… "da dah, da da dah" – ed … to find myself abandoned once again by my companions of the night. And there were quite a few of us too at one time.
Mind you, I’d had plenty of companions during the night. I had to meet a friend of mine at the new airport in North-West England, called Skipton although God knows why as it’s miles away from Skipton and much closer to other places, and I didn’t know if he was coming or going, if you know what I mean, so I had to watch both terminals. I ended up talking to someone who was telling me about this most circuitous route he was having to take to go to Frankfurt and it wasn’t until after he left that I realised that he was in fact an airline pilot.
A group of us stopped off at a pub that I knew to do something and then set off back to the airport and on the way back I noticed that the whole bus was littered with frozen food all thawing. It seems that an airline stewardess coming back from Spain had been disciplined for something and so to revenge herself she had emptied all of the frozen food cabinets. I said that it was a pity that no-one had said when we were at the pub because they had a huge frozen food chamber and it could all have gone in that.
Bak at the airport I wondered if I had time to go and sit on the beach (Skipton is a wild place) before my flight and so I telephoned the hotel, that had all the details of flights, but some Australian woman answered the phone, answered me in the rudest of terms and then hung up. So I stormed off to the hotel to register a complaint.
Back in the land of the living (or, at least, the undead), I’ve been wandering around Burgundian towns and villages today – ones through which I have often hurried and never stopped.
We had St Florentin perched on its lofty bluff overlooking the valley in which the road between Auxerre and Troyes has run since long before Roman times. This has been a very rich town at one time as you might expect – on the border between the land of the Dukes of Burgundy and the Counts of Champagne and all of the tribute and tolls that must have flowed through here.
There’s evidence of a great deal of wealth in the past but today the old part of the town is semi-derelict
Pontigny is another place I visited. That is famous for its Cistercian Abbey which is remarkably intact despite the best efforts of the Wars of Religion and the Revolutionary Terror.
Its major claim to fame is that it was the refuge of Thomas A’Beckett and Stephen Langton after they fled into exile having upset the king. Another Archbishop of Canterbury, St Edmund, who served between 1233 and 1240, he is buried here after having died nearby on his way to the Vatican to see the Pope
I was disappointed with Auxerre, despite all of my hopes of the place and despite how nice it looks from across the river.
But then again, it’s probably a very bad idea to come and see anything or anywhere while Troyes is still running around inside my head. Troyes was certainly one of the most beautiful and interesting places that I have ever visited in recent times.
Auxerre does have a lot going for it of course – its river, its churches and abbeys, the vestiges of its walls and its famous clock dating from 1484, but the integration between modern and historical isn’t anything like as well-done as Troyes, and many of the narrow Medieval alleys have been swept away and for no good reason too if you ask me.
And to prove that my stories about fires ravaging the whole of Quebec are… well, not exaggerated but, shall we say, over-emphasised, Auxerre has had its share of fires too. 900, 950, 1023, 1825, to name just 4.
There are some little gems too along the road. One such is the town of Coulanges sur Yonne. This is another place that has been by-passed by the modern road so travellers don’t get to visit it but for a little place of some few hundred inhabitants, it’s gorgeous and you can imagine what many modern cities of today must have looked like 1000 years ago simply by walking around here.
A word has to be said too about its setting. Here at the foot of a steep valley alongside the River Yonne with the high hills and plateau in the background, no wonder it has been left behind in the mists of time.
But anyway, it’s late – later than I was hoping but I needed to push on or otherwise I won’t ever get here. Now I’m off to find some food – at Clamecy more likely – as I have no gas and I’m not paying …
