a mirror-still Med towards the reflection of the full moon under a sky so starry that it looked like a planetarium - that takes some beating. Even though I then got up the next morning and reversed the van into a boulder..
My 'endish' slump I think comes from the gradual realisation that a life full of incident, the unexpected and the unfamiliar is about to be replaced by the mundane, familiar and habitual. However, it's not as simple as that, because as you become a travel junkie and the unfamiliar becomes habitual, home life and the familiar start to seem odd. Furthermore, the months you spend travelling disrupt social contacts back home and undermine any sense of belonging you might have to a particular place. The question on your mind is always, 'where next?'

So here we are, parked at Calais , the boat inevitably running late, in a state of limbo between this trip being a lived experience and an abiding memory. I'm getting to the 'reasons to be cheerful' stage of self-help. Ok, Phillip Quinlan emailed me yesterday to say the annual literary journal, 'Angle' is now on-line, including two of my pieces. That should cheer me up, but actually one piece is not bad, and the other a bit boring, if technically sound. So, along with all the domestic tasks at home, maybe I could attempt to to occupy myself with coming up with something better than OK. Then there is the question of 'next' - we need to research Asturias, Gallicia and Portugal, and we are having a family holiday to Brittany in a months time. It's not all bad is it? I even get to drive the car, with a real gear stick and discover that it is possible to travel faster than 55mph. So much to look forward to...

The rehabilitation programme:

P&O Foodhall - choose an (un)healthy English Breakfast...


Waitrose - chose an 'Essential Waitrose Quiche' - I love how ridiculous Waitrose is - since when was a quiche 'essential'!


Wallingford - we agree, "England is beautiful, especially in late Spring - billowing cloudscapes and big trees in leaf...

Posted to FB on return: "Homecoming: this not a lawn, but a meadow. Does anyone have a goat we can borrow?
...no goat offers forthcoming so....
e

Minor irritations of La Republique

Monday 23rd May, 2016

As I posted yesterday, by our reckoning we have made over 100 trips to France over the past four decades. Given the French's penchant for political protest and enthusiasm for igniting tyres, or herding cattle up the Champs Élysées, then I suppose it is remarkable that we never have been affected. Statistically it was likely to happen, and yesterday it did.

My Sister-in-Law, Jackie, lives in Northern France and emailed to warn us that in protest at changes to the labour laws refineries and fuel storage depots at Le Harvre had been blockaded and petrol in service stations in the region was running low.

We were not in dire straights camped at Blois, as we had filled up a few kilometres south, and still had about two thirds of a tank remaining. Would that be enough to get us to Calais? Difficult to say, it would be cutting it fine.

English weather in France - have we enough fuel to get to Calais...er


As we headed north up the N20 it was clear that most petrol stations were closed. Just to add to the gloom it poured with rain for most of the journey. I tried to calculate our fuel situation. Under normal conditions a full tank of diesel will take us around 400 miles. As we trundled northwards I made a note of the our milage as the fuel gauge reached the half mark. We were nearing our next destination by the time the gauged notched down to quarter full. Our fuel consumption was exactly as expected, we had covered 100 miles. Five minutes before we had passed a sign giving the distance to Calais as 185km, so right now we were probably about 108 miles from the port. Fuel gauges usually give you a bit of lee-way - but would it be enough to get to the ferry and to the fuel station outside Dover East docks? Too close to call, but luck was on our side.

Just before the turn-off to Neufchâtel en Bray the autoroute service area still was selling diesel. Some pumps had been closed off, there were queues, but only is three or four vehicles per pump. I put in enough fuel to get us to Calais with a bit to spare.

Finally, after 120 miles - a place with diesel. and shortish queues.


