France beckons, how might we describe the prospect, what leaps to mind? Charming, infuriating, stylish, bland, ancient, modern, foreign, familiar, alien, unwelcoming... At one time or another it's been all these things, for as foreign parts go it's the place we've been to the most. Our first visit to the country as a couple is now almost half a century ago, for Gill even longer as she went to France on family holidays as a teenager. So if pushed to describe how we feel about France in just one word it would have to be - ambivalent.
That being said there are bits of France that we are not ambivalent about, Herault department for example, we have always had fun there. Our favourite 'municipal' at Loupian is still shut, the nearby Camping Carpark at Meze seemed mysteriously busy when we checked online. The town has a Fete Primtemps, we know this because we accidentally ended up parked next to it in April 2022. We plumped instead to head for Villeneuve des Bezier, even though it really a suburb of the city it doesn't feel like that, it has a village ambiance and the ACSI campsite is attractive, situated next to the Canal de Midi.
1. Almost Belgian in it's weirdness.
We knew France had suffered quite badly in the recent stormy weather, just how much rain there had been in recent days became obvious when we approached the camp site. The villages' 'office de tourisme' is located on a barge on the canal oppostite the campsite entrance. The boat was half submerged.
We pulled up at the entrance and Gill headed off to book us in. She was away ages, eventually returning as a passenger on the site manager's golf buggy. The entire site was waterlogged and many of the pitches reduced to a quagmire so she and the manager had taken a a tour of the entire place.
In the end we opted to park overnight on a road in the corner of the site then relocate to one of the asphalt pitches on the site's aire de camping car when a place became available tomorrow.
2
It's a pleasant site and the people running it friendly and accommodating which is not always the case in France. It is a tad quirky, odd garish cut-out cartoon characters decorate the sanitary block and the place is decorated in lime green and orange. This seems to be go-to colour scheme in French public spaces, aspiring to denote post-modernity and 'rejouissance', which in more normal cultures might be regarded as a contradiction in terms. To make matters worse the place piped terrible music all day long.
Gastronomy, viniculture, haute couture, socio-linguistics, political theory - there are many fields of human endeavour in which France might justifiably claim to be pre-eminent. Pop music is not one of them. Happily most French pop music fails to make it across the channel so, untless we head there, we remain immune to its charmless peculiarities. All of it is terrible, but some is more execrable than others.
I guess the genre that is merely mildly annoying rather than totally dreadful has to be 'nouvelle chanson' - lovelorn caberet style ballads updated by modern influences from electronica or world music. Whereas traditional chanson tends to be huskily heartfelt itsd contemporary exponents prefer an uncanny, dreamlike vibe - like here, Enfant Perdu's ditzy 'Tahiti sous la lune'. Nouvelle chanson is annoying, but it is authentically French, as a traveller in a nearby land I guess you have to accept it as a just one of those Gallic peculiarities like weird roundabout sculptures or over-designed lampposts.
More annoying is the Gallic take on the classic Europop banger. Clara Luciani's 'Le Reste' is a good example, a cutesy but eminently forgetable frothy pop song that sounds like every Eurovision mid-table flop from the past two decades.
Frap (rap Francais) - no accident that it rhymes with crap! At the best of times I struggle to enjoy rap, I understand its power and cultural significance, but I find it difficult to listen to. Unfailingly, France's take on the genre comes over as an exercise in cultural misappropriation. What should be the authentic voice of black urban youth feels like a pastiche reinforcing the very stereotypes rap music seeks to unmask and neutralise. It appears Zola x Koba LA D's 'Temp en Temp' must be riding high in the charts right now. On consecutive days it serenaded my morning shower . However, only when I tracked down the accompanying video did could I fully appreciate the track's creepy, cringe-worthy vibe.
