Tag Archives: Rouen

Saturday 18th July 2020 – I’M NOT HERE

This morning, although I heard the three alarms, I didn’t get up until about 06:30. Tons of stuff on the dictaphone, as I discovered, so it must have been a very restless night.

We were in a classroom last night having a talk on climate change, this kind of thing. A question that came up interested me, about New Zealand. The lecturer was saying that all of the difficulties about New Zealand – in Iceland the volcanos and glaciers were pushing out the centre of New Zealand – rather, pushing it up, the centre of South Island and changing all of the weather. There were storms and this thing. I asked if this was going to be a permanent thing or a temporary arrangement. One guy in this classroom was making notes, doing it with a kind of hammer-press thing and it was making a racket even louder than a typewriter. I wanted to ask him to shut up if anyone was able to talk to me about my question, to which I never actually had the answer. There were a couple of girls in this class and I was quite keen on one of these. For some reason the question of cycles and motorcycles came up. These two girls rode motorcycles so I was thinking “should I buy a motorcycle too so that I can keep up with them?” and that way I can keep up with them and be close to them I suppose and so on. But it was a case of how long was this going to continue? Is it just a flash-in-the-pan kind of course and we’ll all go our separate ways in a week or is this going to be some kind of long-term situation. As usual, I was full of indeciaion yet again.

Later on I was back in my house in Winsford of all places. There was a lot going on there as if it was in Central London and actually a car. I was sitting there watching all these events going on behind me – a little old woman tottering back to her home and someone I was with running out and shouting after her. But this little old lady didn’t seem to hear. There was another older person with us. The three of us came back and the reason why I hadn’t heard anyone reply was that the 2 old women were talking really slowly. It seemed that they were taking this old lady to show her this Old People’s Home, whether there was a vacancy in it, something like that. Off they went and they were climbing up the steps just as an ambulance pulled up and dropped off a load of elderly ladies all on crutches. I was back in my house and a couple of rooms were really cold and a couple really warm. I had the central heating all confused. This was the first time that I’d been in this house for God knows how long. I got back in there and there was a small cupboard on the wall. That was where the food was. I thought “God I’d left my steps in Belgium”. I don’t know why I said Belgium. I had to open it and everything was all crammed into these shelves and I thought “where am I going to put my freezer now?” There’s no room to put that in the kitchen. I had a pack of drink and for some reason this drink needed to be put in another bottle so I cleaned another bottle with bleach and had to rinse it out. Of course there was all the calcium in the water and it took ages to try to run clean before I could start to use it.

Another thing that came was that I was on a bike cycling home and for some unknown reason I fell asleep when I was cycling and woke up to find that there were some girl cycling alongside me. As I awoke she sped off. I then had to go and retrace my steps. it was through this hilly area and I remember a few things of the route and got on a bit of route that I didn’t recognise at all. It was steep and windy. I thought “God, did i cycle through this in my sleep? I was doing really well!”. Then I came into a town and by the bus station were loads of people with skis and it turned out that this was a … march. This was a big ski resort and you flew into the airport and a bus from the airport brought you into the town. Right at the bus stop was the start of the chair lifts so it was the easiest place to go to if you wanted to ski after work. All these crowds there and I fought my way through. This woman said something about this but I can’t remember what the something was so I replied to her in French and said “it’s not a problem”. She said “I was referring to you” I replied that I have to get home so I have to fight my way through everyone to get home. Everyone laughed at that and that was when I ended up back at my house in Winsford.

Having gone back to sleep at some point I stepped right back into that dream again, right back into Winsford and right back into my house. The house had been built for 2 years but I’d only just moved into it. I’d had it that long that I hadn’t lived there. it was in the middle of some kind of shopping centre where all of these shops were half-built or quarter-built where the money in Winsford ran out. The didn’t have the money to finish off all of the shops to let. a very decaying place indeed it was. I was walking through there and there was another couple in front of me. the guy was telling the girl about how the election in May 2015 2 years ago had changed absolutely everything and the new party decided to stop work on the shops.

Later still we were in a water mill that produced electricity with the water wheel. This mill hadn’t been used for years due to some kind of faults and complications about a diesel fuel blower and all of this and had set the place alight. There wa s no way of getting any modifications for it and they needed to get some kind of money coming from the mill so they decided that they would open it as a water-powered mill and let nature take its course. I was there but everyone else was off looking for things but I was screwing up the sluice gates so that the water instead would pass through the main centre of the mill. I started to open the main mill doors and the water started to rush in there. it suddenly started to go at a hell of a rate, this, as if a huge flood had built up outside for hundreds of years. It was necessary for me to slow down the flow of water otherwise it was going to sweep away the mill.

After all of that I was surprised that I wanted to go away. That sounds like it was more than enough travelling to be going on with.

But the first task was to finish off the packing and start to load up Caliburn. Basically, I just threw the stuff in because the back of the van has a huge pile of old cardboard boxes in it.

When everything was packed and loaded I tidied up and took the rubbish down to the waste disposal, vacuumed the living room and kitchen and then washed the floor with bleach and disinfectant. While the floor was drying I had a shower and a weigh-in. And I’m keeping this weight down, although what I will be like by the time I return will be anyone’s guess.

Cleaning and disinfecting the waste bin was next and then bleaching and disinfecting the WC and sinks.

Once all of that was done We set off.

First stop was the dechetterie where all of the cardboard, the old Caliburn battery and the old electric kettle bit the dust.

Next stop was Noz. But there wasn’t all that much in there, apart from a few small tims of potatoes.

After that wes LeClerc for a full tank of diesel, a couple of memory cards and a few basic items of foodstuffs – nothing much at all.

Off to Roncey to Liz and Terry’s. Terry loaned me a brushcutter which went into the back of Caliburn – while I was there I tidied it up a little too but I’ll be doing some more tidying up in there as well as I go round

Liz made lunch and we all had a very good chat for a couple of hours.

Round about 15:00 I hit the road. 260kms to travel on the first stage of the journey. Via Caen, Liseux and Evreux. Eventually I ended up in St Marcel, on the outskirts of Vernon in between Rouen and Paris on the banks of the Seine.

Here there’s a hotel, the Hotel du Haut Marais, and this is where I’m staying tonight.

old cars 1913 panhard levassor duranville france eric hallOn the way down towards the banks of the River Seine we had a little interruption that delayed me somewhat.

As I drove through Duranville in the département of the Eure I came across a garage that had seven or eight old cars out on display, and that kind of thing is enough for me to stop and have a better look to see what is going on,

And I seem to have found myself at the garage of a dealer of vintage and historical vehicles and almost everything in this yard is available for sale if you have enough money, which I don’t.

strawberry moose old cars 1913 panhard levassor duranville france eric hallThe first car that I saw and which tempted Strawberry Moose out of Caliburn to come for a ride.

The car itself is a Panhard-Levassor of 1913 although what model it might be I really have no idea. Being a 2-door 2-seater it’s not going to be one of the Model 20s that Président Poincaré adored but that’s all that I can say.

The company was a big fan of sleeve-valved engines – ports in the engine casting to vent the gases, protected by a kind of rotating sleeve between the piston and the bore. Very quiet running but very heavy on oil consumption and a technique that faded away when conventional valve seating technique improved.

Some Panhards had sleeve valves and some were conventional, but I don’t know about this one.

old cars strawberry moose cadillac convertible duranville france eric hallThis car is much more like what you would expect to see in a place lke this.

One of the most opulent and ostentatious mass-market vehicles ever to hit the road anywhere, the Cadilac convertibles of the 1950s were the acme of bad taste in the 1950s. Big, powerful V8 engines and wallowing suspension were great on the open roads of the south-west where WE HAD LOADS ON FUN IN THE MUSTANG all those years ago, but in the crowded streets of the major cities they were a nightmare.

Nevertheless it was the kind of vehicle to which everyone aspired back in those days, and everyone had to be seen in one, just like Strawberry Moose and his new friend.

old cars Ford V8 pickup duranville france eric hallThis is a vehicle that will probably appeal more to the traditionalists and the practically-minded amongst us.

It’s a Ford “steppy” – a step-sided Ford V8 pickup of the design that when I first started going to North America 20-odd years ago, were still reasonably common on the roads over there but now you will be very lucky to see one moving about under its own steam on a day-to-day basis.

Possibly from the late 1940s or early 1950s was my first thought. In fact the unofficial Québec number plate that it has on the front (Québec doesn’t require legal plates on the front of its vehicles) suggests that it’s a 1952 model. If so, it’ll have the 239 V8 sidevalve engine in it.

old cars ford model T duranville france eric hallOn the other hand, 30 or so years earlier, just about everyone in the USA would have been seen in one of these.

