… on the road again. My stay with Marianne in Brussels is over.
I’m presently holed up in a concealed fold in the ground in a parking space I know somewhere between Rethel and Chalons-sur-Marne, or Chalons en Champagne, or whatever they call the place these days. We’ve stayed here before as you know.
The plan was that I was going to have a slow amble back over a few days, looking at all of the places that I’ve driven past and never visited during all of the time that I’ve been travelling up and down the road, but the weather put paid to that.
It’s broken at last as you might expect, and we had a howling hurricane and pitch darkness all the way down to here. And so I pressed on rather than hanging around, and took shelter here.
I’m not anticipating it being any better tomorrow, so I’ll be going home instead.
As for today, a few more hours on the book and then after lunch we nipped out. Today is the start of the January sales so our first port of call was the sales at IKEA.
But of course Brain of Britain strikes again, doesn’t he? They don’t start until the Tuesday.
We had a bit of a laugh too at her apartment.
One of her best friends is a strange woman who belongs to one of these weird sects, and the idea that anyone should put temptation of sin in their way by being in the close proximity of a person of the opposite sex is a devastating one, from her point of view.
Consequently, I’ve been having to keep a low profile, but the aforementioned friend called round today. The machinations that we had to go through in order not to offend this woman were … errr … quite amusing, I’ll tell you.
But it’s all good fun, isn’t it?
So two poems in French (and several more, I notice, as I glance further ahead) translated into English (straightforward), then rendered as poems (nothing like as easy) with certain crucial words remaining in the same place (almost impossible).
I ended up spending all my time thinking in rhyme, in order to try to get into the swing of it.
And translating several anagrams into English to the satisfaction of Marianne and keeping to the gist of the story – it’s been hard work.
But it was worth it in the end.
