… you’re all wondering where I am –
The answer is quite simple. I am in the bosom of friends (yes, I do have friends). And it’s one of the, if not the main, reason why I’m on the road right now.
Having crashed out definitively last night at about 21:30, I vaguely remember waking at about 01:30, finding that I was still lying there on top of the bed, saying “sod it” to myself and going back to sleep again right there.
The next time that I awoke, it was at 05:53 and I was still there on top of the bed.
This time I was awake for good, so I decided that that would be a good time for me to arise (before even the 1st alarm!) and attack the notes, of which there were plenty, from last night.
This was when we’d seen that body on the rocks and we were telling everyone but it didn’t make the slightest bit of difference. In the end someone believed us so we had to negotiate our way back to this clifftop. I was worried now having told someone that either it had gone or I’d imagined it or something, but when we got there sure enough there it was sprawled on the rocks. We got this guy to call for the police and an ambulance but for some unknown reason he had very great difficulty getting through.
Later on i was in LeClerc. It was more like 23:00 but I was shopping for stuff for breakfast. I had to work out where everything is and what I wanted and how to get the best available qualities. In the fresh vegetable stall I bumped into Liz. I was picking loads of carrots with their heads on and putting three in my basket. I was talking to Liz about how I used to plant the heads for fun when I’d cut them off the carrots and even a few of them would grow again. Liz said that she still did that and they always seemed to grow for her. By now we were standing in a garden somewhere and it was beautiful. The wind was blowing and I was watching my wind turbine going round faster and faster and faster but I thought that this was still slow for what it was supposed to be doing. it should be doing much better than this. Then Caliburn turned up driving down the lane to my house
There was still plenty of time after this to go for another walkabout. I found myself in Iceland but it was the strangest kind of Iceland I’ve ever been to. We were in a hotel and had an hour or two to wait before we needed to go to the airport or wherever it was from where we were leaving so they took us into town. I had my backpack my guitar and something else with me. They dropped us off for a walk round and we’d all meet back at the railway station. I walked around, or tried to walk around but I had so much stuff to carry with me and I didn’t even have my suitcase at this time. It was really inconvenient. I was struggling to get around. We ended up having to get back to the station (in Iceland, that has never ever had a public rail network!) to pick up the bus to go back to the hotel. In the end I ended up back there but everyone else was back there already. I thought that this time had gone really quickly and I hadn’t done half of what I needed to do. We all went to get back onto the bus as the bus was ready one of the boys upstairs came down to talk to the travel host who was Matthew Swann. It turned out that a girl had been ill and we were waiting for the ambulance. It turned up and first of all this other girl came down. She was a bit shaky. Then they went upstairs and came down carrying a girl. She was in quite a state and the first girl was saying to the ill one “you’ve got to eat, you’ve got to drink at least every 5 days especially when you’ve been sick” all this kind of thing. They just dumped her in the corner of an ambulance and the ambulace guy said in perfect English “yes she’ll have to be wrapped in another blanket – she can’t be wrapped in that one”. They started to get her out and put her in the ambulance.
But earlier I’d been on another bus as well. I don’t know where I was and I had to work out how I was going to get to Crewe. It was a long complicated journey and I was waiting for the bus to do the first stage and around the corner came the K43 with “Crewe” on it. I got on and the conductor came round to ask for my fare and I couldn’t remember the name of the bus stop. I tried to describe it to him “it’s the one after …” bit I couldn’t think of the name of the one before it either. In the end I asked “is the fare to Crewe all the same? Just give me a ticket to Crewe”.
When I had finished it was breakfast time so I went downstairs to see what was on offer. I had the fresh bread and jam with coffee and juice.
We had been told to wear masks in the dining room, so I remember saying that it would be fun trying to eat, but the lady reassured me, saying that it was only when we were moving around. Sitting down with our food, we didn’t need masks.
It was a pretty quick meal – I wasn’t down there for long and qfter breakfast I came back here and packed everything. By 09:00 I was back on the road.
Not very far though. First call was at LeClerc the other side of the motorway where I stocked up with groceries and the like, and then I made a phone call as I watched an artic lorry to perform a series of complicated manoeuvres.
Second port of call was the LeClerc fuel station where I fuelled up with diesel.
Off on my travels, and the route as far as Evaux-les-Bains was quite as I remembered it. And then a merry, mazy winding way through the hills and the side roads until I ended up at Rosemary’s.
If you think that where I live is quite beautiful, it’s not a patch on where Rosemary lives. Her house is perched on the clifftop overlooking the Gorge de la Sioule, the gash that cleaves the Combrailles in two and which as the River Sioule running through it, along the bottom.
And this is where I’m staying for the next few nights as there are things that I need to be doing before we go back into lockdown.
Lunch was prepared already when I arrived and then afterwards I made another phone call – this time to Ingrid to tell her that I was here. And we made certain arrangements.
A good search of Caliburn to find a very important item finally came good and then we had some organising to do.
All of that took up a good part of the afternoon followed by which we just chatted for a while about nothing in p
particular.
After we’d had our evening meal, Rosemary took me out for a walk around her neighbourhood
While I know the area pretty well to drive through it, just like anywhere else in rural France there are loads of little pathways and trackways that you only know if you are a local. And so disturbing the ponies in a neighbouring field, we disappeared off into the depths of darkest Combrailles
Rural France has never been troubled particularly by an invader who has disrupted the society in quite the same way that The Romans, the Saxons, the Vikings and the Normans did in England and so many of the paths down which we were walking have their roots going back into antiquity and even prehistory.
Very rarely was this this area carved up into great estates and parkland that overwhelmed the traditional “parcelles” of the local peasantry and the patchwork of fields and tracks is all just as it might have been when this area was reclaimed from the climax forest that covered it.
It was actually quite late when we set out for our walk.
It’s July of course at the moment and it stays light usually until quite late. Right now the sun is just disappearing over the brow of the hill. So we didn’t hang around particularly – a nice lap around the paths and tracks and then back down the lane to home.
So now it’s bedtime. Not exactly an exciting or busy day, but I was exhausted after my trip. I wanted to rest because It’s all going to kick off from here, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall seeing in a few weeks time as the story unfolds.
As I said a while back, we are heading for a second lock-down, I’m convinced of that, and there is no time like the present to do certain things. It’s now or never.