“Every colour you like, as long as it’s black” said Henry Ford of his Model T “Tin Lizzy”, or “Flivver” as Paul Getty called his, so I’ve absolutely no idea at all what he would have had to say about this one in a bright lime green.

Te one advantage of cars of this era with separate chassis and body is that they could be cut about as much as anyone likes, and so you could buy them in all kinds of shapes and body styles. And if that didn’t suit you, you could customise your own.

This little pick-up is a beautiful example.

old cars ford modet t fire engine duranville france eric hallIt’s not the only Model T here at Duranville either. We have this one here to whet our appetite.

Or, rather, should I say “wet our appetite” because this is the former fire engine of the town of St Laurent in Québec. That’s a town that now no longer exists, having been conjoined to Montréal in 2002. But it’s an area of Montréal that regular readers of this rubbish will know very well because it wasOUR OLD STAMPING GROUND AROUND THE METRO DUCOLLEGE beFore I was taken ill.

As for the vehicle itself, it was new in 1924 and is said to be the first motorised fire engine of the city, serving between 1924 and 1944, and just imagine going out to fight a fire in that in the middle of a Québec winter.

She underwent a complete restoration in 2006/2007.

old cars dodge convertible duranville manche normandy france eric hallYes, as well as the cars outside, there was quite a number inside the building too as you can see and they let me have a wander around inside with the camera.

Right by the door was this Dodge Convertible. It looks beautiful from this distance but that’s because it’s had a full restoration by the looks of things. It wouldn’t have looked like this maybe 20 years ago, I bet.

Unfortunately there’s no indication of what model it might be but it has the styling of a Dodge of the mid-late 1930s

old cars dodge convertible duranville france eric hallIt’s carrying a set of French numberplates issued within the last 3 years or so but there’s no other indication about where it comes from.

It’s not the kind of North American vehicle that I would have expected to have seen being sold in Europe at that particular time – after all, there was a quite a big volume-car marked in Europe at this time churning out all kinds of stuff that was as good as this at probably half the price.

There wouldn’t have been an “exotica” market back in those days, so I suspect that this is a comparatively recent import, like much of the stuff seems to be.

old cars barn find bugatti replica france eric hallThis of course isn’t a recent import, but it’s certainly a lot more recent than it looks.

Had this been a genuine Bugatti “30 plus” you wouldn’t find it in a place like this looking as if someone has dragged it out backwards from a haystack. It would have genuine alloy wheels on it for a start and be locked up in a vault somewhere because it would be worth a fortune.

My guess is that this is a replica, of which there are several examples available and on the road. It has a few quite modern features that you wouldn’t have found on the originals 90-odd years ago.

old cars dodge pickup duranville france eric hallWe saw a Ford stp-side pickup just now parked outside, but here tucked away in a corner is a Dodge pick-up of an earlier vintage, I reckon.

There was a series of lightweight Dodge trucks, the WD series (or DD series if made in Brampton, Ontario) between 1939 and 1947 of various carrying capacities between half a ton and one ton and if I had to guess, I would say that it’s one of these.

The position of the sidelights on the A-pillars suggests that it’s later rather than earlier but the absence of window vents suggests that it’s not one of the final ones made.

old cars buick 8 renault prairie 1952 mgb duranville france eric hallThis is a bit of an eclectic assortment of vehicles stuck away in a corner.

The MGB is of no interest to us of course but the big Buick 8 in the foreground is of course. Again, it’s difficult to say much about it except that because of where the spare wheel it is, it might actually be a Buick 8 Special of the late 1930s

The Renault at the back is a Renault Prairie of 1952 and if you want to see a close-up of one of these I’ll have to dig out my photos from 2007 because regular readers of this rubbish in a previous guise will recall that we found one in a scrapyard in France back in those dats.

Talking to the owners later, it appears that they have an agent in Québec who sources this kind of thing and has it shipped over from there. So much for yet another business opportunity then, unfortunately.

But right now I have other things to think about, like finding a hotel.

hotel du haut marais saint marcel 27950 eure france eric hallThere are several along the river but I need to be careful because one of th bridges is closed for repair. I have to track my way through all kinds of countryside before I arrive at Vernon.

And this is my hotel for this evening, the Hotel du Haut Marais at St Marcel. It looks as if at one stage it’s been one of the Accor group’s places but really these unit hotels all look so alike that there’s no way of telling.

Anyway, it’s a reasonable price without going too far and it’s comfortable. And I’m off to have an early night. It’s been a long day and there is plenty to do. A good night’s sleep will do me the world of good.

Tuesday 17th March 2020 – BLIMEY! WHAT A CHOICE!

The trains to Belgium are cancelled, as you might expect. And there are no trains from Granville tomorrow anyway.

So do I stay here and die of lack of my cancer treatment, or do I go by some other means and die of the virus?

But more about that later. Firstly, I managed to beat the third alarm again and had a decent start to the morning. I can’t wait to get to Leuven though because my stocks of medication are dwindling and I’ve already run out of one item.

The dictaphone came next of course. We had one of my sisters again in this dream and she was dressed up like some 1920s New Orleans dancer. I had to pick her up from school and she was all upset because they wouldn’t let her slide as in sliding up and down the ground on the ice. There was me, my sister and someone else, another person and we were in the car and we came to get out of the car when we were back home. I can’t remember now what she was saying but she was certainly acting very grown up for her age.
Somewhat later I was in a cruise ship that was coming in to dock somewhere. There were crowds of people on the railings. It was the end of the voyage apparently and we were all having to get ott. It was a quayside landing so everyone gathered their carry-on possessions and were milling around waiting for the order to disembark. There was a girl of about 10 there and I was having a chat to her, a little dark-haired girl. The order then came basically to leave so they started to leave. Then this girl came back so I don’t know what she was trying to do but she disappeared into the crowd so I didn’t get the chance to speak to her at that moment. I had my rucksack and my little camera so I was going to go off the ship to take a photograph and probably come back on as well and wait until later when it was the time to disembark. In the meantime there was something going on about the storage locker on board ship. They had a car and they were driving it into the storage locker. At first the owners of the vessel were very disappointed with this and very upset. But by the time that it came to the third time to drive the car in, they had come round to the fact that it was a good idea to have this storeroom opened. The third time they succeeded in bursting the lock but I’ve no idea now why it was that they wanted it open themselves.
There was another one of thsee nights where there was more going on too but if you are having your tea or something you won’t want to know about it.

After breakfast I had a look at some more digital files to split. I seem to have drawn the short straw with this today though because firstly, they were all very long and complicated ones to break up, and secondly, one of them just wouldn’t work at all and I’ve no idea why. Half of it was missing and / or unavailable and I’ll end up having to record this directly from the album one of these days.

As a result I was late going for my bread. We aren’t officially allowed out of our homes except for certain specified reasons, but “shopping for essential supplies” and “taking exercise in the vicinity of your own home” seems to cover that. We have to download a form off the internet each time we need to go out, fill it in and carry it with us

trawler english channel granville manche normandy france eric hallSo having printed out and filled in a form, I could go outside for a stroll.

There was no-one else out there at all walking around the headland, but that wasn’t the story out at sea. Regardless of the situation, people still have to eat and fish will be quite high up n the menu over the foreseeable future. As a result, we had a few trawlers out there doing their stuff.

Trawlers, maybe. But I bet that we won’t see Thora and Normandy Trader for quite a while. They’ll be keeping a respectable distance while all of this will be going on

yacht english channel granville manche normandy france eric hallSo no Channel Island boats and probably no gravel boats either. But there’s always other stuff.

If you’re out at sea you can neither give this virus to anyone else nor receive it and so taking to the water in your yacht seems to be a very sensible option. It’s times like this that I wish that I had a boat in which to sail.

All the time that I was out there, I reckon that all in all, there weren’t even half a dozen people out in the streets. But I learnt some tragic news at La Mie Caline. All non-essential businesses are to close for the duration of this outbreak. And despite being a bakery, their business has been classed as non-essential. Today is their last day of operation.

It beats me how anyone can consider a bakery to be non-essential, but I suppose that it’s do do with them having a café on the premises that they fall foul of this “public gathering” rule.

Back here I mused on the fact that having had to print out all of this paperwork et cetera, I hadn’t seen anyone official, never mind been asked to produce anything. But a friend who lives in Macon reassured me. She had had to take her cat to the vet’s but she had been stopped and asked for her papers.