However, preeminent in the canon of dismal French popular song has to be any attempt to cover classics of transatlantic pop and rock. My morning ablutions provided me with an excellent example of how to ruin the great American songbook by giving it a Gallic twist. The chances are a singer whose stage name is 'Disturbed' is not going to be well placed to reinterpret Paul Simon's 'Sound of Silence'. I rest my case! The power of the original lies in its understatement - the deliberate juxtaposition of naif, sweet delivery with bleak lyrics. Disturbed's attempt to dramatize the song, 'to give it some welly' ruined it. It really annoyed me.
"It's not all bad," I told myself. Despite dire warnings of downpours, floods, mudslides across the entire southern half of France, we had a couple of dry days and a few hours of sunshine. As soon as the sky turned blue we headed down the Canal du Midi towpath on our bikes.
Herault may well be our favourite department, a pleasing, bucolic landscape of shaded villages and neat vineyards crisscrossed by avenues of tall plane trees.
As the name suggests Villeneuve des Bezier is close to the city, little more that a kilometer or two from a sprawling retail park,. It's difficult to decide whether the village is a suburb or a satellite settlement. It feels like the latter, the big, recently built Marie assets the place's autonomy and the old centre has a range local shops.
The sausages from the boucherie artisinale were excellent, but quality comes at a price in France. Equally good was the Cantal cheese we bought, however at €28 per kilo, twice the price of a supermarket, shopping local is not affordable on an everyday basis.
We rounded off our short stay in Villeneuve des Bezier with a visit to the Cave Cooperative.
It's a couple of minutes by bike from the campsite. Near enough to wobble back with a couple of cases strapped to the pannier racks. The rosé proved particularly delicious and inexpensive - a winning combination.
2. Il pleut comme des chats et des chiens.
Next day we headed north up the A75, France Meteo's dire weather warnings peppering our planned route. There seemed to be no end to the stormy weather. It presented two problems. Firstly as the motorway crosses the Central Massif the A75 reaches 1000 metres. Motorhomes are alarming to drive in strong winds. In most circumstances we would have stayed put and waited for the weather to improve but with the tunnel booked six days hence we had no choice but to head north straightaway.
The second issue, also mini-monsoon related, concerned our next stop-off. We've stayed in Massiac often. The village is well situated just off the A75, placed halfway between France's 'midlands' and the Languedoc coast. A couple of years ago the free aire de camping car was closed by the Mairie and a paid facility established at the underused municipal campsite operated by the Camping-Car park group. The organisation manages 600 motorhome parking areas, mainly in France. They are well designed and entirely automated. The first time user can buy a 'Oyster style' plastic card from the pay machine by the automatic entrance barrier. The card links to a phone app that allows you to pre-book on-line any Camping-Car park and includes a running total of how many pitches are available.
Motorhoming in France has always been easier than in the UK due to the availability of free aire de camping-cars throughout the country. Out of season and in less popular locations you are more or less guaranteed a free place to stop overnight. However using them is not without challenges. You cannot always be sure the service points will work particularly in the winter. At weekends and holiday times aires become rammed with vans jammed together with inches to spare. Sometimes we have experienced a frosty reception from the natives when we have tried to join them. Conversely, despite prohibitions on 'camping behaviour' and stays of over 72 hours some places are populated by 'long stayers' sporting big awnings and outside furniture spilling out into the adjacent pitch. The Camping-car park app solves both these frustrations by having clearly defined hardstanding bays. Once all of them have been booked then the automatic barrier will not admit anyone else. It gives more certainty about finding a place to stay. Admittedly, they are not free, but at €12 -15 for 24 hours they are affordable.
The only exception to this set-up are the camping-car parks located in former municipal sites - dubbed 'camping du mon village. They are identical to all the rest except they don't always have well defined bays and some pitches are on grass rather than hard standing. This is not an issue for us apart from in SW rainy weather. Our moho is built on a Fiat chassis, it is reliable, well built, fuel efficient and nippy for a van. The only downside we have found is its propensity to grind to a halt on wet grass, then get bogged down. Our destination, the former municipal site in Massiac, is next to a river and a tad boggy.
