Ferried by post-modernism towards the frozen south

I have a plan, all 87 days of our trip listed on a spreadsheet, where we will stay, the cost, distances, GPS co-ordinates... (yes, I probably am somewhere on the spectrum). A mere thirty six hours into our trip and we had deviated from it (we always do, but usually it takes over a week to scrap it). So why do I persist with the habit? Occupational therapy probably, something to give me hope during the interminably  dull, dreary Pennine winter days. However, even when things go to plan they are rarely entirely without incident or interest. Thankfully the journey down to Portsmouth was pleasingly incident free. We accidentally managed to avoid the usual hold-ups around Birmingham and Oxford by being so tardy with the packing it was almost mid afternoon by the time we set off. 

Over recent months arriving at Portsmouth docks has been made more exciting by the City council. As you reach the city centre at the end of the M275 there is a roundabout with four exits. Three of them take you straight into the new low emission zone, one of them avoids it and leads to the ferry terminal. If you have a van with a Euro 5 rated diesel engine and classed as a 'private HGV', weighing in at over 3500kg then it's very important you take the correct route. So far as I tell from information on-line the slightest incursion into the LEZ will result in a £50 charge. Normally, even with guidance from both Gill and the sat-nav, given four exits at a roundabout I have a greater than 50/50 chance of taking the wrong one. Maybe the added frisson of a potential penalty helped focus the mind, we arrived at the docks at my first attempt. 

Three lines of motorhomes and caravans were drawn-up at the booths. Last time we made this crossing in January 2020 there was a late evening ferry to Caen, and we had to wait until it embarked before we could form a queue and settle down for the night.  However tonight 'Santander' was displayed on the signs above the gates. I pulled over to one side and hopped out to see if I could find out what was going on. The guy who had driven in just behind us caught up with me and off we toddled together like Laurel and Hardy looking a bit perplexed. Unable to find anybody official we decided to ask one of the other motorhomers. I caught the eye of a chap sitting by his campervan lounge window. "Are you waiting for tomorrow morning's boat to Santander?" I enquired politely. His reply, "No, I'm waiting for the one next Friday, I just thought I would get here early."

Sigh...  British blokishness in full flow, a bit superior, sarcasm masquerading as humour, clearly I'd stumbled across a pillock who fancied himself as a bit of a card. He did relent almost immediately, admitting that he was in fact awaiting the morning ferry, but the damage was done, he'd self identified as a complete plonker and there was no way I was going to adjust my initial impression. I suppose it is futile to wish we were more straightforward with each other, ambiguity, along with quiet desperation is 'the English way'. 

Our exchange had brought others out for a chat, the topic changed to speculatIon about when check-in opened in the morning. One woman claimed that she had it on good authority that the gates opened at 6am. I was somewhat sceptical about this, how could it take three hours to load a car ferry? If that was the case for every ferry leaving  Dover then eventually the queue would tailback half way to Scunthorpe. As the small gaggle of motorhomers eased seamlessly into chitchat mode I headed inside. I can't do chitchat, I am congenitally unsociable. We set the alarm for 6.30am.

It was pitch dark when I was rudely awoken by voices and the sound of half a dozen diesels coughing into life like a chain smokers' convention. I reached for my phone, 5.45am, bollocks! I was wrong, the woman right, embarkation did commence at six. Quickly we threw on enough clothes to appear half decent when we presented ourselves at check-in. All the while a stream of motorhomes and caravaners squeezed past us to get ahead in the queue.

It did take a minute or two longer than usual to process our paperwork, not just passports to check, but our NHS vaccination certificate and the QL code on the Spanish on-line health declaration form we  struggled with yesterday while parked in Cherwell Valley services. The Galicia, Brittany Ferries new ship for its Spanish routes, is enormous. I guess that explains how a little  longer for each vehicle's check-in due to Covid regulations ends up with it taking three hours to load-up. Still, we did depart on the dot at 9am. as scheduled.

'Swanky for a car ferry,' I agreed on planet Zog with my cyberpal Susan. The Galicia is well appointed, spacious and the cabins comfortable.

However, it is French; what this guarantees is rampant over-design. The vibe is hispanic, but about as authentic as Carmen, in other words a vision of Spain dreamed-up in Paris.  For example, one of a series of large decorative panels in the 'tapas restaurant' includes a female figure in silhouette.

The oversized plywood carnation stuck on the side of her head may signal 'flamenco', however the svelte outline with a swan-like neck resembles a classic Gallic feminine stereotype with connotations of the teenage Brigitte Bardot with her hair up.

Even something as apparently straightforward as a celebration of traditional Spanish costume assumes a French iconography, reduced to a slightly ridiculous pictorial synecdoche where a series of single legs represent entire categories, the matador, flamenco dancer and so on.  

