Category: South of France

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Carcassonne, Saturday 17 March 2012

Bienvenue à Carcassonne

There’s something raucous going on further down the platform, maybe the French version of a hen party, people in brightly coloured curly wigs making loud screechy noises. Outside the station, entrance roads are cordoned off, lots of police standing around, and police cars. Then I see a banner with the word ‘Carnaval’ on it, and today’s date.
I dodge out of the way of the reversing police van, and realise I’m standing at the taxi rank – exactly what I want. After the farce in Sète I’m not taking any more chances with buses.
A taxi pulls up and I show the driver my notebook with the address, neatly written in block capitals. He frowns and shakes his head. Pulls out a map and starts opening it, folding it, unfolding it, studying it. Takes my notebook and stares hard at it, then throws it down on the passenger seat, shaking his head some more. Turns the map upside down and looks at it again. Speaks into his radio mic, then puts it back.
‘They’ll call me in 5 minutes.’
‘You’re a taxi driver, for goodness sake!’ I want to shout at him. ‘Don’t
you know your own city?’
He picks up the notebook again and holds it against the map, then takes the mic and speaks into it some more. At last he nods, smiles, hangs up, passes me back my notebook.
‘It’s okay! It’s okay! We go!’
On the radio someone is talking in excited tones, it sounds like a sports commentary, and I hear the word ‘Angleterre’, then voices singing the Marseillaise. Can’t help humming along – wait a minute, maybe it’s a rugby match, England versus France. Mid-March, time for the Six Nations. From the singing, it doesn’t sound too good for our lads.


Within 10 minutes we’ve reached the mediaeval city walls. There’s a barrier across the road, the sort that lifts up to let the traffic through. We stop.
‘It’s in there’ he gestures through the gate. ‘Place de Saint-Jean.‘
‘What?’ That’s as far as he’s taking me?
He points up the cobbled street, then at the meter.
I walk past the barrier, through the crowds of tourists around the gate. What if it’s like Mont Saint-Michel, all those steps? My heart sinks.
I pass a one-man band, in cod-mediaeval costume and with his nose painted red, sitting in an alcove. Narrow cobbled streets, the Wardrobe bumping and grumbling behind me. Alleys lead off in all directions, no signposts, I just keep going, with no idea where to. Past cafés and tourist-tat shops, a set of stocks with a dummy in a shabby wig, a well, a haunted house. Looking for Le Logis des Remperts, 3, rue du Moulin D’Avar.

At the Place de Saint-Jean, I can’t see any signs. I double back on myself, and in the next street, outside the Haunted House, there’s a map. The Rue du Moulin is in the opposite corner of the square, a narrow alleyway, and on the left, a sign reading ‘Le Logis des Remperts’. A gate leads into a small courtyard, with loungers, plant pots, table and chairs, and a door in the wall. I knock, but there’s no response.
I get the laptop out of the bag and set it up on the table, looking for the details. No luck. I must not have saved it. And I can’t get online to recheck the email. But there’s a phone number.

‘There should be somebody there but maybe they didn’t hear you.’ The nice lady gives me the security code for the key pad. ‘I think you’re in room 1.’
I tap in the code, and open the door. Inside, Room 1 is to my left, on the ground floor mercifully, and the key is in the lock. I open the door and let myself in.
Bare stone walls, a double bed, sofa, table, microwave, fridge and sink in the corner. Tea, coffee and instant hot chocolate. Milk, butter and orange juice in the fridge.
Outside, I take a few steps down the street, turn left and find myself out on the city walls. A chilly wind blows over my face in the drizzly afternoon, up here on the hillside. Past the cream stone blocks and crenellations, I look down on the red-roofed white apartment blocks and churches of the modern town, dotted with bare winter trees and dark evergreens, the river snaking through its valley, and in the distance the white-speckled pyramids of the mountains, under low grey clouds.


Wandering around the old town, it’s hard to keep my bearings – too many little winding streets, full of cafes, restaurants, crêperies, shops selling jewellery, wine, local delicacies, post cards, arts and crafts, toys, books and so on and on. That looks like a good café, must pop back later for a hot chocolate. Which way now? What’s round this corner? Oh – I’m pretty sure I saw that shop window with the twee fairy figurines half an hour ago – how did I get back here? And where’s that café?


I’m back at the Rue du Moulin again. Might as well pop in and see if someone’s turned up.
They didn’t say I was supposed to wait for them, did they? I used my credit card to book the room online, I guess that’s good enough.
There’s a leaflet of events on the hall table, with a list of amazing acts performing in the Carnaval. Never mind the mediaeval city, I really must have fallen into a time-warp: Johnny Halliday (is he really still alive? Or is it some kind of character franchise, like Dr Who or James Bond?); The Alan Parsons Project; Duran Duran.