Now the place is unstaffed and only accessible via the automatic barrier, if you were to get stuck you would be in a bit of a pickle as there is no one on hand to help. Any such anxieties you might harbour about this are not helped by warning signs at the entrance informing you that the site is in a flood zone. When the the siren sounds intermittently campers are instructed to leave the site in an orderly manner. Long blasts on the siren signals impending 'inondation' - follow the evacuation signs and run for your life!
There were two German vans already pitched up when we arrived. The occupants were sitting outside huddled around a small camping table covered in beer cans. The rain was tipping down but this was not going to stop the party, They had donned the kind of all-weather waterproofs more usually worn by Icelandic trawlermen in Arctic waters in midwinter. Nevertheless the gaggle of damen und herren seemed very jolly. As we passed they gave us a hearty wave.
The site was very puddly. A weedy gravel track runs between the pitches of the old municipal, we decided to park-up on that rather than risk getting bogged down in the spongy marked emplacements.
The river Alganon skirts the edge of the site, about 30m from where we had parked. Given the flood warning signs at the en group trance it was difficult to ignore the river's ominous roar. I decided to take a look. The Alganon was undoubtedly in spate, but the origin of mini-Niagara roar was coming from a nearby weir, the river was a little swollen but still a metre and half or so below its bank, it appeared we would get through the night without having to flee for our lives.
Next day we continued north glimpsing the snowy cones of Auvergne's old volcanoes as we drove through thundery showers. The worst of the weather seemed to be settled in the Massif Central, north of Clermont Ferrand the sky brightened.
We made good progress reaching another Camping-car park at Saint-Pierre-le-Moutier, a somewhat sprawling village a few kilometres south of Nevers.
Like the previous stop the site was situated in a former camping municipal and had the same issue regarding waterlogged grassy pitches. Our solution - make sure the front driving wheels were close to the asphalt. Just for good measure we positioned our levelling ramps to give us a little extra momentum when we exited. At what point does my propensity for careful planning tip over into over-anxiety and paranoia, I wondered.
The description of the site said it was next to an 'etang', as the weather had brightened we decided to find it. In truth it was a pond rather than a lake, so we headed off to take a look at the centre of the village instead.
Saint-Pierre-le-Moutier's big moment in history happened six hundred years ago when the town was 'liberated' by Jean d'Arc. These days it's a sleepy, somewhat overlooked place, only the over-sized church with a Gothic tympanum and some impressive town houses with ornate renaissance period windows hint at its former significance.
The local boucherie was well reviewed so we set off to find it - if the weather cheered up a BBQ might be the thing. Sadly we forgot our wallets, the sausages did look good but we lacked the means to buy them.
Wandering back towards the van we passed a number of plaques commemorating local men killed by the Gestapo in August 1944, just a few days before Allied forces liberated the town. Somehow modest memorials in small out of the way places seem more shocking than big monuments like the Cenotaph.
As evening approached the thundery downpours we had driven through earlier in the Auvergne caught up with us. By eight o'clock we were in the middle of a humdinger of a storm, thunderclaps shaking the van, fork lightening crackling earthwards a couple of hundred metres away. The lights in the van flickered, the ones outside fused, the aire was plunged into darkness. I poked my head out of the door, it seemed the local streetlights had been knocked out too.
The supply had not been reconnected by the following morning. We speculated that we might have a problem exiting the place as the automatic barrier required power. When we drove up to the gate the pole was raised, the designers had forseen the problem, if the power fails then the barrier opens. However we still had an issue, the ticket machine required power. It was stone dead, so we were unable to tap our Camping-car park card on the contactless panel to book out. This meant that every 24hrs a further €14 would be debited until the €60 balance on our card was gobbled up. Gill phoned the customer service number on the card. Amazingly an operator answered immediately without the usual 10 minute wait listening to a tinny version of the third Brandenburg or Coldplay. He spoke English, sorted the problem straightaway and was pleasant. It's the third time we've needed Camping-car park's helpline. They've always answered immediately, been helpful, and fixed our problem. More often than not we end up moaning about the vissictitudes of our online lives, it's a rare occurrence to be pleased about it. Woo
Camping-car parks have been excellent and made motorhoming in France much better, particularly so in the winter months when most campsites are closed and the water at service points in free Aires is often turned off. So, after screeds moaning about 'La Republique', finally something positive!