There was a phone call too – and this has thrown my plans into disarray. Due to “other considerations” which are completely understandable, my appointment on Thursday with the nephrologist has been cancelled. I rang up the oncology department to confirm my appointment just in case but despite trying for an age, I couldn’t get through. Instead, I had a little … errr … relax and then finished off the radio project.

To back up the computer was next and then to load up all of the files that I need onto the portable hard drive that I take with me. No afternoon walk of course, much as I would like to go. The cynic inside me doesn’t take this as seriously as everyone else. I’ve lived through all kinds of things that we were told were going to wipe out the human race and I’m just wondering what’s going to wipe us all out after this.

Tea was an anything curry, everything left over in the fridge, followed by rice pudding, and then I had a shower.

Grabbing my stuff, I’m now ready to leave. I’ve decided that I’m going to go in Caliburn too even though I’ve nowhere to park him. But I’ll worry about that later, I suppose.

What I’ll do is to do the drive in two (or maybe more) stages, because it’s a long way. If I can get a couple of hours on the road tonight, park up in a lay-by and then continue tomorrow.

That is, if I get that far because movement is strictly controlled. While “travelling for medical purposes” is one of the exemptions, I reckon that they might raise an eyebrow or two at almost 700kms

But I set off, fuelled up at LeClerc and then headed for the motorway. No-one about at all and I had one of the quietest runs that I have ever had.

pont de normandie le havre france eric hallMy route took me to Caen and then in the direction of Rouen and Paris

But I turned off in the direction of Le Havre and skirted the outside of the city. At one point I had to drive over the magnificent Pont de Normandie over the estuary of the River Seine. It the time that it was built, in the early 1990s it was the longest cable-stayed bridge in the world and also had the longest span (856 metres) between the pillars of any other cable-stayed bridge in the world.

Although it no longer holds these records, it’s still an impressive structure and I would loved to have had a better photo of this but unfortunately Strawberry Moose wasn’t with me to take the photo. He’s stayed at home, for I don’t want him to catch this virus

le havre france eric hallFrom the top there’s quite an impressive view of the town of Le Havre and its port. Everywhere was lit up and it looked like something out of Space 1999 but I couldn’t take a decent photo of it which was disappointing.

I picked up the motorway again at the north side of Rouen (it’s bizarre that there’s no ring road around Rouen) and headed in the direction of Calais, turning off for Amiens and then Lille.

In between Amiens and Lille I found a Motorway Sevice Area and settled down for a couple of hours on the front seats of Caliburn. I’d remembered to bring my bedding with me. It’s about 01:30 and I’ve driven about 350 kms in 4 hours, which is good going. It’s important to pass beyond the Paris-Le Havre-Rouen-Amiens area in the dead of night because if there’s ever going to be heavy traffic, it will be in that sector.

But that was one of the quietest runs I’ve ever had.

Tuesday 10th July 2018 – BARRY HAY …

… once famously said “one thing I want to tell you all, and that it’s good to be back home”.

And so as I staggered in through my front door at about 21:50 last night I did have to say that I couldn’t have agreed more with him, even though I was confronted by the European Cardboard Box Mountain.

So having crashed out good and proper last night at about 21:30 after my marathon session around the northern half of the Somme front line, I was up and about at about 05:40, long before the alarm.

I’d even found time to go off on my travels too, where I ended up in a comfortable household with a woman from Shrewsbury (and who could pronounce it correctly too) and her two teenage daughters. It started off by my having received a huge packet of documents – deeds for Reyers, deeds for Expo, life assurance policies and the like. It turned out that I had finally become fed up of my bankers and closed my accounts. I needed to file the documents away safely and so I reckoned a safety-deposit box that I had in a bank would do. But then it turned out that I had of course closed the bank account so I wouldn’t have access. A self-storage unit might do, but I didn’t think that that was permanent enough. So o the way home I stopped, parked my car (which was pale green) on a bad corner and applied some kind of dry shampoo to my hair (it was long) to clean it. But cars kept on bumping into mine and pushing it further around the bend so in the end I had to abandon the procedure (and the top off my shampoo tube which I had dropped on the floor somewhere) and drive the car away. I passed several petrol stations where I could have obtained some water to rinse my hair but later found that I could comb it out – except for where it had been badly applied and I ended up looking like a pineapple. This woman was going through her paperwork too, and reckoned without actually saying it that although she came from a good family background she had been adopted. I was explaining about how I’d been born on one side of Shrewsbury (which I hadn’t) and how I’d lived fora while on the other side of the town (which stretching the imagination a little, you might say is true).

Somehow I still didn’t feel in the mood to do too much so I had a shower and a tidy up, packed everything away, said goodbye to the most bizarre landlady I had ever met in my life (and, believe me, I’ve met a few) and loaded up Caliburn – who still had his wheels on which surprised me greatly.

And I forgot to take a photograph of the hotel too.

It was looking miserable and cloudy, and I could even smell the rain, but anyway I set off on my travels, remembering this time to stop at the LeClerc that I had found yesterday evening to pick up stuff for lunch (but forgot my breakfast too while I was at it).

Dodging the roadworks and following the diversions, I eventually arrived at Albert and called in at the Super U to find some breakfast. But not before I was accosted on the car park by someone who was clearly looking for a job. Much as I admired his initiative, I couldn’t do anything for him of course, but this is the second time (the first being at Soissons a good many years ago) that I’d been propositioned like this.

Breakfast was taken at the side of the road in Albert and then I went for a wander around the town.

Albert is of course famous as being the main British assembly point behind the lines, and for the fact that it was visible (or, at least, the spire of the church is visible) from the German lines at la Boisselle. Consequently it was under heavy artillery fire throughout the war.

There’s the famous church of course, with its statue of Mary perched on top, offering up Jesus to the clouds. And the legend that God would reach down and take up the baby if a virgin ever walked past.

With it being such a magnificent target, the Germans naturally aimed at it, but after it had been hit and almost fallen (and French engineers had chained it to the tower) another legend grew up that differed according to whoever you spoke to.

Either

  1. whichever side that knocked down Mary would lose the war
  2. the war would not end until Mary had been knocked down

As it happens, it was the British who knocked it down in March 1918 when the town had fallen to the Germans in the Spring Offensive.

From Albert I headed off to Dartmoor Cemetery a mile or so to the east of the town.

This is a famous cemetery, and for a couple of reasons too. Firstly, it’s the last resting place of a couple of people called Lee. They are father and son who fought side-by-side on the Somme and were killed on the same day almost in the same place.

The second reason is that it’s the site of the grave of Harry Webber.

In 1914 his three sons joined up for the War and were accepted as officers. Harry Webber then petitioned the War Office, offering to serve the British Army in any capacity they liked, so that he would have the privilege of saluting his three sons.

After all, he had plenty of free time, having just retired from the Stock Exchange at the ripe old age of 65.

Despite being refused on many occasions, his persistence led him eventually to be appointed as a Lieutenant Transport Officer to one of the Regiments on the Somme.

And it was there on the Somme that he was killed by a shell.

Aged 67 at the time of his death, he is the oldest known battle casualty of the War.

Next stop is Mansell Copse and the Devonshire Cemetery.

Here, the Devonshire Regiment had to charge down a hill, across a railway line and up the other side into the German trenches at Mametz. And while the artillery had blown away most of the wire and most of the defences, there was a well-protected machine gun built into a substantial cross in the civilian cemetery halfway up the other side.

Captain Martin, who was said to be a keen modeller, went home on leave just before the battle and made a clay model of the battleground, and on his return just before the battle told his colleagues where he thought the machine gun would catch him and his men.

And sure enough, after the battle had passed over the spot, they found his body exactly where he had predicted.

The War poet William Hodgson wrote
I, that on my familiar hill
Saw with uncomprehending eyes
A hundred of thy sunsets spill
Their fresh and sanguine sacrifice,

And I suspect like most sensitive people, he maybe had an idea that he would be one of them.

He was a Lieutenant in the Devonshire Regiment and he too met his death in the attack on Mametz on 1st July.

At Carnoy, in the village square, this was the casualty treatment centre for this part of the front.

General Rawlinson had asked for every ambulance train on France to be standing by behind the lines to evacuate the wounded. There were 20 of them, but the Quartermaster-General sent him just three.

As a result, some wounded men had to lie here in the open for as long as five days before they made it back to a hospital.

One soldier, with a slight wound to the foot, discovered when he arrived at a hospital after all that time that the wound had turned gangrenous and his entire leg had to be amputated.