The crowds are thinning out now, but I’m still walking. Back at the drawbridge the one-man-band is still in his niche. There’s something particularly tuneless and irritating about his efforts, but he seems happy enough.
I follow the sound of much more tuneful and interesting music. A group in mediaeval costumes are performing, dancing, juggling, all very festive, but no sign of Johnny Halliday.
The crêperies and shops are starting to close, outside displays being taken in, shutters closing over windows. I get my chocolat chaud, but almost have the table cleared away under me.


I walk onto the ramparts and watch the changing colours of the clouds, from grey to pink, purple and red. As the sun sinks the world turns chilly, but somewhere a blackbird is singing. My phone has run out of battery, but after all, no camera can really capture that feeling of watching a beautiful sunset.

From ‘Single to Sirkeci‘, Linda Rushby

Le Logis des Remperts – my home for two nights, under cloud and sunshine.

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The Long Way Back

Yesterday was the anniversary of one of my most vividly-remembered days described in ‘Single to Sirkeci’, when I arrived at Port Camargue. Earlier in the week I was remembering Prague, and it all set me thinking about ‘The Long Way Back’, and whether I’m ever going to finish it. I’ve been thinking about it for years – or, more accurately, I’ve been avoiding thinking about it. At first I used to start each year with the resolution that: ‘this is the year I’ll finish and publish it!’, but gradually I got over that, and recently I have been trying to learn to let it go, along with all my other failures.

I spent about six months, from autumn 2017 to spring 2018, trying to make something of it. It started with the ‘rump’ of around forty thousand words describing the return half of the journey from Istanbul back to England, which I’d chopped from the sixth draft of ‘Single to Sirkeci’. Prior to deciding to split the manuscript, I’d spent a couple of years on the herculean task of trying to edit the 200k word first draft down by half, and after brushing off multiple suggestions of chopping it into two books, and stalling at 140k, I gave in to the inevitable.

When I published ‘S2S’ in early 2017, the plan for ‘The Long Way Back’ was to combine the material I had on the return journey with a briefer description of what had happened after my return; my time in Prague; my moving to Southsea; and some reflections on lessons learned from the ‘life journey’ (if I could think of any) – I even wrote an introduction and blurb to that effect, which I must dig out some time when I need a good laugh at the ironies of over-ambition.

Giving myself six months to deal with cancer and chemo, I started in September 2017 to go through blog posts from the time between returning ‘home’ at the start of August 2012, and departing for Prague in May 2013. Rather than the planned précis, I found myself editing a tale of disappointment, depression and yearning, as I struggled to come to terms with life – while, in the present, also struggling to come to terms with moving on from cancer. This resulted in a further fourteen thousand words to add to the forty, and I hadn’t even started on Prague – which, when I went back to it, was also a saga of depression and disappointment, although alleviated in places just by the fact of being in Prague. Then there was the year after, living back with my ex (working title: ‘Madwoman in the Attic’), mystery illness, moving to Southsea – and then what?

For a while I toyed with the idea of turning Prague into a third volume, and spent some time trying to find three–syllable words starting with either ‘B’ or ‘R’ to make a catchy title: ‘Bohemian Something-or-other’ but with no luck.

Then I just stopped. I just stopped writing.

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Desultory Equinox

Yesterday I was thinking about Prague – in fact it has been in my mind on and off for the last few days. Often, when I was there, I used to question why I was there, and what I was doing. If I could have found a compelling reason to stay, I think I would have, but my presence always felt anomalous; I wasn’t a tourist, but nor did I ever become a resident, nor even an ‘ex-pat’, just this invisible woman who slipped around the city with no-one really noticing whether I was there or not – except possibly my landlord, when he made his monthly visits to collect the rent (in cash). In the end, coming back to be near my daughter and granddaughter and make some efforts towards selling the old house and ‘moving on with my life’ had to take priority

Those same questions keep coming up lately: Why am I here? and What am I doing? At least now I have some answers which make sense superficially: I’m just another retiree who’s decided to come and live near the sea, buy a house, make this place my home. After six years, the deeper questions don’t seem quite so compelling – I’m retired, with a comfortable pension, and the sale of a large family home enabled me to buy my little Edwardian mid-terrace outright, so why shouldn’t I be here as much as anywhere else? It’s a lot more congenial than either of the two places where I’ve spent most of my life.

This lockdown has felt harder than the one which started this time last year, but I think I’ve become ‘harder’ too, more settled with being at home on my own – most of the time. But if you asked me – if I ask myself – what I’ve been up to, what I do with my time, I’m hard pushed to come up with an answer that makes any kind of sense. I’ve got my editing job, which I’m doing two chapters at a time as the client sends them to me, and each chapter takes about an hour; I do my half hour of exercise and write my 500 words most days; I listen to the radio; crochet my blanket (which also takes about an hour each day) and mess about with other craft projects in a desultory way. Since I finished the blue fair isle jumper, I’ve picked up another top-down jumper, in different yarn on a bigger needle, which I started and abandoned about six months ago. Because it’s a ‘cake’ style yarn, with long stretches of colours blending into each other, I decided to do a design on the front with different stitches, rather than different yarns, but I’ve tried one idea, pulled it back and tried another, and that isn’t going very well either.