3. No such thing as a small phobia.
Next stop, Sully sur Loire, we know the place well having stopped at the ACSI site on the opposite side of the river from the town half a dozen or more times. Our plan had been to stop somewhere different, nearby at Giens, but the site there looked perilously close to 'inondation', the river swirling past, swollen by weeks of rain storms. Camping le Jardin de Sully also overlooks the river but is set back from the bank by about 100m and is so less prone to flooding. It feels safer.
We booked in for a couple of nights. We needed to use the laundry and the driver needed a break. The weather improved slightly from persistent rain punctuated by thundery downpours to thundery downpours with bright spells in-between. At times the cloudscapes bordered on the sublime.
We consulted the rain radar and decided that the next 'sunny interval' might be long enough to take a short bike ride down the cycleway that runs alongside the river. It wasn't and we were wet through but the time we got back.
Since we were here a year ago the old railway bridge near the campsite has been restored to provide a crossing dedicated to bikes and pedestrians. It is a distinct improvement, previously cyclists had to use the main road bridge at Sully sharing the narrow carriageway with HGVs and lunatic French SUV drivers.
I stopped halfway across the newly painted metal bridge to look at the mighty Loire in full flood, then immediately regretted it. I find big rivers unnerving, actually more than that, they frighten me. It's a mild phobia I think, wholly irrational and oddly irresistible like an itch you have to scratch.
It probably explains why I was drawn to the poetry of John Berryman. The poet's father shot himself. It happened right outside the boy's bedroom window when he was 11 years old. Unsurprisingly Berryman never got over the trauma. Despite a successful academic career and international fame as a poet, his life was haunted by alcoholism, failed relationships and mental instability. Dream Songs published in the mid 1960s won the esteemed Pulitzer prize. The work comprises of 77 short self analytical poems written by a fictional alta ego called 'Henry'. By turn they are sad, darkly humorous, desperate and haunting. Occasionally Henry's moaning is interrupted by other voices, like Mr. Bones. He is black, speaks in a faux southern patois and is profoundly inauthentic - as if the narrator had opted to don a blackface.
They are intriguing poems, at once alienating and immersive. Given his issues it's not suprising that John Berryman came to a sticky end. On cold, grey morning in January 1972 he got up from his desk at the University of Minnesota, walked to the nearby Washington Ave Bridge and leapt over the parapet.
It seems to me that artists and writers who make themselves the main subject of their work seem peculiarly prone to self destruction - Berryman, Plath, Hemingway, Cobain, Bourdain...
As I crossed back over the old box girder bridge I parked my bike and stared down at the swirling grey water below. I do find big rivers scary. I remembered that I wrote a poem about Berryman when I first came across his work, now almost two decades ago. I looked it up when we got back to the van and here it is ..
Dream Song
Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
Hart Crane
1. A view from Washington Avenue Bridge
‘O come on down, O come on down’, the river
lures our famous, fucked-up poet, ‘behold
these languid, shit-streaked waters, feel the shiver
that chilled old Mr Bones.’ Henry, the cold
north wind blows in from Manitoba; we know
you suffer, wake hungover, grow too old.
Your dream song asks, ‘Where did it all go wrong?’
Literati freaks observe you clinging
to the parapet—speculate how long
it takes to lose your grip. Henry singing
raucously, a bitter chariot swings low,
de Ol' Man River say, ‘Let go, Let go.’