At lunchtime I had been on the Motorhome Adventures site to see how other Brits were faring, but at the time there was only one post, from a member living in France warning of possible disruption. I posted a message about our experience as soon as we arrived at Neufchâtel en Bray aires to update others on the situation:
"Thanks Rodney. We found no fuel available from the Loire to Normandy adjacent to the N Roads we were travelling on - mainly Supermarket self serve. One place had fuel but would only accept French bank cards. Quite a few Total stations had chains across. Finally we found a place on the Autoroute a few kilometres from Neufchâtel en Bray, where in a noble gesture of Fraternité I only put 30 litres in to ensure we have enough to get us to the Ferry. Most French drivers were feeling less than fraternal and had they been able to fill the boot, door pockets and any spare supermarket bags with fuel, they probably would have tried. I don't know how this is going to play out in the long term, but certainly if I was leaving the UK in the next few days I would make sure of entering France with a full tank. If I was heading south east to Austria, Switzerland or Italy, then heading through Belgium, Luxembourg then down the Autobahn might be a good move. I'll post again tomorrow on how the queues are looking after the weekend."
Since then other posts reveal that it is a very mixed situation with fuel apparently still available in Calais, but running out in a fairly random manner across the North of France. There are rumours of lightening road blockages and a more general strike planned for Thursday. By then, so long as Calais port is not disrupted - a favourite target - we should be back in the UK. Right now, I just wish it would stop raining so we might enjoy our final two days in France.

And it did (stop raining); and we did (enjoy our final day in France).


We never did discover the Olympian aspects of the of the municipal site at Wimereaux

The place itself - think Clacton with croissantes

Bathing huts..

inspired by Sixties Habitat wardrobes...

Some had been personalised.

In the afternoon the cloud broke a bit, so we took a clifftop walk towards Boulogne.


I like the way he still kept walking... it shows true Gallic nonchalance...
Blue/grey sea, mauveish thrift - that's nice.


e

Monday 23 May 2016

Watership Drown

Saturday 21st May, 2016

There are many good things you can say about Camping Val d' Loire in Blois - its proximity to the cycle trails that run alongside the Loire, the pretty riverside location, the charms of nearby Blois, the easy bike ride to the Intermarche in Villneuil, however our abiding memory of the place will be the rabbits. There is a huge warren by the river bank and most of the day you find bunnies hopping about the place or grazing, quite motionless, so it is tricky to discern them among the many molehills. Having had pet rabbits when the children were small we are lapine aficionados, so we were happy to be parked-up among the bunnies.



I fear life in the riverside warren may be somewhat precarious. Like the residents of San Francisco, Tokyo or Naples, you sense the good life is only one natural disaster away from catastrophe. Since this lapine Arcadia is built into the banks of the great river its inhabitants live blissfully unaware that their existence is only one rapid Spring thaw in the Auvergne away from a bunny apocalypse.

Although the weather has been unsettled, a mixture of grey drizzly cool days and one stiflingly close one that built to last night's thunderstorm and downpour. Nevertheless, there have been dry spells where we cycled around the excellent local bike tracks.




Yesterday we spent the afternoon in Blois. Aside from the famous castle, the town itself is a pleasant, prosperous place with ancient streets, now pedestrianised and full of up-market shops.





Blois' famous gateway
The famopus Renaissance staircase has been hidden by flags so people cannot photograph it without paying for a fll tour of the castle - a bit mean, I think..


Peaceful park by the castle
kids are great!

The town centre is pedestrianised - a lovely place to stroll

Friendly locals!.
We camped here in 1979 during a road trip we took with friends, squashed together in an ageing Morris Traveller. Back then Blois was all faded grandeur and pale blue peeling shutters. It struck me how France changed under Mitterrand. When we first visted it really did conform to stereotypes, involving berets, rusting Deux Chevaux, alarming sanitary arrangements, quaint cafés and priorité a droite. By the mid 90s suddenly rond-point and Macdonalds sprouted everywhere followed closely by extreme urban traffic calming and stiff competition between  local Mairies to beautify their patch of La Republique with bizarre lamp-posts.