All of this pales into insignificance in comparison with the Las Meninas installation, a multi-media exploration of Picasso's reinterpretation of Velasquez ' monumental  portrait of the Spanish Infanta.

 

As well as the scary giant figurine, passengers are invited to explore the Galicia further to find smaller effigies dotted around here and there. Let's face it, you are never going find a similar opportunity for cultural enrichment en route to Dunkirk with P&O.

We have travelled regularly in France for almost half a century, observing how design has changed over that time, not in galleries or in window displays on Parisian boulevards but in more workaday places -  provincial towns, shopping malls, advertising hoardings, chain restaurants and budget motorway hotels. On our first trip in 1975, in rural areas an older France predominated -  faded sun bleached shutters, dusty streets with smelly drains, wrought iron pissoirs and Deux Chevaux the colour of faded denim. Back then modern France was cool, new buildings reflecting the austere, unadorned white concrete of the international style or Brutalist grungy monumentalism.  In advertising and on the streets the new wave aesthetic of Godard, Gainsbourg, and Deneuve still prevailed. 

From the late 80s onwards we observed an aesthetic change. I suppose it's unsurprising that the post-modern was embraced so enthusiastically in France as arguably it was their thinkers - Barthes, Foucault, Baudrilliard - who best articulated it. Whereas post-war French design had espoused the chic - it was cool and understated, and rarely got jazzier than polka-dot, suddenly, as the millennium approached you were confronted by a nouveau garish. Soft furnishings and cafeteria deco exploded with tangerine, lime green and puce. On advertising hoardings out went the the quietly chic and the sultry pout, in came the quirky, the droll and knowingly cute. 

I remember twenty odd years ago, on one of our Easter trips to Provence, being startled in a hypermarket veg aisle by an enormous technicolour image afloat above the new season produce. The poster must have have been well over two metres in length, larger than life, and depicted an attractive young woman with more or less nothing on. Public decency was just about preserved by the fact the model placed her arms across her chest in an X shape and the designer, using some primitive version of Photoshop, had re-purposed an image of a curly leaf lettuce as a ra-ra skirt. This was around the time when in the UK Tesco's had added three quarters of a million shoppers to its customer base by adopting the strap line 'Every little helps'. Maybe Carrefour , Leclerc, or whoever was trying to make the same point by purely pictorial means.

Anyway, judging by the styling of the Galicia, French designers appear to have retained their enthusiasm for a vibe that embraces an amalgam of the chic, the droll and kitch. Personally, I think it's old hat and never really appealed to British tastes anyway, it comes over to us as naff rather than droll. Moreover, it's a style about to go out of fashion as sustainability and an increased appreciation of the natural world perhaps is poised to eclipse four decades of culture-centric thinking. 

Our conclusion,The Galicia is comfortable but the interior styling is simply off-kilter. We are sitting right now in the bar. It is a tall, two-storied  space with faux wrought iron work and a big glass roof. I think it is meant to be reminiscent of a municipal market hall but it reminded us of the central space of a Victorian panopticon style prison. At least the ferry decor gave us plenty to talk about - food for thought. 

This was good, because getting actual food proved a bit problematic. This is our third attempt to sail on the Galicia to Spain, the previous two having been postponed due to the pandemic. When I changed the date to late January back in September Brittany Ferries must have been desperate to increase their bookings, we benefited from a price drop of £60 and the offer is a free breakfast and dinner in the restaurant.

To maintain social distancing evening meals had been divided into three 'sittings' determined by a letter printed on your cabin door entry  card. Our sitting was 'A' - at 6.15pm. The system would have worked had there been enough staff to manage waiter service for a three course dinner simultaneously in both the main and the 'tapas restaurant' on the floor above.  However, not only was there insufficient staff, quite clearly many were unused to waiting-on and no-one was co-ordinating  clearing the plates from one course to allow the next to be served. We observed chaos unfold in slow motion, with queues of people at the entrance awaiting the next sitting unable to be seated because tardy service ensured insufficient tables were freed. We sat down at six twenty, it was after eight thirty when we left.

For much of the time we were entertained by two singletons sat at the tables adjacent to us whose conversation appeared to have been scripted by Nora Ephraim. I have to admit I am not averse to eavesdropping, but in this case it was almost impossible not to overhear every word. To adhere to the requirements of social distancing the restaurant's tables were placed two metres apart and only set for two. The vast majority of people on the boat were like us, retired couples. People on their own had a table to themselves. A lone middle-aged woman, was sitting to the left of Gill. When she fell into conversation with the man with sitting just behind me it was impossible to ignore them. Their tables were roughly three metres apart so they had to raise their voices a little to communicate. In their enthusiasm to be sociable they remained blissfully unaware of how intrusive it was for us, sat in-between them, just to one side.

