Back to Blighty

I'd allowed 10 hours for the trip to Bristol - 2 from Paris to Calais, 2 to Dover, 2 to London, 2 to Bristol and 2 for odd delays. That meant that the 9am start should approximate a 7pm finish.

With no alarm it was always a bit of a gamble as to whether I would wake in time, but my eyes opened at 7.30am and I grabbed my pre-packed bags and went down to sign out and grab a coffee from the vending machine.

I hobbled the few hundred metres to the Gare de Lyon and found my way into the Metro. I didn't have a ticket, my two day pass not being valid for two days - 48 hours - but rather for the day of issue and up to midnight of the next. Which was annoying as I'd timed buying it to cover today's travel.

Still, I queued patiently in a line that fed two windows. To the left was the ticket window, to the right some kind of information window where a couple of travellers received words and left. I was next in line and not wanting information, waited. After thirty seconds or so an irate elderly Frenchman walked from the back and roundly berated me for not going to the information window, saying we were all in a hurry.

At the window I asked if he sold tickets. In that laconic way that the French have perfected over centuries of dealing with, particularly English, fools he replied: "It's what I do.."

Somehow the French have mastered the ability to talk down to you as if you were a simpleton, yet without directly insulting or patronising you. It's wonderful. It's masterful. It's impossible to counter. And it's embarrasing. I grabbed my ticket and scuttled into the bowels of the Metro.

At the Gare du Nord I surfaced and headed for a bank of chest-high machines that resembled ATMs. I'd purchased my ticket online for both the train to Calais and the ferry. To retrieve my train tickets, I simply had to enter a code into the machine, confirm my identity by swiping my credit card and the ticket would be printed out. It's a great way of reducing queues. Providing it works, which it didn't for me: my card refused to be read.

There were mercifully short queues for les billets and I was given a ticket and a troubled look as the lady pointed out the five minutes I had in which to change trains at the mid-point halt. Not to worry, they wouldn't schedule two trains without leaving adequate time to transfer.. would they?

They would and did. I missed the train and was stranded. The next train would leave some two hours hence, as would the ferry.

I tried to find a bus that would make the trip. I wandered around the station precincts trying to find an internet cafe so that I could alert the ferry company to my plight. Nothing. I just had to sit it out.


At Calais station, two hours and twenty minutes after the ferry had left, I saw a sign for buses to the ferry terminus. I followed the direction of the arrow and, some ten minutes later, found myself in town at the exact moment the tourist office was having it's lunch break. There had been no mention of buses to the ferries for some time. I asked a man getting into a 'GB' camper van.

"It's a long way, mind," he said after pointing me where I suspected I had to go. I had given up on the bus and asked about the ferries themselves. I shifted uncomfortably on my blistered feet and tried to look pitiful.

"Good luck," he said climbing into his van. Bugger, not pitiful enough.

I picked a bus stop near the station, waited for the first bus and climbed on. Asking for the ferry had the requiredresult: a shake of the head and a precise indication of where the correct bus stop lay. It was clear the sign writers in Calais had moonlighted from their job confusing tourists in Paris.

At the stop were a reassuring number of nervous backpackers anxious as to whether this was indeed the correct stop. And I wasn't the only one who had missed a connection. I relaxed a notch.

After half an hour the bus came and wound its way through the town and an increasingly complex system of roads that snaked through a buildingless landscape towards the port. I was glad I hadn't attempted the walk.

At the P&O counter I was all prepared to plead for mercy. I had the E15 ready in case I had to purchase a new ticket, but my main concern was room - could I get on the next ferry or would I have to wait? My fears were handled with a courtesy I hadn't expected. Not only could I get on the next boat, but they were used to people missing connections; there would be no need to pay again.

At immigration a Greek youth was having a problem: he had no passport.

"This is an identity card," the lady half-shouted, using the time-honoured English way of dealing with foreigners.

The other immigration chap told his client to pay attention.

"Nothing to do with you, is it?"

When I got through, I asked him about the Greek, starting by saying that after hours on the road a bit of entertainment was nice. He clearly wondered about my idea of entertainment, but engaged my question: why, if the UK was in the EU, were people not allowed freedom of movement? Without actually answering what I suspect could have been summed up by simply saying 'politics', he indicated the alternative.

"You should see what's hanging around 'ere at night. Scum of the earth, all trying to get in."

The Greek, obviously not scum, had got in. And personally I would rather be scum in the south of France than in Birmingham. I was tempted to say that the UK should open its doors and show people what they are getting into. That should cause a nett emigration.