That’s one of the reasons why the cemetery at Carnoy is so large, but only a handful of graves are “unknown” – they mostly all came from the casualty clearing station, having died in that five-day period.

One Captain, Captain Neville, was in charge of four battalions. He gave each one a football and ordered each battalion, at the start of the battle, to kick a ball all the way to Berlin.

Two of the footballs made it back to Blighty, but Captain Neville didn’t.

Up on the ridge at the top of Carnoy, I’m standing on the German front line looking right across to the Devonshire’s trench at Mansell Copse.

Somewhere not too far from where I’m standing, although I can’t see it because of all the wheat, it the crater caused by the Kasino Point mine. This blew away a large proportion of the German defenders and as it was blown late, took the defenders completely by surprise.

This was one of the reasons why the attack on this section of the line was so successful, and the village of Montauban, a couple of kilometres behind me, fell quite quickly.

The British front line soldiers were through quite easily, and sat waiting for the second line and the cavalry, because they had completely broken the front and there was nothing now between them and Berlin.

But at this moment, unfortunately, General Rawlinson lost his nerve. Having heard of the disasters on the other fronts, he could not believe that there had been a breakthrough here at Montauban and refused to order the second line and the cavalry forward.

He noted in his diary as early as 12:15 on that day that “there is no hope of getting the Cavalry through today”.

Meanwhile, the British first-line troops were sitting staring at empty fields and empty forests, and did so for two days, and when Rawlinson finally did order his reserves forward, it was too late.

The Germans had refortified the line by this time and the slaughter started again.

Had Rawlinson only kept his nerve, the War could have ended 12 months earlier. But then that was Rawlinson’s big failure. he hated Kitchener and had no faith whatever in, in fact he had nothing but contempt for Kitchener’s “New Army” of civilian volunteers. They may not have been as well-trained as his beloved regulars but they certainly played their part.

And he was a born-and-bred infantryman too and had no understanding of and no faith in the cavalry either, and no concept of the panic that a well-handled cavalry division could create behind enemy lines.

Not quite relating to the First Day on the Somme, I went just down the road to the Military Cemetery at Guillemont Road.

One of the people lying in here is Raymond Asquith. He was the son of Herbert Asquith, the British Prime Minster at the time.

So having concluded my visit to the Somme Battlefield, the next question was bound to be “what to do next?”

Heading towards home was the obvious answer and I decided that I would at least reach Rouen before I thought about a place to stay.

But Amiens was awful. There were roadworks all the way through the centre and what should have been a 15-minute drive turned into over an hour.

And from then on it just seemed to get worse.

I had to stop not far outside Amiens for lunch. and also a little half-hour doze. And as usual, I felt a little better after that.

But my better humour didn’t last much longer. Not long after my little pause I came across yet ANOTHER “road closed” sign, and we disappeared down yet ANOTHER enormously long diversion.

But it’s an ill-wind that doesn’t blow anyone any good, and we eventually ended up just a couple of miles away from the autoroute that runs down the coast from Abbeville. So at least I was able to hot-foot it to Rouen and make up a little lost time.

But I lost it all in Rouen because, once more, there were road works just about everywhere and we crawled through the city and it took us ages.

Just WHEN are they going to build a by-pass around it? It’s totally crazy having all of this traffic on the city streets.

On the edge of the city I put in some diesel and then settled down on the autoroute just to get clear of the place. Caliburn was running quite well with just a little vibration that’s sprung up from somewhere, and we were bowling along quite nicely, so I just kept going.

Still three hours to home though, but only 2 and a bit via the motorway if you don’t mind the péages.

And one of my friends had told me a very useful tip. I’ve been paying “Class 2” for Caliburn because he’s over 1m90 in height, but apparently vans of Caliburn’s size are really “Class 1”, and apparently I ought to argue.

So at the first péage passage, Caliburn was classed as “Class 2”. So I pressed the button and explained. Sure enough, the tariff changed over to “Class 1”.

At the second péage, still “Class 2”, but as soon as I pressed the button to call, the tariff changed automatically to “Class 1” and a voice from Control said, before I’d even had time to say anything “I’m sorry. I’ve changed it for you”.

So this is a well-known phenomenon that doesn’t even need explaining, and when I think of all the times that I’ve travelled on the péages in a van and all the excess tolls that I must have paid and how I’ve been ripped off, and how the autoroute companies have been there ripping off van drivers for 15 years.

They must have made millions out of van drivers illegally over the years.

By the time that I reached Caen I really was flagging but I decided that with just an hour or so to go, I’d keep going. If I really felt bad I’d stop for another doze at the side of the road.

But here we are, back at home. 500 or so kilometres with just a brief doze and another stop for fuel. A far cry from when I could do 1000 kilometres non-stop without batting an eyelid, even after a full day’s work, but it’s still the longest day that I’ve had for several years, and it’s also after a good day out around the battlefields.

I ought to be really proud of myself, but to be honest, I’m just too tired to care right now.

Saturday 23rd June 2018 – I’M NOT HERE

But then you knew that already – at least, in the sense that I’m not all here most of the time.

The morning started off with me being well and truly here – up and about again nice and early which makes a change two days on the run.

And once breakfast was over and I had had a little relax, I went and assembled the coffee table.

once the coffee table was assembled, I went downstairs to fetch the desk. And by elephants that was heavy. I really struggled to get that up the stairs.

Assembling it wasn’t easy either. It was quite a complicated piece of furniture and very heavy tomove about. To have it finished, in position, vacuumed up the stuff on the floor in the bedroom where I wanted it to be, that was a task of a couple of hours.

I can certainly now understand why “old” people have to sit down for a cup of tea so often.

There are still some things left in Caliburn but I can’t bring them up by myself. It’s going to have to be a job of opening the packets in Caliburn and bringing up the stuff in two or three trips like I did last time.

But not today. It wore me out just doing that. But at least the place looks as if someone lives hers, and that’s certainly progress. Although the European Cardboard Box Mountain is blocking just about everywhere.

I managed some tidying up, but not a lot, and then I began to lose interest.

Instead of putting the clean clothes away in the cupboard, I put them in my suitcase, grabbed a few other things and then Caliburn, Strawberry Moose and I hit the road.

First stop was the estate agent’s. The barrier here to the car park is broken so we are having a new one installed. But the remote controls need to be handed in to be reprogrammed.

After that, we didn’t come home, we carried on driving.

tinchebray normandy franceHaving a look at this sleepy little town here, you would be forgiven for thinking that it’s the back of beyond and there’s nothing whatever exciting about it.

And if you were to rely on the French Tourist Board and the French Ministry of the Interior, you’d still believe that.

Because there is absolutely nothing whatever to tell you that one of the most crucial moments in English history took place here at the town of Tinchebray.

tinchebray normandy franceWhile you admore some of the beautiful buildings and scenery here, let me tell you a little story.

And for this, you’ll have to turn your clock back 950 years.

William the Conqueror was Duke of Normandy prior to becoming King of England in 1066. And when he was King of England, he still retained his title to the Duchy of Normandy.

tinchebray normandy franceThis was only a temporary solution. He had three surviving sons and on his death, he bequeathed his Normandy lands to his eldest son Robert Curthose.

His Kingdom in England was bequeathed to his second son, William Rufus, or William II. His youngest son Henry Beauclerc was given a suM of money.

William Rufus died childless (and regular readers of this rubbish in one of its previous incarnations will recall thatwe once visited the scene of his death) and Robert being the oldest son expected to add the Crown of England to his titles.

tinchebray normandy franceUnfortunately Henry beat him to it and had himself crowned as Henry I, much to Robert’s dismay.

He gathered up a small army and invaded England, but the population refused to rise up to support him and he was obliged to return to Normandy.

There were continual intrigues as each brother tried to undermine the other, and there had been several skirmishes in Normandy between Robert’s supporters and Henry’s supporters.

Henry had already led an army there in a campaign that had ended indecisively, but in the summer of 1106 he was back again.

possible site of Tinchebray castle normandy franceLate September saw him besieging the Castle here at Tinchebray.

Unfortunately, there seems to be no trace of the castle today. All that I know is that one contemporary report of the battle desribes the castle as “on a hill above the town”.

So if I were having to have a wild guess as to where “a hill above the town” might be, in the absence of any evidence whatsoever, that is the most likely-looking “hill above the town”, over there.

battle of tinchebray normandy franceRobert led an army down from Falaise to try to break the siege, and the armies clashed on some flat land at the foot of the castle.