But this is just a temporary setback – isn’t it? Something will happen soon. That’s the way it goes, I’ll break some more bits off the old shed and keep going.

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Tackling the Chaos: Memories Lost and Overwhelmed

Clicking through photos again to track down another one which came up on my desktop recently, I thought it was from Sête in Provence, but it was a little further east along the coast, at Le Grau du Roi in the Camargue, taken on a very grey and damp Spring Equinox in 2012 (of course). Which reminds me of my late friend Douglas Jeal, who, after hearing my tales, went to the south of France at around the same time the following year, then grumbled at me because the weather was horrible. What did he expect? Well, he had lived in Barcelona for a while, which has its own microclimate, so I suppose he can’t be blamed for thinking it might be similar  a few hundred miles along the Mediterranean coast.

What else does that remind me of? A few days ago the image on my desktop was of a map of that corner of the Med, a mural on the wall of Bordeaux station, where I was stranded for a couple of hours or so during a train strike when I was en route from Brittany to northern Spain. Something piqued my interest when I saw it again, but I couldn’t remember what it was, so I opened the file in Photoshop to check, and still can’t see why. It’s quite a poor quality photo – from an old, pre-Smart Nokia phone – so zooming in hasn’t helped. Maybe it will come to me.

I’ve mentioned before about the Magic Refilling Data pot, and how my efforts at clearing space on my google Drive by downloading photos from Google photos to my hard drive and then deleting them from Google photos were being thwarted because every morning my phone was being backed up to another file on Google Drive. Over several days (because it takes a long time to select and delete that many photos and my PC is four years old and quite creaky – and also it was refilling again every morning with the ones I hadn’t backed up and removed from my phone) I managed to get all the photos up to the end of 2020 from my phone, onto my hard drive, and removed from the backup file on Google drive. The day came when I logged on to my computer, opened my Gmail, and was informed that I had used 11 Gb of my 15Gb allocation. That lasted a couple of hours before the messages started to appear telling me that my Google Drive was full again.

I listed all files in descending file-size, and found that the photos I’d already deleted were still appearing on the list. By clicking on each file, I was given a side panel with details, including the folder where the file was located. Clicking on the name of the folder led me up the tree to the folder where it was, and so on until I reached a folder called ‘Desktop’, and above that, another one called ‘Computers’… tbc

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Happy Days

When I was travelling in 2012, naturally I took a lot of photos, and I created a folder of pictures that I’d straightened, cropped and saved in the right proportions to fit my ‘desktop’, and then set up as a random display. When I went somewhere new, I would add to it, so there was at least one from each place (and many more from some). In the end there were 474 altogether (I just checked). I used it for a couple of years, then got tired of it and changed to more recent images, and not so many.

Last week, I decided on impulse to go back to it, so all of these pictures of places I went have been flashing up, changing every minute, which is a terrible temptation just to sit and stare at the desktop without actually doing anything. Some of them I recognise – some instantly, as they’re well known tourist icons, others are more difficult and occasionally there’s one which could be anywhere (or any of several places, at least).

I don’t know why I just said that, except that it’s what I’ve been doing for the last few minutes.

Istanbul, Barcelona, Venice and then… not sure, red and blue boats in a rocky harbour – Sorrento, maybe? The out of the way fishing harbour that I ‘discovered’ in the pouring rain on the afternoon of my birthday – if so, it must have been taken when I returned on the following morning (Easter Sunday), because the sun is shining. But I’m not convinced – there are so many pictures of little boats with bare masts and furled sails, in picturesque harbours. Sometimes I can work it out on the basis of the weather, what time of year it seems to be – Brittany in February, San Sebastian and Provence in March, Italy in April, Croatia and then Istanbul and the Black Sea coast in May, then the long, long stretch over the heart of the continent in June, to the Baltic (Flensburg and Stockholm) and Atlantic (Norway, Hamburg, Amsterdam) in July.

I tried to speed up the rotation, but one minute is the minimum Microsoft will allow me for each image. I’m sure it used to be possible to set it at 30 seconds, but that was in an older version of Windows.

Just flicked back and caught sight of a wonderful wintery image of a sandy Breton beach at low tide, with a stranded boat, a gull just taking off in the foreground and the mist so thick in the air – I remembered how much it reminded me of Wales. I’ve never been back, never seen Brittany in summer, I’ll always have this memory of cold and mist and constant drizzle – to be fair, that also goes for many of the places I visited in Provence and Italy, in that relentlessly rainy April.  