The Guardian lifestyle section runs a regular feature called 'Blind Date'. Readers send in a profile and the paper pairs them up and arranges a date. Afterwards each person reports back on the experience answering a set of standard question - first impressions? what they ate? table manners? topics of conversation? I think we could have made a good attempt to complete the questionnaire on behalf of the pair next to us. So far as what they talked about the topics included places they had visited, their experience of the pandemic and the woman talked about her daughter, any mention of a significant other was significant in its absence. The entire entire encounter was executed with that odd mixture of exaggerated affability edged with one-upmanship that you get when strangers meet. 

Eventually we adjusted to their babble and were able to concentrate on our own concerns, consisting mainly of Gill's insightful analysis of the restaurant's lack of any discernable order of service, punctuated occasionally by one of us fulminating over the mediocre quality of the food. Anyway, at some point after 8 o'clock while I awaited to be disappointed the arrival of my much anticipated cheesecake, I noticed a reduced hububb; the pair beside us had gone. 

Had they gone their separate ways or left together? We were destined never to discover the answer to one of the Guardian's more searching questions, the somewhat coyly phrased, 'did you go somewhere afterwards?'  However I am fairly confident about what the outcome would have been to of the final part of the Guardian's version of blind date, the bit where the couples get  to score their experience out of 10. I bet the man's score would have been at least 2 points higher than the woman's. I assert this with confidence for two reasons. Not only because at times I sensed the woman seemed mildly dismissive of what her chance companion had to say, but also this score seems to be the common pattern in the Guardian feature when heterosexual couples are featured. Like this week. I am uncertain if any general conclusion can be drawn from this, is it the case generally that women are more choosy than men?

Even taking into to account the hours I spent de-constructing the boat's decor and the evening diversions in the restaurant, that still left us with ages to while away. Gill was more successful than I was, watching Black Widow on the TV in our cabin then making forays on deck from to time to time. I was just thankful it was flat calm for the entire journey. Nonethless, the soporific rocking motion of the boat prompted complete torpor on my part. I spent most of the crossing snoozing gently, only surfacing briefly to witness a leather clad Scarlett Johansson acrobatically beat some burly bloke senseless or make approving noises about the artful photos Gill had taken of the ferry's impressive funnel.

Finally, with half an hour to go before our scheduled arrival time I joined Gill on deck hoping to see snow clad Cantabrian mountains under a deep blue sky. I got the latter, but we were ahead of schedule and already slowly progressing up the wide expanse of the Bahia de Santander. I had to make do with a prospect of the mud flats of Somo and Santander docks rather than anything more sublime. Still it was an exciting moment.

We disembarked in groups to minimise crowding on the stairs wells. Once on the car deck, while we awaited the doors to, members of the crew wandered about with what looked like small ray guns, zapping everyone to check their temperature. Since there had been a thorough check of our vaccination status before we boarded formalities at the Spanish end were swift. Within quarter of an hour we we out of the city and heading south towards the A67 autovia. Previously we have spent our first night close to Santander, at the area autocaravanas near Somo or the free parking at the entrance to Cabárceno safari park. This trip we decided to attempt to cut one night off our dash for south by driving for a couple of hours through the Cantabrian mountains to the high plains of northern Castille y Leon.

Motorhomers on Facebook had been reporting since Christmas that Spain was having an unusually harsh winter. As we approached Reinoso the mountains to the west were very snowy indeed. It was stunningly bright however, the clarity of light breathtaking after months of grey mist at home. Everything seemed great as we settled into the area autocaravanas in Aguilar de Campoo. 

It shared the  space with the local  infant school. Wednesday at 5pm appeared to be football training,  one moment we had the place to ourselves, the next kids kitted out in quilted training gear arrived by the dozen. They must be a tough breed hereabouts  because as the sun set the temperature plummeted below zero. It did not deter Aguilar de Campoo Juniors, they stayed hard at it until 7pm when a traffic jam formed around us as parents arrived to collect their frozen off-spring.

We turned in early leaving the heating on the lowest setting. At some god forsaken hour just before dawn I woke feeling very chilly and needing to visit the loo. I discovered the heating had failed, the lights weren't working and the toilet wouldn't flush. The temperature in the van was -5.6C.

I pulled on a sweatshirt and climbed back into bed. Some hours later over a very grumpy breakfast, we attempted to understand what was going on. We had plenty LPG, the leisure battery meter registered well over half capacity, but every time we switched the heating on the 12 volt supply cut out. We ditched our plan to us area caravanas on the way to Seville.  With sub-zero overnight temperatures we needed electrical hook-up to run the heating or we would keep ditching our water. We found a campsite near Plasencia that was open all year. If we can reach there today perhaps we can get as far as Seville tomorrow, we speculated. Double digit temperatures were forecast with afternoon highs in the low twenties. This is what we needed, the one thing we had not anticipated was an escape to the frozen south.