The site was constrained, and so the knights had to dismount and fight on foot, and if my guess is right as to the site of the castle, then the only constrained flat land at the foot would be that field there.

The result was a tragedy for Robert.

In less than an hour, his army was smashed and he was taken prisoner. He lived for the rest of his life, all 30 or so years of it, in captivity.

Normandy was united with the English crown and remained so until 1204.

And you won’t find a word of this anywhere in the town.

During the Royal Progress of Saint Louis, King Louis IX in April and May 1256 to consolidate his Kingdom, he is said by the Chronicler Eudes Rigaud, the Archbishiop of Rouen, to have visited the town.

This didn’t seem to be mentioned anywhere either, as far as I could see.

ford probe tinchebray normandy franceBut here’s something exciting.

When was the last time that you saw one of these?

I saw one in Leuven once but you won’t have seen on in the UK for a while because only 15,000 were ever sold there and the last time that I checked, there were only about 700 still on the road.

ford probe tinchebray normandy franceIt’s the Ford Probe of course, a badge-engineered Mazda that was intended to be the replacement for the Mustang and the Capri. But honestly, who would want to be seen in one of these?

That was the general Public’s response and the car bombed spectacularly. It was on sale for just three years – 1989-1992, and whereas the Capri was always in the Top 10 in the UK? this one was well stuck in the bottom 10.

Finding one on the roads today is something of a rarity.

So now I’m in a flea-pit in Alençon. When I’ve finished kicking out the bed bugs from between the sheets I’ll be hopping in.

I’m carrying on along the road tomorrow – I hope.

But I’ll just mention my tea, which was supposed to be chips with a tortilla wrap with nothing in it but vegetables.

And so the guy behind the counter thought it was funny to fill it with meat. He wasn’t laughing when I finished telling him what I thought of him.

It’s amazing how much French I know when I want to be offensive. Working for 15 years with a bunch of French-speaking chauffeurs did come in quite handy.

Tuesday 8th May 2018 – THAT WAS A LONNNNNNNNNNG DAY.

And it started with the alarm at 06:20 as usual.

By 06:30 I was up and about and by about 07:15 I was breakfasting.

A spin through the apartment to make it look something like respectable and then to complete all of the packing. There was even time for a quick shower (and it was quick too, seeing as I’d switched off the water last night.

At 08:30 I was down in town buying my bread for sandwiches and a half-baguette to eat with my lentil whatsit on the bus – and I also bought two half-litre bottles of water.

Not that I needed the water but with only staying two nights in Leuven I don’t need to take a full carton of soya milk or fruit juice (and I won’t be there in time to do an evening shop) so two strong half-litre bottles at, would you believe, just €0:29 each is the cheapest way to deal with these issues and who cares about the contents at that price?

I’m nothing if not resourceful.

Having made my butties and packed everything, Liz turned up bang on time as I knew she would and we set off for Avranches and a look around to get our bearings. And then we went for a coffee.

While I was saying goodbye to Liz a couple of cars drove past on the motorway heading east, pulling trailers upon which were a couple of vintage cars from the 1930s. “How interesting” I thought.

flixbus 712 gare avranches manche normandy france bruxelles gare du nord belgiumMuch to my surprise (and everyone else’s I suspect) the bus pulled in bang on time. A nice modern Mercedes 6-wheeler.

It was packed too – only a few free seats so I chose a seat next to a rather attractive student-type person of the female sex. If I’m going to be hemmed into a seat on a bus, I may as well take advantage of it.

We reached Caen at 13:30 for a lunch stop so I sat outside and ate my butties in the sun while the drivers had a break.

At 14:00 we were back on the road and went via Rouen (where my travelling companion alighted), Amiens (where we overtook those two old cars that I mentioned earlier), some tiny wayside village where just one person alighted, and Lille to Brussels North Station. Arrival time was programmed at 21:00 and we arrived at … errr … 20:58.

I was impressed.

interior flixbus 712 franceAs for the bus, it wasn’t as comfortable as a North-American long-distance bus and certainly not as comfortable as the train. We were all just a little cramped in here

However not having to drag a heavy suitcase across Paris was a huge plus as far as I was concerned. And it was that which made the difference.

I wouldn’t abandon the train for the bus under normal circumstances, but it was certainly an acceptable substitute at half the price. And when I have my huge suitcase to move about with me on a Canada trip I shall be giving this matter of the bus some very serious consideration.

sncb brussels gare du nord leuven belgium may mai 2018There was a 20-minute wait for a train – an Intercity Express direct to Leuven so I was quite lucky about that.

And we nearly had a “Nicole Gerard” incident too. So engrossed in my book that I almost missed my stop. Mind you, she was even more engrossed than that and when she looked around her, found herself to be in the carriage sidings and had to be escorted back to civilisation by a cleaner.

Being decanted out of the train in something of a rush I had a pleasant perambumation down here and seeing as I was late found my room key in the safe on the wall.

My room is small but quite nice but it’s right on the front and there was a street party last night. The row was intense.

As well as that, I have some noisy neighbours so I’m not too happy. Trying to crash out here, but it’s almost impossible. Not to mention a thirst that you could photograph.

But my tea – the lentil-mix stuff that I made last night – and bread, all of which I ate on the motorway between Gent and Brussels, was delicious. A good plan, that.

Friday 18th November 2016 – I REALLY AM THE KISS OF DEATH

I was in Sedan yesterday evening, with the intention of going for a wander round, and then I saw an advert from the local football club, CS Sedan-Ardennes, talking about matches that the club will be playing in the near future. I noticed that one of the matches would be played tonight.

Sedan had at one time fairly recently played in the French First Division, and had a nice modern stadium on the edge of the city centre. But they have fallen on hard times just recently and are busy propping up all the other clubs in the Third Division. Still, football is football.

The LeClerc supermarket was just around the corner from where I was so I nipped into the LeClerc and stocked up with another pile of tinned food, seeing as it’s so much cheaper there than in Belgium. And not only that, things like the boulghour is half-price compared to Belgium. And so now I have enough stuff to keep me going for the first month when I go back there.

Once I’d finished the shopping and fuelled up Caliburn, I headed off to the football ground and found a fritkot where the owner served me up a big bag of chips and a salad wrap, all for €6:00 which I thought was extremely democratic.

The football ground to which I was heading was just down the road from the fritkot, and when I arrived there, it was in total darkness. But not to worry. It seems that Bird-brain of Britain had confused the address and there’s a street of the same name in a suburb of Sedan and by pure coincidence there’s a football stadium in that street too.

Back into town again and I arrived at the real stadium this time, the Stade Louis Dugauguez. There was some parking in the immediate vicinity which was quite handy and I then had the “hunt the pay-booth”, which was quite exciting.

stade louis dugauguez c s sedan ardennes france  october octobre 2016To my surprise, it cost me just €7:00 for admission to the ground. That’s a bargain at any price, and then I had another massive hike around to find the entry gate that I needed.

I took my seat behind the goals just as the match kicked off. The noisy sector was just a couple of sectors away from where I was, and I was in good company. Mind you, I could have had plenty of choice as to where I would sit. A huge modern 28,000 all-seater stadium and there were about 1500 – 1800 of us in total. No more than that, I shoudn’t think.

stade louis degauguez c s sedan ardennes france  october octobre 2016As for the match itself, it was rather surprising. Sedan are bottom of the Third Division and US Quevilly-Rouen Métropole, the opponents from Rouen, are third in the table and so I was expecting a walk-over. But Sedan could have won this match at a canter had they tried because they looked quite a good side.

They had by far the most possession and looked quite dangerous going forward. But it’s yet another case of a team that could play all night with no opposition on the field, still be out there right now and still not score. Hand them a stringed musical instrument and they still couldn’t hit the nether regions of a ruminant animal.

We had one occasion where one of their attackers blazed the ball miles over the bar from 5 yards out of an open goal and another occasion where an attacker, in an even better position, forgot to kick the ball.

As for Quevilly, they didn’t look as good but they scored the vital goal – a free kick round the blind side of the defensive wall and the keeper not being able to hang on to the shot with a Quevilly forward the quickest to follow up.

They also hit the woodwork too with the keeper well-beaten, and missed a couple of other good chances too.

What with my late night last night, I was in bed and asleep about 2 minutes after I went to bed. I’d had the radio on and that awoke me at 00:45 with something noisy, so I turned it off, went off down the corridor,and then back to bed.

And there I stayed, flat out until the alarm went off at 07:00.I’d been a-travelling too, but heaven alone now knows where I’d been on my journey.