Recently I worked out that we had crossed the channel more than one hundred times; France is, for us, simultaneously familiar and foreign. We have not sufficient grasp of the language to truly be considered Francophiles. We are merely habitual tourists, and even though we cannot claim to understand its culture in depth, no matter how much have driven its highways and byways we still feel a mild thrill clattering off the ferry into the concrete sprawl of Calais docks. I wonder if Europeans have the quite the same sense as the British of being 'abroad'? Google translate comes up with 'a l'estranger' in French, but does that have the same connotation exactly? I like the way 'abroad' hints at a sense of expanding horizons. Logically its antonym should be re-narrow! That's how it feels going home, a sense that the familiar narrows the mind simply because it is less surprising or puzzling. I think we both enjoy being slightly puzzled; we are curious people.....

e

Saturday 21 May 2016

Vichy, and the importance of the comma

Wednesday 18th May, 2016

The view from the A75 motorway is spectacular as it wends its way through the volcanic cones of the Auvergne, more so even than yesterday when we hopped across the gleaming plateau of the Causse; nevertheless the journey was uneventful and a tad tedious. This is a good thing, as a driver I like uneventful and tedious days having had too many driving days in Italy which were remarkably eventful and characterised by tedium being randomly relieved by suicidally minded Vespa and Alfa Romeo owners. The extent of our tedious Tuesday can only be evidenced photographically by a lack of pictures. Only a couple Gill's effort to record the snow-capped Puy from the cab, and my portrait of her sense of her unbridled ebullience next to the pasta shelves in the Carrefour Market in Clochmerle-twinned-with-Tadcaster. After a moment of deep personal crisis sparked by the suspicion that Fettuccine was unknown in France, I was delighted to be on hand to record Gill's utter delight at finding the last packet of this under-appreciated pasta in the Massif-Central.





Gill, overjoyed by Fettucinne
Our two days in Vichy have not been tedious at all. I felt compelled to communicate this to my architecturally impoverished American cyber-pals on Facebook, posting a clutch of photos of the town's Art Nouveau gems, accompanied by the message, 'Vichy France was great!' A moment or two later it dawned on me that I had inadvertently asserted, not a passion for fin de siècle buildings, but a hitherto undisclosed enthusiasm for Petain's Fascist puppet state. Thankfully the addition of a humble comma was enough to set the record straight, and the edited caption now read, 'Vichy, France was great...' and it was and is. 

From Camping Bellerive across the river, it is an easy cycle ride along small roads and bike lanes into the town. The route runs through a pleasant park alongside the Allier, then crosses over a couple of streets before reaching another green space where the famous Opera, Casino and Thermal Baths are situated. We locked the bikes and went walkabout. Here is a selection of the 150 photos that the pair of us took in the space of half a day or so wandering about Vichy's delightful parks and streets.

1. Fin de Siècle architecture

What makes the Art Nouveau buildings of Vichy unique is their surprising restraint. Given French Architecture's tendency before the Modern era to delight in exuberance and decorative motif, it might be expected that the curving natural forms associated with Art Nouveau would result in buildings that are a cornucopia of busy details. However, this is not quite the case. The Opera has beautiful detailing in its architrave, corbels and decorative ironwork, yet the proportions of the building itself have a grandeur based on classical proportion.


Vichy Opera House - Classical proportions, art nouveau detail





The adjacent Casino was rather more typically 'fin de siecle'



Similarly, the Thermal Baths are a delightful mixture of intricate detail and more plain, light-washed spaces that exude calm and tranquillity - an ambiance, one supposes, that formed an integral part of of 'the cure'.


A covered walkway connects the Opera at one end of the park tothe Therman Baths at the Other.
Oriental influences on the Thermes building

Beautiful light-filled interior spaces








2. Good late 19th century sculpture and paintings.






3.The Town Centre: quirky Shops, old arcades and buildings in contrasting styles.