On the ferry I looked at the duty free prices, wandered around, changed some money and finally went on deck. About a dozen ships could be seen at various points of the compass. I ate the last of my chocolate and a salad bought in Paris and went in. It was clouding over.

I have preternatural instincts when travelling. I can take a seat and sleep, waking at the merest of noises or bumps. I found a corner seat, put my bags safely around me, and closed my eyes..

"'Scuse me. Hello." A voice intruded dimly into my brain.

"Hello?" Again.

"Hello? Excuse me." Again, and unanswered. I opened my eyes.

A cleaning lady was leaning over me, smiling. The once crowded lounge was empty.

For all I was aware, I could have been robbed, stripped naked and painted blue without waking from my slumbers. I was going to have to hone my instincts again..

As we got off the ferry I felt the cold of a heavy downpour.

"Twenty years I've been away," I said to the steward at the gangplank, "and whenever I come back it's always 11 degrees and drizzle." I knew what I meant, even if it came out wrong. So many times I'd been away from these shores, and each time I returned it was cold and wet.

He looked at the downpour.

"Drizzle would be nice."

Pictures - Hungary

Pictures - Romania

Why the delays - and where are the pictures?

You might have wondered why there were no pictures, and why the updates were so sporadic. The truth is that internet access has its problems abroad:

New Zealand. Wow! Free use of the internet and not even hidden behind check-in. Upstairs there are some consoles (two out of three were working) but you can’t install any software or plug in cameras and the like. Which is pretty sensible.

Brisbane. If they had internet access I failed to find it. Mind you I was rather busy panicking over spoons..

Brunei. Beautiful transit lounge and a wee internet hub with about a dozen computers. Pay your money and sit at a computer and a clock tells you how long you’ve had. I didn’t try to plug anything in, but I did have to change some security settings in order to get access to the blog site. Most places won’t allow you to do that, so maybe I could plug things in too..

Dubai. No time to look, too amazed by the other things to look at!

Heathrow. Expensive and secure, no mucking about with their settings there! At £1 per 10 minutes it was looking a bit pricey, but the second pound gave me 10 minutes plus 10, and the next pound gave me 10 plus 10 plus 10, and the next gave me 40minutes! Did I read the instructions wrong or was it a glitch. I didn’t care, I was happy.

Romania. While my friend Jan insisted that Romania was still living in the Dark Ages I did manage to pretty quickly find an internet café near the main railway terminus in Bucharest. It was the only place I looked so I can’t say whether Jan was right about the rest of Romania, but I suspect not. Unfortunately for me the café was closed.

Hungary. This seemed a much more up-to-date country (all things being relative) and indeed my backpackers’ lodge did have a computer. They were pretty relaxed about the time I spent, having just a jam jar with a note on it asking for money to be popped in. They also allowed me to fiddle to my heart’s content. Unfortunately they had a 200MHz computer with Windows 98 first edition (circa 1990) which meant I couldn’t plug my camera or flash drive in to upload photos. I didn’t look for any other cafés and didn’t rip over any.

Slovakia. Kind of hard to judge really: I was on a train the whole time.

Czech Republic. Jan, whose place I was staying in, had access via a mobile phone which was unreliable at certain times. Being with Jan also meant my regime of writing up notes in the evening was somewhat curtailed as he showed me every single pub and beer in the country. Hence the gap in the blog. I’ll try to fill it.. we did use his laptop on the train though, picking up wireless signals for most of the two hours trip.

Germany. On a coach the whole time. Ah, not true, we did stop once. And the services did include internet access. But it was 3am and I had 5 minutes, so..

France. The lodge where I stayed had access, albeit horribly expensive. There were plenty of internet cafés around however the only one I tried did allow me to upload photos.. but my camera batteries failed at that point.

UK. Friends and family. Bags of access and ability to upload photos.. but they are friends and family and I haven’t seen them for a long, long time. Have a heart.

The moral is that when you go abroad you have varying degrees of internet access depending on where you are and who you are with. And the size of your hangover.

Begging at the Tower

“I’m not going gay”

I was in a dormitory of four beds and was in the bathroom preparing for a shower. No locks, so the young Japanese caught an eyeful as he retrieved his towel. The sight of me naked is unlikely to turn any guy gay. Celibate, sure. Hysterically blind, maybe. What a start to the day.

I was heading for Les Halles and the Pompidou Centre. Both had been substantially altered in the years since my last visit. I asked my questions at the Pompidou, snapped at Les Halles and wound my way between the teeming cafés enjoying yet another blue sky day.

Getting to the Eiffel Tower was made harder by a key Metro line being closed. I got as close as I could and walked along the banks of the Seine. I didn’t want to go up, just eat my lunch on the Champs de Mars, below.