For most of the morning I was working on my web site for Labrador. I’m making some quite rapid progress too as far as information goes, but not as far as distance goes. It’s going to be longer than I thought before I arrive at Baie Comeau, but it’s going to be an interesting drive, as well as a controversial one, that’s for sure, because the stuff that’s come crawling out of the woodwork is quite … errr …interesting, to say the least.

After lunch, I crashed out, and for longer than I intended too. It had been a nice afternoon and I was sorry that I missed it. But it’s never too late to hit the road and so off I set for Sedan.

Once the football had finished, freezing to death, I walked back to Caliburn and drove back here. No room on the main car park due to the influx of weekenders, and the lounge was crawling with people – including the noisy brat who was still up creating a disturbance at gone midnight. That’s no way to bring up a 4 year-old.

By 00:30 I was too tired to do much so I called it a night and went to bed.

I hope that I have as good a sleep as I did last night.

Thursday 6th November 2014 – THE BIG PROBLEM …

… about portable telephones these days is that there are fewer and fewer public telephone boxes.

Consequently when Yours Truly and his sidekick Strawberry Moose are off in Caliburn on a Mission to rescue people in distress, there is nowhere for us to go to put our underpants on outside our trousers. As a result, we drove all the way to Rouen dressed quite normally.

The drive was quite uneventful and I found a place to park up in the secluded car park of a restaurant right on the edge of the city of Rouen and froze to death all night. It really was cold.

I had my phone call at 06:40 and then went to look for the hotel. And I do have to say that I have come to hate the centre of Rouen – really hate it. It’s all one-way streets and pedestrianised areas and I couldn’t reach the hotel. IN the end I had to park up and let my “client” come to me.

It was 08:00 when we finally met up, far too late, and then went off to Pissy-Poville (yes, it really does exist) for this recovery job. There was no way to remove the vehicle involved and so we had to empty it of everything – and I DO mean everything. That wasn’t as easy as it might sound either as it was so misshapen that we couldn’t open the doors. We were there for ages with a series of heavy crowbars and hacksaws, but we managed it in the end.

It then took ages to fill up Caliburn and once that was done, we had a drive back gome. And that wasn’t quite so easy either for we had a really full load up on Caliburn and he wasn’t impressed at all. Still, at 18:00, I was all unloaded and back in Pionsat.

What a day!

And it wasn’t finished either. I have some friends coming here and I’d booked them in at the Queue de Milan Hotel in Pionsat. I went round there to pay for the room now that I was free, only to find that they were there and had paid the bill. Consequently I took them to the Dauphin restaurant in Montaigut, giving them a guided tour of the town while we were at it.

I came back here and crashed out – hardly surprising given what I’d been through today. I’m far too old for this.

Wednesday 5th November 2014 – ANOTHER ONE OF THOSE DAYS …

… where things don’t go according to plan. And I need to have this place finished for my guests too.

This morning though, it all started quite well, although it might not sound like it.

The last few weeks I’ve noticed that the battery bank hasn’t been charging as quickly as it ought to be, and discharging quicker than it ought to. Furthermore, the overall charge has been slowly dropping overnight when nothing has been running.

I had a look inside the battery box and, sure enough, another one of these Hawker batteries has burst. And again, just as you might think, it’s the one that is at the input/output end of the battery bank. The burst was causing the battery to overheat and that was where all of the power from the battery bank was going.

It was therefore time to bite the bullet and start to install the new batteries that I bought a while ago – those enormous 200 amp-hour batteries that I can hardly lift up. This involved expanding the base of the battery box, and I’s started on that a while ago, but hadn’t finished. Nevertheless, by rearranging the surviving Hawker batteries and knocking out three of the breeze blocks that form part of the side of the battery box, I could fit three of the large batteries.

So that is what I spent all of this morning doing – reorganising the battery box so that I could fit the three large batteries in. And moving the three batteries from the barn to the house was quite something. lifting 58kgs from a standing start is one thing – actually carrying it is quite something else.

It involved a very late lunch, and with tools and rubbish and all kinds of things littering the nice, clean and tidy floor from yesterday.

Just as I had finished my very late lunch and about to go and tidy up everything, the phone rang. Someone has suffered a calamity and needs my urgent attention. And this event has occurred in Rouen, no less. Keen readers of this rubbish will recall that I had to go on a breakdown to Rouen just before I went off the Canada, and now I need to go back. I have to be there for round about 06:30 tomorrow morning and so this means that I need to set off round about now and find a place to settle down somewhere on the outskirts of the town ready for things to happen.

So much for my nice, tidy living room floor – and my plans to have both myself and the house all nice, clean and tidy for my visitors. And that reminds me – I wasn’t able to contact them to tell them what was going on and so I’ve been leaving messages all over the place. I hope that they will find at least one of them.

Saturday 23rd August 2014 – IT’S NOT EVERY DAY …

… that I’m up and out of bed at 06:30, but that was the time that Rob rang me up. And consequently, by about 07:30 we were on the road, fuelled up, tyres on the trailer inflated.

It was heavy going on the Autoroute northwards. It’s the last-but-one Saturday of the holiday season so there were piles of traffic heading towards Paris.

At Orleans we came off the autoroute and headed cross-country via Chartres, Dreux and Evreux to Rouen and then northwards towards Amiens and Abbeville. But Rouen dismayed us. There were major roadworks on the way into the city from the north and the queue was enormous, stretching for miles and miles. Travelling northbound, we had no troubles but it didn’t look good for coming back.

caliburn ford transit car transporter trailer rouen franceAbout 30 miles out of Rouen, round about 14:30, we located Rob’s car and loaded it onto the trailer. Strapped down at the back, but I chained it down at the front. Going that kind of distance (over 600kms), I wanted a chain holding the car to the trailer just in case.

We set off on a very scenic trip back. Avoiding Rouen isn’t easy as the River Seine is in the way and so it took several hours to rejoin the main road down near Evreux, but at least we were moving for most of the time.

Heading back towards home we were stopping every 100kms or so to check the strapping on the car – we didn’t want the car falling off the trailer – and we couldn’t go very fast anyway and so it was about midnight when we were finally back at Rob’s and unloading the car.

I was back here by 01:00 but I couldn’t sleep – just like in the old days when I could never sleep after doing a long shift on the taxis – and so I watched a film for ages.

Tomorrow I’ll have to uncouple the trailer and park it up properly.

But the irony of all of this is that we travelled almost 12OOkms without a hiccup and without attracting any kind of attention whatsoever, but at Evaux les Bains, just 10 kms from our destination and at 23:30 at night, we were stopped in a gendarme barrage, looking for drunk drivers and the like. They had a good look around, a good inspection of the trailer and then a length chat, and waved us on our way.

It was just 1km after that that the retaining strap that was holding the rear of the car snapped. I’m glad that I had chained it down as well.

Sunday 9th June 2013 – HERE’S MY SPEC ….

caliburn autoroute rouen france… from Saturday night’s sleepover.

Leaving Calais I drove for a couple of hours and parked up at about 03:00 just short of Rouen on a motorway rest area.

And probably one of the best nights’ sleeps I have ever had. Totally painless and I’ll stop here again!

From here it was straight down the motorway through the depressing weather all the way to near Nantes and from there down to Fromentine.

Not a hiccup along the way (I hope that I was sticking to the limit when I drove past the Kojak with a Kodak) except at Rouen where I ended up in some kind of mayhem around the old harbour

We had marching bands, tall ships and all that kind of rubbish and it took hours to extract myself from the chaos.

When are they going to build a flaming by-pass around that blasted place?

At Frometine I arrived, would you believe, in the middle of a brocante.

And what a brocante it was – there wasn’t anything for sale under about €100. I really do think that some people have taken leave of their senses when it comes to valuing their possessions.

A bit of good luck, though – the second-hand bookshop was open so I bought a few more history books.

That’s one thing that I’m finding with raiding a few of these bookshops – that there are huge gaps in the British version of European history that can only be filled by a French perspective on things.

So far, I’ve bought a huge volume on the Hundred Years War, a couple of books on The Battle of the Rail – the fight of the French cheminots against the SS during the crucial 10 days after D-Day and today, a book on the Allied invasion of Provence.

These are all events that British historians simply gloss over, and it’s nice to read about these events from another point of view.

There’s a pizza place in Fromentine, run by a woman who comes from Morlaix, a town in Finisterre where I spent a few relaxing weeks back in 1976 or something.