Window shopping
Designer chocolate shops seem to be the thing..
and fancy cakes
..and odd gelitine based sweets

The Mairie looks like it pre-dates the majority of the Spa developments by a decade or two - Second Empire exuberance!

La Poste - not the most beautiful building in Vichy, but interesting if you are a fan of 20th Century Architecture...
 an interesting mix of Art Deco an Modernism,

The French never quite got the hang of Gothic revival - not quite Pugin is it?
What can you say...?


So what about Vichy France?

I suppose that it is not surprising that there is scant evidence of Vichy France In Vichy, France. On the the Casino a small plaque commemorates a moment in July 1940 when a group of 50 French Parliamentarians made a brave declaration in support of liberty and the French Republic. Their subsequent fate under the the emerging pro-Fascist regime of Marshal Petain is not recorded. 

In a small tree lined square near the Opera,stands the town's large war memorial erected after WW1. Its relief sculpture depicts a a battle scene mixing gritty realism with idealistic flights of patriotic fancy. A panel on the side lists the new or the town's fallen from WW11 to Syria. 




The only reference to the darkest moment in Vichy's history was a nearby small rectangular headstone of black marble inscribed with a short message of remembrance for the 800 people from the town sent to their deaths by Petain's regime. Half were political opponents of the Fascist regime, the remainder local Jews transported to Germany's death camps. The simplicity of the headstone was in marked contrast to the grandiose War Memorial, and reflects how combatants are glorified, but civilian casualties dismissed as collateral damage. Both are victims of war; we should remember them with equal respect I feel.

Gill began to chat to some municipal workers planting flowers in the memorial garden. One young women spoke excellent English, it transpired she had spent three years as a student at Glasgow University. She was able to translate the inscription on the the headstone about the victims of the Vichy regime, but it was clear she had no idea who Phillipe Petain was, her colleague even speculated that Petain was in charge of the Resistance! We wondered if such ignorance about occupied France was common among young people, it certainly seemed a little surprising coming from residents of Vichy.

We had bought a couple of quiches and mini-patisserie, and sat in the park by the opera for a somewhat late lunch. We remarked on how well maintained Vichy's Spa buildings were in comparison to Spa in Belgium, Montecatini Terme, and the lamentable state of the Spa buildings in our home town of Buxton. A bit of park bench googling helped answer the conundrum. It seemed that some measure of income comes into the town from sales of Vichy water, and the cosmetic brand associated with it. 



We imagined how much a better state Buxton would be in if a bit of cash came into the town from every bottle of its spring water sold. Instead the brand is owned by a multi-national - Nestlé, who are utterly disinterested in the town that provides the brand's identity. The fabric of Buxton spa is falling to bits as complex arrangements involving English Heritage hand-outs and deals with dodgy property developers never seem to come to anything. It's the story of two countries and two approaches to managing heritage and national assets. Here in Vichy, some measure of local control has helped secure the future of its superb architectural heritage; Control of Buxton water was handed over into the private sector decades ago, eventually being absorbed into a a remote, disinterested multi-national conglomerate. Buxton's thermal baths are boarded up and the grade 1 Regency period Crescent enmeshed in a decades long saga involving the Local Authority, English Heritage and private property developers which never quite seems to result in the promised refurbishment actually coming to fruition but remains forever 'work in progress'. It's tempting to extrapolate the saga into a wider context, and reflect on how, compared to our European neighbours we have simply stood aside as onlookers and watched authorities of all persuasions asset-strip national resources that are part of a collective heritage and should belong in the public domain. 

We cycled back to our pitch next to the Allier, and were entertained by members of the local rowing club being terrorised by their resident trainer who tracked each group of rowers in his rubber dinghy, yelling at them in gattling-gun French through a megaphone. 


River bank fauna...