I don’t know what I was going to write about today. Not that. But maybe that was safer than how I’ve been feeling.

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Remembering Cannes

No romantic poetic thoughts about the French Riviera last night. When I was in Cannes in 2012, I remember it struck me as tacky, over-privileged, overcrowded, superficial, artificial. I spent a lot of time there in McDonald’s, home-from-home of the American teenager, using the free wifi to work out my onward plans and arrangements. Maybe I should have gone to Nice, as a friend recommended, for the flower market and the Matisse (or is it Cezanne?) museum, but for some reason I thought Cannes would be more ‘classy’ – when it was just more expensive.

But I must have done something other than sit in McD’s getting stressed over Google, surely? There was the flea market, I remember that. I walked up a hill to a chapel with a view, a posing pigeon, a sexy photographer, a statue of an oddly grinning Madonna and child, and a museum which was closed for lunch, so I ate chocolate and drank water in the garden instead. How do I remember all this? Because I wrote it down at the time for my blog, then used it (or at least re-read it) when I was editing ‘Single to Sirkeci’. I even have a photo of the statue somewhere, which is why I remember her odd expression. Also one of the posing seagull – it wasn’t a pigeon, see, my memory’s not that good – although my alliteration is admirable. I ate crepes on the promenade, had a fabulous Provenҫal seafood dinner on my last night there (onward travel arrangements and accommodation having been confirmed) and swam in the sea. It was the vernal equinox – or thereabouts.

By the summer solstice, I hadn’t quite made it to Norway, as planned, but was in Berlin, in freezing cold and driving rain, sheltering in the national art museums, poring over an exhibition of Goya’s engravings of horror and war. And eight years ago today, where was I then? From the ‘memories’ of Lübeck and Flensburg that popped up on Facebook a few days ago, I guess I would have reached Copenhagen by now. Yes, I am lucky to have those memories, lucky that I wrote them down, and I should probably finish off that book with the later ones.

What was I thinking about when I woke up? Trying to remember what I’d been dreaming about, whatever that was. Then the usual probably. Or remembering Cannes, which would explain why I wrote about it just now.

Life is a story that we tell ourselves, over and over, and maybe it changes with each retelling, because how would you know? I seem to remember writing, somewhere on my travels, about how life distracts from writing and writing distracts from life, how they feed on one another and interfere with one another in an incestuous, abusive relationship – or maybe that’s not how I put it, maybe that’s what I thought just now.

One thing I know for sure, we can never know the ending of our life-story until it’s too late.

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Rising and Retiring

While the cassette recorder is on my desk, there’s even less space than usual for Miko to squeeze into. Which makes typing even more than usually awkward. At least I have my reading glasses today.

Yesterday evening I was writing an email to an old friend and listening to music, and I got to thinking about the south of France, the scents of flowers and herbs, and the little shops in out of the way towns selling unbranded local soaps and colognes; the paintings of Van Gogh (partly because of the jigsaw I was doing earlier that morning when it was pouring with rain here); the woods around the retreat centre in Limousin where I stayed six years ago. I started putting together bits and pieces for a poem, including kittens playing in a pile of nets in the harbour at Sorrento (different country, I know, but same sea). Then into the music stream popped a young Joan Baez singing ‘Plaisir d’Amour’ and I thought ‘oh, how appropriate!’ but I’d already sent the email by then.

Why is it that I often feel quite peaceful and comfortable with the world in the evenings, but then almost always feel miserable when I wake up? No, it’s not related to alcohol consumption – I’ve thought of that. Someone once told me that what you think when you wake up relates to what you were thinking when you fell asleep, so make sure you’re always thinking happy thoughts before you drop off, but this is clearly nonsense. How can you know exactly the point you will be falling asleep before it happens, let alone control your thoughts in preparation? What would happen if you were lying there thinking: ‘Right, am I asleep yet? No? Better think of something happy then. How long can I keep this up for? How long do I need to keep it up for? Has it happened yet? How long am I going to have to keep up these happy thoughts? What if I drop off just when I’m getting frustrated or stressed?’ etc etc. You’d never actually fall asleep – unless this is just because, as I keep forgetting, my brain is weird and doesn’t act in the same way as normal people who can control that stuff?

I’ve been told: ‘You’re obviously not a morning person’, but that’s not true, I’m better if I get up in the mornings, I hate lying in late and losing half the day. But it’s like everything else, I have to motivate myself to do it, the activity, the process of getting out of bed, it’s not even that I particularly dislike it when I do it. Sometimes I even talk myself through it: ‘right, duvet off, one foot on the floor, sit on the bed, second foot on the floor, brace yourself with hands on the mattress, push down and straighten legs’. It’s the gap between thought and action that stretches out and out, as though thinking is a substitute for doing.