She made me a nice vegan pizza (good job that I was prepared with my vegan cheese) – after all, it is Sunday – and then I went off to my spec from the other week to pass the night.

I’ve an early sail in the morning.

Sunday 11th December 2011 – HAVING MADE …

… good time last night and covered a lot of ground, and being to cold to sleep for too long, I was up and about today in plenty of time.

st valery en caux franceOf course, it goes without saying that I’m open to all kinds of sightseeing opportunities when I’m on my travels, so when I saw a sign for “St Valéry-en-Caux”, I was off.

St Valéry-en-Caux has something of a reputation dating from World War II and the Fall of France.

The town was the site of the “last stand” of the British Army on Mainland Europe in June 1940

st valery en caux franceThe British Army’s 51st Highland Division had been detached from the rest of the British Expeditionary Force in order to go to assist the French at the Maginot Line.

They had thus escaped being encircled and trapped in Dunkirk, and they retreated to the west.

The plan was to evacuate them from St Valéry-en-Caux – not the ideal place but the only place possible that had not been overwhelmed or threatened by the Germans’ rapid advance.

The navy duly arrived on 10th June, but the troops had not yet arrived. And having suffered an aerial attack, they pulled back offshore.

The soldiers arrived shortly afterwards and hastily threw together a defensive perimeter around the town to protect the evacuation, but the Germans were too quick.

The arrived hot on the heels of the Highlanders and overwhelmed the perimeter quite quickly.

By the time the ships returned next day, it was already too late. The fighting was all over and practically the entire 51st Highlander Division had been led off into captivity.

memorial 51st highland division st valery en caux franceIn 1950 a memorial stone to the 51st Highland Division was erected on the cliffs on an eminence that dominated the town.

That’s it up there on the skyline in the centre of the photograph.

The erection was, apparently, something of a ceremony, with the pipers of the Black Watch playing “The Last Post”.

st valery en caux franceI actually saw a photograph of the town on that occasion, and it didn’t half look a mess – even 5 years after the end of the War.

The town was fortified quite heavily by the Germans as part of “The Atlantic Wall” so it’s no surprise that heavy fighting took place around here later in the War.

The amount of destruction in the town, and the fact that the fortifications escaped so lightly, is some kind of testament to German thoroughness.

st valery en caux franceThat is of course one reason for visiting the town. There are plenty of others too.

It’s quite a historic place, being first mentioned in a Charter of 990, although legend has it that the town actually dates from the 7th Century when a religious institution was founded here as part of the plans to evangelise the coast.

Nothing has been seen to confirm this, and no trace of a likely building has ever been discovered.

Chapelle Notre Dame du Bon Port st valery en caux franceFirst port … if you pardon the expression … of call in St Valery-en-Caux has to be the Chapelle Notre Dame du Bon Port – the Chapel of Our Lady of Bon Port – the “Good Port”.

This magnificent wooden structure, designed by Raymond Jules Lopez, and situated in the … errr … Place de la Chapelle.

It dates from 1963 and replaces a much older chapel that was destroyed during the war.

Chapelle Notre Dame du Bon Port st valery en caux franceAnd in an irony that seems to have gone right over everyone’s head, the stones from the original chapel – about which nothing much seems to be said – were used for a very secular purpose – to build the casino in Veulettes sur Mer.

Its stained-glass windows, designed by André-Louis Pierre, are said to be magnificent and are best viewed from inside, something which I was very keen to do.

And so in a situation that somehow only I seem to be able to manage to conjure up, the church is closed today and the doors are locked.

Maison Henri IV st valery en caux franceThe most magnificent building in the town is what it known as the “Maison Henri IV”.

Built in 1540 by the wealthy Guillaume Ladiré, it earns its name from a story that suggests that the French King Henri IV spent a night here in 1593.

It’s said by many to be the finest “Normandy-style” half-timbered house in the region and who am I to disagree?

Yet another claim to fame possessed by the town, and about which people are quite reticent, is the fact that a major rail crash took place here on 17th January 1945.

The fact that it happened in wartime and involved armed forces means that it never received the publicity that it might otherwise have done had a news blackout not been in force.

A train loaded with American soldiers was coming into town when a brake failure cause it to overrun the buffers at the station. 89 American soldiers were killed and 152 injured.

Finally, and most importantly, there’s a transatlantic telephone cable – the TAT 14 – between North America and Europe that runs out to sea here. According to the American Secret Service, this is a vital communications link and so the area is considered by the US military to be a “strategic point”.

We all know what that means. Iraq and Afghanistan were considered by the US military to be “strategic points” too.

Blimey! Is that the time?

My ferry leaves in 90 minutes and I have about 50 kms to travel. And to check in, and to board. And I’ve never been to le Havre so I don’t know where the port is!

I shall have to put my skates on!

nissan pao grey import le havre franceMade it to the port and on the ship with half an hour to spare (good old Caliburn) and I’m glad that I did because just look at my travelling companion!

It’s one of these Nissan Pike-style retro cars made in Japan in the late 80s and early 90s. This one is the Pao – the estate-car version.

Rare as they come, I’ve never seen one before and I probably won’t ever see one again because these had a very limited production run – and that was for Asia only.

nissan pao grey import le havre franceThey don’t have a class type approval and so were never officially imported into the UK.

Only individual cars can be brought in – the so-called “grey imports” – and they need modifications before they can be used on British roads.

You’ll notice the add-on rear foglights underneath the rear bumper, for example. That’s a real give-away if you want to see if a car is an official mainstream import or a grey import like this.

le havre franceAs for me, having parked up Caliburn and photographed the Pao I went hot-foot, or chaud pied as they say around here, up to the deck to see what I could see.

Having spent my early afternoon in St Valery-en-Caux rather than Le Havre, I hadn’t seen too much of the city, so I needed to see what I could see from on top.

First thing to see of course is the River Seine – the town is situated right at the mouth of the river.

le havre franceIt’s not really a historic place as such, like many French towns and cities. It’s effectively a “planned town” built on the orders of King Francois 1st in 1517.

With the expansion of France’s maritime power in the 15th and 17th Century, the town was intended to take advantage of its ideal situation here.

As more and more ships were sailing, and the ships themselves grew in size, the port of Rouen was overwhelmed. Goods could be unloaded here and trans-shipped by barge up the Seine to Paris

le havre franceMind you, that’s not to say that there was never a setttlement here. Evidence has been uncovered suggesting settlement from the dawn of European humanity.

More-or-less continual occupation from Neolithic times is suggested.

There was an Abbey here in the immediate vicinity at the time of WIlliam the Conqueror and there were certainly a couple of small fishing villages here when Francois I became interested in the site.

le havre franceBut like most things, it was the era of the Industrial Revolution that saw the spectacular growth of the port.

Continual development has been taking place over the last 180 years, and it’s now one of the major ports of the country.

There’s a considerable amount of heavy industry as you might expect. Oil refineries, cement works and all of that, all based on the raw materials that are brought in.

le havre franceMammoth cruise ships call here today as you can see.

But that’s just a sad reminder of the days when the great French transatlantic liners of the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique sailed from here.

And the huge ship-building works – the Ateliers et Chantiers du Havre – closed down in 1999. That was a major blow for the town.

le havre franceThe city was totally destroyed by the Allied air forces during the war – and the rebuilding has not been kind, as you can see.

The worst of the air raids took place on 5 an 6 September 1944 by the RAF Bomber Command.

They dropped a total of 10,000 tonnes of bombs on the city, destroyed 12,500 buildings and killed over 3,000 civilians. 350 boats and ships were sunk.

And all to no purpose either because the port had already been badly damaged and the German defenders were camped well outside the town.

The reason of this destruction has always for the French been a total mystery. Many conspiracy theories, such as the wish to damage French post-war maritime commerce, have abounded ever since.

In the lounge of the ship for five and a half hours of one of the most comfortable crossings of the English Channel, I was in Pompey – or Portsmouth to the uninitiated.

Out of the docks and round the back streets is one of the best chippies in the whole of the UK and I felt so much better once I’d wolfed down a helping of beans and chips liberally doused in malt vinegar.

The M27 and the M3 to Winchester took me to the A34 to Oxford, and then the A43 as far as the edge of Towcester where there’s a quiet lay-by for the night.

And guess who forgot to plug his heated seat in so that he could warm up his bed?

Tuesday 31st May 2011 – THE EVIL HAS LANDED!

And I’m now curled up in the back of Caliburn fast asleep in a cut-off of the A5 at Markyate.

pont de l'arche franceThis morning though, I was curled up on a car park at Pont de l’Arche on the banks of the River Eure. Quite painless here, it was.