2. Sotto in Su
First rule of comedy, when all else fails—
fall over. Timing though is everything;
even as you clamber across the rails
you sense they’ve seen it coming. Still, you fling
yourself towards the slivered sun,
Icarus, upside down tumbling, falling
towards the sky’s blank mirror.
‘The meaningless underside of bridges’—
who knows better the travesty of horror,
the perfect peace beyond enticing edges,
the garden where your nightmare first began,
Father slumped, stock-still next to his gun.
It's too niche to be publishable I think, but it does have moments, like the lines about upside down Icarus. Also, the phrase 'travesty of horror' epitomises what Berryman is about. So it is with our own petty anxieties and odd phobias, treated as travesties they are powerless, regarded seriously they become dangerous. Pointless then to dwell too much on the fact that on both the nights we were parked by the Loire I woke up in a cold sweat amid a vivid nightmare about drowning in a flood of biblical proportions.
4. What is the opposite of a 'field in France'?
Regular readers will know that 'a field in France' is a metonymic phrase coined by Gill to signal all things bucolic and joyous about parking-up in depths of 'la campagne' under a deep blue sky dotted with fluffy clouds with birds chirping in the trees and the sound of a lone cicada rattling in the undergrowth. Think Monet's 'Poppies' photoshopped with a Burstner C-class moho in the middle of it.
Part way through today's journey up the N154, between Orleans and Dreux (Blogger's automatic spell checker keeps changing the latter place's name to 'Durex', once seen, the anagram becomes inescapable), anyway it's a dismal road and I found myself speculating about what might be the antonym of a 'field in France',? What epitomises the tatty, deary aspects of 'La Republque', the kind of things that inspired the travel writer Tim Moore to characterise a miserable Frenchman as 'being like Eeyore with cancer'.
The N154 is certainly a very dreary road, arrow straight for the most part, crossing endless prairie sized wheat fields, its monotony unrelieved by the occasional abandoned gravel pit. There are no aires de picnic, not even a layby, there is nowhere to buy any food, and even if there was it's impossible to pull over anyway. We seem doomed to traverse this drab corner of France in drizzle and today was no exception.
The only place of note on the road is Chartres. It boasts a magnificent Gothic cathedral, without doubt one of the great buildings of Europe, representing the high point of Medieval culture just as the Parthenon epitomises the ancient Greek. I have spent hours wander around it and bored the entire family by showing-off my in-depth knowledge of the way the pattern of the church's soaring quadripartite vaulting is fully reflected in the footprint of the nave and choir columns. However that was decades ago, and since then I have spent much more time hereabouts fulminating over Chartres' notoriously traffic choked ring road. Today was a double whammy because we arrived at the 'rocade' at 1.50pm coinciding exactly with the post lunch dash back to work.
I read an article recently that the French government had launched a campaign targeted at male drivers after research had revealed them to be the most aggressive in western Europe. The most startling statistic was the fact that 35% of the respondents revealed that they would be willing to deliberately ram the car of any driver who annoyed them. In truth this should come as no surprise to anyone who drives regularly in France. It seems that French motorists have zero hazard awareness, tailgate as a matter of course and observing anyone needing to change lane, enter a roundabout or pull out of a side road their natural inclination is to close the gap and cut in before them. As I gingerly picked my through the traffic carnage of the Chartres rocade it struck me that perhaps here lay the antonym of a 'field in France', not just because of the arsey drivers but also in the seemingly endless sprawl of retail tat, budget hotels, car dealerships, and cheap chain restaurants, interspersed with faceless mid-rise concrete banlieues.
Maybe this - Chartres rocade - epitomises 'le moche République' providing a handy antonym to our off the cuff phrase 'field in France' celebrating 'la belle'.
5. It doesn't take much to make us happy....
Last night we stayed in the Camping-car park in Dreux an unprepossessing town a little further north of Chartres on the N154. The aire is on the edge of town at the back of a dismal industrial estate. However it's well designed and serviceable, so ok really.