As evening fell the rowers and coach went home and peace was restored. It is very peaceful here, despite being less than two kilometres from the town centre. Evening light, a big river with a slow swirling current, bits of twig, a scattering of pink petals, a half submerged fridge - stuff drifts by. After a day immersed in history, it's almost inevitable that the river seems a metaphor for passing time. 




Yesterday, the BBC reported that Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party acknowledged for the first time on the 50th anniversary of the start of the cultural revolution that the whole thing might have been a 'mistake'. Their statement was couched in gloriously arcane Marxist-Leninist mumbo-jumbo, containing the phrase 'History inexorably moves forward' - I am still trying to decide if the phrase is deeply profound, or utterly inane. Staring at the Allier, considering it as a metaphor for history seems to make more sense than some other contemporary Western notions -such as Fukuyama's idea that Liberal Democracy represents 'the end of history' or various cyborg visions of the future like Transhumanism.

Somewhere like Vichy makes it is difficult to ignore that we exist within a larger 'stream' of history, and my sense of this was magnified on reading more about Marshal Petain. He was born in 1856, and in a sense he typifies the values of the autocratic, imperialist Europe of the late 19th Century, resistant to universal suffrage, fearful of communism and relentless in imposing Western values on other cultures. 

Vichy is part of that world. It's gracious spa architecture, casino and opera house typify a place where the monied and political classes of the period spent their leisure time. It's fame was assured when Emperor Napoleon III became a regular visitor in the 1860s. This privileged world did not survive WWI, and in a sense it is here that the relationship between Vichy and Petain becomes most interesting. He was not merely a product of the world that Vichy represents but a key defender of it. As one of the commanders of French forces during the Battle of Verdun in 1916 he was hailed as a hero of the French Republic, however, his vision of the Republic was staunchly conservative, harking back to the autocratic traditions of the previous century. As a military strategist, however, he was far from conservative, advocating in his later life that the French army adopt the use of fast moving armoured divisions. Perhaps if his advice had been heeded the invading German panzers would not have simply out-manoeuvred the Franco-British expeditionary force in the battle for France in 1940. Their defeat led to the fall of Paris, and France being divided, the Germans ruling the northern part directly, and Petain administering a Fascist puppet state from Vichy. 

Once you understand his background, Petain's actions may never be regarded as laudable, but they do become more understandable. He believed that German military superiority would result in a swift victory, Britain would sue for peace, and he would strike a deal with Hitler putting himself at the helm of a reunited France with Paris as capital. This vision of a return to Europe as a collection of autocratic 'Great Powers' may have seemed to many conservatives in 1940 the most likely outcome - with Fascist regimes in Spain, Italy and Portugal, Stalin in Russia, Nazi Germany in the ascendancy, France defeated and Britain isolated - it is easy to see how Petain took the actions he did as an act to 'save France'. Without Churchill's belligerence, the actions of the 'few' and America's subsequent involvement, then a Europe of dictatorships could well have been the outcome of a some peace treaty hammered out in the autumn of 1940. 

As it happened, Petain got it wrong in every respect. The Vichy regime colluded with Germany and many atrocities occurred throughout France. Rightly he was held to account after the liberation of France, escaping the death penalty on humanitarian grounds - he was now aged 88, and somewhat demented. He was imprisoned, but lived the last few months of his life under house arrest. On his death in 1951, President De Gaulle intervened. Petain's death certificate described his occupation as 'no specific profession' in line with his official 'disgrace'. Charles de Gaulle decreed it should read 'Marshall of France' respecting Petain's role in the defence of Verdun.

So, sitting here by the Allier at twilight, what have I learned today? That a river is an imperfect metaphor for history, because its flow is largely predetermined by a habitual course, and as the events of 1940 show, though history, as the Chinese committee asserted, may move ever forward, it's direction is uncertain. Perhaps a raindrop trickling down a window pane is a better analogy.



What else have I learned? Vichy is a place of grace, beauty and tragedy... and of course, I was reminded of how important it is to understand where to place a comma.

e