And where those cranes are in the distance, that’s the River Seine.

The two rivers are quite close together, separated by a low earthen bank and run parallel to each other for a considerable distance.

pont de l'arche franceThe town itself is quite beautiful and has quite a history.

There’s a Roman road that passes near here and with this being one of the easiest crossings of the rivers, there was a Roman camp not too far away.

It’s considered likely therefore that the origins of the town were in the civilian settlement that would have been here to service the Roman camp.

pont de l'arche franceIn the early Medieval period sometime in the 9th Century, the presence of a bridge across the rivers here was recorded.

This bridge was guarded by two fortresses, one at either end. It took the Vikings four months to reach Paris during their invasion of 885, much of which was due to the spirited defence of the forts.

The Viking encampment is just outside the town at Damps – which was the argot, or slang for “Danish”.

l'église Notre-Dame-des-Arts fortifications pont de l'arche franceLike most towns in strategic positions, it was fortified and in places, traces of the fortifications can still be seen.

But even where the fortifications no longer exist, it’s very easy to imagine just where they might have been and how they might have looked.

And remember my pet theory about churches and fortresses? That’s exactly the kind of place where you would have had an early Medieval fortress,
isn’t it?

l'église Notre-Dame-des-Arts pont de l'arche franceThe church itself, l’église Notre-Dame-des-Arts, dates from the 16th Century and is in what is said to be the “flamboyant gothic” style. I won’t argue with that.

The stalls are quite interesting – they are said to have come from Bonport Abbey when it was dismantled after the French Revolution.

The altar is a baroque creation of the 17th Century and there is also a magnificent organ donated by Henri IV.

pont de l'arche franceThe town is actually of some significance in British history.

It was a favourite haunt of Richard the Lion-Heart, who was of course Duke of Normandy, during his battles with King Philippe II of France and fighting took place in the vicinity.

And in World War I the Royal Flying Corps had a big depot here that reconditioned and repaired aeroplane engines for the front-line squadrons.

So now I’m moving on.

Rouen was not a problem (for a change) although I wish that they would build a by-pass around the town and I arrived in Boulogne for a late-ish lunch. The big LeClerc on the edge of town came up with some goodies, and then I went for a stroll around the town.

I wasn’t stopping though, I had other fish to fry.

batterie todt battery audinghen pas de calais franceOn the coast between the two villages of Audresselles and Audinghem are what are known as the Batteries Todt – the “Todt Batteries”.

Fritz Todt was the German Minister for Armaments and Munitions in the early days of World War II prior to his death in 1942.

One of his tasks was the overseeing of the forced labour gangs, and another was the construction of the border fortifications.

batterie todt battery audinghen pas de calais franceHis “Todt Organisation” undertook construction of the Atlantic Wall – the system of fortifications that protected the French and Belgian coasts from invasion.

Part of the fortifications consisted of four massive concrete bunkers, each one of which contained a huge 380mm gun, the kind of which was fitted to some of the biggest battleships.

batterie todt battery audinghen pas de calais franceThese could fire shells well over 30 miles on a good day and so the Kent coast was well within range.

This would make them a natural target of RAF Bomber Command and so these gun emplacements were build with roofs and walls of reinforced concrete 3.5 metres thick, and were protected by 9 75mm anti-aircraft guns.

batterie todt battery audinghen pas de calais franceConstruction began in August 1940 and the first shell was fired on 20th January 1942, although the official opening was on 10th February.

There was a field of fire of 120° and so they had a pretty good control of the Channel and the Kent coast.

Nothing could move over there without the Germans seeing it and being able to fire at it.

batterie todt battery audinghen pas de calais franceEach gun required a crew of four officers and eighteen men, and with all of the tasks that had to be performed, a force of 600 men was involved.

It wasn’t until the 29th of September that the guns were finally silent, captured by the North Nova Scotia Highlanders from the 3rd Canadian Army during “Operation Undergo”

batterie todt battery audinghen pas de calais franceTheir attack was preceded on the 26th of September by 532 bombers which dropped a total of 855 tonnes of bombs. And you can see the damage that they caused here.

Although there is no record of any “Grand Slam” 5-tonne penetration bomb being dropped in this raid, they were being employed elsewhere in the vicinity against German “special artillery” and I can’t imagine anything else that would do this much damage.

english channel kent coast cap griz nez pas de calais franceIt was a beautiful late afternoon/early evening and so I wandered off to my little haunt on the top of Cap Griz Nez.

There’s a nice, quiet little car park where I have spent many a happy hour (and several comfortable nights).

And there’s also a stunning view from here right across the English Channel.

english channel kent coast cap griz nez pas de calais franceWith a really good telephoto lens you can see most things when there is nothing to obstruct your vision, like trees and the like.

Over there to the left of the ship you might be able to make out the Richborough Power Station between Sandwich and Ramsgate.

You’ll probably have to click on this photo to see a larger image in order to see it more clearly.

cap griz nez pas de calais franceSitting here with my binoculars ship-spotting, at one time I could count as many as 42 ships in sight.

Not for nothing is the English Channel described as being the busiest sea lane in the world.

It’s so busy that in fact that ships have to “drive on the right” when they are sailing through the Channel, just as they do when they enter the harbour at Halifax.

cap giz nez pas de calais franceMy train isn’t quite late and so I could sit here and cook myself a meal in the back of Caliburn. I did remember my gas stove for once.

Having eaten and washed up, I went back up to the scenic viewpoint to watch the sun set on the British Empire. I reckoned that that was rather symbolic.

At the appropriate time I drove up the coast to the Channel Tunnel terminal and we whizzed through on the train to Folkestone.

But we had some excitement at the Tunnel terminal.

A French Customs official came out of his hut, looking all official and the like, and flagged me down. I thought that this was going to be a search or some other interaction of some unpleasant sort, but far from it.

Caliburn, being fully-signwritten as you know, attracts a considerable amount of attention when he’s on his travels and this Customs Official had seen the signs.

He wanted to talk wind turbines and seeing as I was running a little early, we had a lengthy chat. The result is that he took a card and he’ll be in touch.

Even though I was starting to feel tired, I make it a rule never to stop until I’m around the M25 an heading north. Having to negotiate the M25 in daylight hours is a pointless exercise – I’ll be stuck there for a week.

03:00 is definitely the time to be round there, and by 04:00 (yet again) I was pulling into a little truncated road that I know where the A5 has been diverted.

Not the first time I’ve stayed here. We parked here the night in 1973 – a dozen of us in a hired Bedford CF van after watching the Speedway World Finals at Wembley.

Tuesday 28th September 2010 – WOULD YOU BELIEVE …

sncf railway train riom puy de dome paris france… that this is the first time that I’ve been on a French train since all of 1978? That was when I had a brief excursion from Rouen to Paris to escape from a party of schoolkids that I was accompanying.

The trip itself was quite uneventful except that I had to share a table with three other people and a large black dog. Everywhere you put your feet it seemed to be on top of the dog. Probably something to do with me going to Labrador, I reckon.

everything went according to plan at Gerzat and Liz dropped me off at the railway station in really good time for my train. I even managed to have time for a coffee and was on the platform in good time for my train.

The British King Richard I was, as every schoolboy will tell you, nicknamed Richard Gare de Lyon because he was always travelling south with his pal Philip of France. I was here in the Gare de Lyon and I was going west. I didn’t like the analogy.

To seek directions to the RER I enquired of a member of the station security staff. He replied in an English which was absolutely impeccable. When I congratulated him on it he replied
"and so it ought to be. I was born in Atlanta, Georgia".
Ahh well.

So down into the basement, off to Something Halles du Something Else on the RER line A, and then change onto the RER line B for Charles de Gaulle airport Terminal 1. And it wasn’t half a struggle fighting through tides of people with a big heavy suitcase. This was the worst part of the journey without a doubt.

When I finally arrived at the airport I waited outside in the wind and rain in the company of a hundred other people for the Hotel navettes. My hotel was the Comfort Inn and I have no idea why they call it Comfort because the light in my room doesn’t work, the shower is only lukewarm and leaks all over the bathroom floor, the meals and drinks are like the internet service – flaming expensive!

But then it’s the cheapest hotel I could find that had a direct connection to the airport and still had a room vacant. I could have paid a lot more for my room elsewhere. And I’m only going to be sleeping in it anyway. It’s better than a draughty railway station concourse.

And I have my humus butties and a packet of biscuits – what more could any man desire?