Today began with an age-related grammatical failure It's part of a more general diminution in my capacity to string a sentence together that I've noticed over recent months. I've never been that good at remembering people's names, now all kinds of things can suddenly draw a blank - names of capital cities, flowers, kitchen utensils, what day it is, where we were this time last week, the name of the American poet who wrote 'A jar in Tennessee', whether analytical cubism predated synthetic cubism or if it was the other way around, what 9x8 is, how to re-order a list in excel alphabetically - all things over the last few days that I have struggled with where not so long ago I would have managed in a flash. There is no up-side to ageing, but since it is inevitable I guess fretting about it is pointless.
Anyway, right now we are on the Ile de Ré, moments ago I wrote we were 'in the Ile de Ré', but then realised you can no more be in an island than you can be on a town. Maybe brain fog is beginning to spread from things and facts to grammatical conventions and by this time next year my blog posts will read like a Lewis Carroll travelogue written in the style of 'Jabbawocky'.
So, right now we are ON the Ile de Ré. We came here for a couple of days on a previous trip but only I know when (September 2017) because the blog says so (more brain fog). Perhaps I should simply regard Google as my personal external hard drive and not worry becoming forgetful.
I seem to recall writing a rambling post about how the cutesy was taken far more seriously in France than in Britain and consequently the French are much better at than we are, embracing it without awkwardness or embarrassment. Since then things have moved on so far as being cute is concerned. The Ile de Ré is uber-cute, or perhaps more accurately cringingly picturesque. This should appeal to British tastes as we invented the idea. The whole concept rests on a double take, admiring a view because it's 'pretty as a picture ' while pretending we are appreciating the beauties of nature or indigenous culture
As we pedalled through the 'pretty as a picture' neat and tidy streets of Courade-en-Re, dotted with carefully placed, pastel spray painted bicycles, each with posies of dried flowers beautifying a wicker baskets hooked on their handlebars, it struck me that social media has weaponised the cute. Unsurprisingly the campsite we stayed on duly reinforced the stereotype by featuring the stock image on their web-site.
Whereas the knowingly picturesque has always been the slightly effete province of the self consciously cultured, the Instagrammable is mainstream, a kind of pictorial Lingua Franca blissfully unaware of received cultural niceties and immune to such old fashioned notions as good taste and authenticity.
In places that are inundated by tourists the ubiquity of social media predominates to such an extent that the actual place becomes partially virtualised, what is there physically pimped-up as click bait. I first noticed this about five years ago in Portugal and Spain when I first came across street installations spelling out the name of places in giant letters next to some iconic monument or winsome view. Why pay for posters to promote a place when you can get visitors to do it for free via Instagram. Here's one I took earlier...
The Ile de Ré is so popular it doesn't need to resort to such an overt marketing ploy. Instead, like In Talmont where we where a few days ago much of the Ile de Ré Re is soullessly spick and span, cottages gleamingly whitewashed with pastel green window blinds, eaves festooned with hanging baskets, cobbled streets dotted with florid planters.
Its very pretty and even mid-week, outside of school holidays crowded with tourists. So far as motorhomers go - lots of French retirees in gleaming, newish C class vans, almost as many Germans and a fair few British caravanners. Even on a Tuesday on mid-June, when we turned up at Camping La Tour de Prises there were only a few pitches remaining, all of them awkward to access.
Undoubtedly The Ile de Re is an attractive place, a mix of market gardens, vineyards and oysterbeds ringed by pristine beaches. It's quite densely populated consisting of half a dozen rambling, whitewashed villages. What attracts us particularly is the network of cycle tracks that crisscross the island, over 140kms of them in total. It should be fun, it was the last time we were here seven years ago. This time though at times the experience was quite alarming. The routes between the more popular villages were packed with retirees on ebikes. forget any notions of a relaxing of a gentle, it was dog eat dog out there, like the Milan tangientale on two wheels. If you whack up the power setting to max then you can wind-up most ebikes.
The hazards came in in different shapes and sizes. I guess when you have groups of younger adolescents on bikes - school trips we guessed, you might expect them to do stupid things like attempt wheelies on an ebike, perform skids to raise a dust storm, race towards you three abreast. More unexpectedly our fellow retirees were just as bad. It made what should have have been a quiet, soulful experience somewhat nerve-shredding.
I am not surprised that anti-tourist protests are breaking out all over Europe as residents become frustrated at seeing the place they call home reduced to an instagrammable parody of itself. Many visitors probably sympathise with their sentiments, but not enough to change their behavior. I guess we are no different.
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