Dreux, like it's northern neighbour Evreux, has achieved the dubious reputation for rioting in sympathy whenever violence erupts in the suburban banlieues of Paris as the French police go head to head with the local working class youth, predominantly of Arabic heritage. The first time we stayed in Dreux the latest uprising had only just run out of steam. There were patches of melted tarmac all over the place marking spots where cars had been torched, there were scores of them. Such is the centralising instinct of the French state that any attempt to embrace multiculturalism seems doomed to failure. It makes the problem of alienation among the country's ethnic minorities an insurmountable problem.
We drove further into Normandy. The landscape became more undulating, pleasantly wooded, not so dreary even though the weather remained dull. In the past we have always skirted around Rouen crossing the Seine a little to the south of the city centre. Now the city has imposed an Ulez zone this is no longer an option forcing us to make a detour on smaller roads north of the city crossing the Seine using the Pont de Brotonne.
We were heading for our final stopover in France at the Camping-car park at Incheville, a village a few kilometres inland from le Treport. After departure delays in Dieppe and faffing about with immigration at the end of last autumn's trip we decided to see if the tunnel was a better option, even if it was £60 more than the ferry. Our plan for tomorrow is to drive from Incheville to Eurotunnel terminal then sleep at the motorhome parking area at New Dover Road in Canterbury.
So our reason to stop in Incheville was purely practical, we had no preconceptions about the place whatsoever. As it turned out the place was quite ordinary - a former industrial village - but the aire itself delightful, located in a wooded valley next to a lake.
The weather had been so stormy over recent weeks that it had been difficult to appreciate that now it was spring. We circumnavigated the lake, about 4kms, so hardly a hike.
With the trees bursting into leaf and mother ducks on the water chivying their recently hatched offspring along finally it looked and felt like early April. The sun even put in a paltry appearance. It doesn't take much to lift our spirits.
6. ...but takes even less to make us grumpy
So, was 'le Shuttle' more straightforward than the ferry? Probably, but still considerably more of a faff than the last time we used it in autumn 2020. Maybe procedures back then were more light touch, designed to minimise human contact because pandemic related social distancing measures were still in force
Once we had cleared passport control the route to embarkation was circuitous and very confusing. Then two guys with Serco logoed combat style jackets turned up to check the van for migrants. Clearly some aspects of the UK immigration has been outsourced. At least the border force personnel are polite and respectful whereas these guys were surly and total jobsworths, not only checking inside the van and rummaging through the rear garage, but they also insisted we lowered the folding bed in the roof even though it is obvious that the space is not big enough to conceal a chihuahua never mind a person. By now we were feeling miffed with the potential of becoming proper grumpy.
After we exited the terminal at Folkestone we had a major Sat-Nav fail. Instead of being directed along the main road to Canterbury we were sent on a wild goose chase around the country lanes running adjacent to the A road. We saw some gorgeous South Downs' villages, discovered that most of them were connected by single track roads and the local population seemed all true blue green welly types who drove high end Range Rovers or bulbous SUVs. They were not best pleased to be faced with pair of bewildered interlopers in a German moho bunging up their beauteous byways.
As ever we got there in the end, only to discover that the motorhome aire at New Dover Road was flooded - the giant puddle was only about 20cms deep but covered most of the tarmac. We were past caring, we parked up anyway agreeing we had no intentions of getting out of the van and were too knackered to summon the energy to be grumpy.
Next day, the usual thing, sludgy traffic most of the way home, grim service areas, drizzle in Buxton. This year's winter trip has had its moments, but it wasn't a classic. The weather was cooler and wetter than usual and at times I felt less than perky, not unwell, but not exactly fully fit.
Even in early April the Pennines still look distinctly wintry, the garden little different from when we left it in late January. However, the clocks have changed, the evenings are longer, we have 28 Schengen days left....where next?