I had a fresh baguette – sorry, but nobody does bread like the French – some chocolate for my pain au chocolat and one and a half litres of water. I also had the remnants of the Camembert which, as my dorm mates can attest, smelled like old socks. I had to eat it, it was making the dorm uninhabitable.

The tower was crawling with people and the grass was not for picnicking on, so I opted to go back to the benches by the Seine.

On the way I was cornered by a barefoot girl with a piece of paper which claimed she was a Bosnian refugee, starving and alone. For a Bosnian she had an excellent command of French – as did the other six or so girls I’d noticed running the same scam. She told me how hungry and tired she was and as proof showed me her bare feet. I showed her mine, blackened and with huge white saucers of blistered skin.

I won.

Bloody frogs

My foot felt a lot better for having drained the blister. In the end, after fluffing about with the sharp bit on the clasp of my watchstrap I had simply jammed my fingernails into the flesh and ripped it apart. Messy but effective.

I walked to the nearby market. It’s not often that I’m up before all the market stalls are, but this was one time.


Two blocks and a square were given over to vegetables, fruit, African art, fish and miscellaneous hardware. As I walked in I passed a dozen chickens roasting, the first of many, whilst butchers’ shops, some Halal, raised their shutters.


Stalls sprang up piled with artichokes, aubergines, radishes, potatoes, carrots, spring onions, garlic, mint, parsley, onions, lettuces, cabbages – all great acres of colour, purples and greens and whites. Great walls of Italian parsley and hedges of mint rose half a metre on one stall. Vendors sang their sales pitches and bagged the purchases. At the end of the street a fish shop was putting the finishing touches to icy displays of huge, whole sardines, shrimp, tuna, cod, crab, lobster and shellfish. The pavement was soaked with fishy ice-melt; even at 9am it was sticky hot and close.


Walking back between rows of produce I spotted a hardware stall with what I’d come for – cadenas – padlocks. They were cheap rubbish and hugely overpriced but I got three at €3 and a table knick-knack for €1.50. I offered him €10 which he took easily. When I said merci, he replied that la plaisir est à moi.


I wandered away. There had been something about the twinkle in his eyes. Then I realised I’d paid the price for the larger padlocks behind. Mine should have been €2 each. Little wonder the pleasure had been all his.


I went to Notre Dame and felt like a traveller amongst tourists. A mass was in progress – in English – it being Sunday, but the masses streamed round, talking loudly.


Outside an American family gave way to a French couple on the seat to my left, while on my right Spanish gave way to English. Every race, creed and colour milled around, taking cheesy photos.


I took mine and headed to the Gare du Nord to ask about a night boat to the UK. I’d had enough of being alone in Paris.


Paris hadn’t had enough of me it seemed – a ticket to London was €285 one way, albeit on the Eurostar train, well over twice what I’d spent from Bucharest to Paris. I could take the train from Paris to Calais and then get a ferry, but the ticket queues were huge. I decided to go to Sacré Coeur instead. As you do..


I bought a baguette ancien (€1.80) to go with my huge Camembert rustique (€1.40) and exited the Metro at Anvers.


Almost immediately I entered the Montmartre that Impressionists love so. As it climbed, Sacré Coeur appeared at the end of the narrow street. Below the triple-domed church, steps trisect steep grass slopes.


Entering, I was pounced on by an African tout who held up a big hand for me to stop.

“I respect you, you respect me,” he said, trying to guilt me into stopping. Turns out I didn’t respect him.


On the grass, with my back to the church, I ate my lunch and did what I like most: people-watching. Amidst the increasing trudge of tourist feet, islands of calm lay. A couple canoodled, oblivious to the world. For an hour or more they lay with their noses touching, stroking each others’ arms and egos, whispering love.


An Italian man, his wife prone, rubbed her slightly enlarged belly, obviously happy.


A Sikh, with his entourage of five womenfolk sat two metres uphill from them, and said not a word.


“Ah, I got another beer in my backpack, everything is good,” this from a smiling American, opening a bottle of wine with four friends.


A warm wind blew, sparrows ate my Camembert crumbs and a girl in green spoke into a cellphone hands-free kit and smiled.


A bad rendition of La Vie en Rose came from below. A woman, 50+ and long since slim, was showboating. She wore a multi-coloured flowered headband, a purple chiffon skirt, a short pink top, horn-rimmed glasses and too much lipstick. Her bra, struggling desperately, failed to give her the support she so needed, as her breasts leapt this way and that, almost free of their material prison.


She sang, badly, and danced, worse. The Can-Can, Brasil, numerous tunes I knew but couldn’t name, she puffed out, dancing like a thing possessed. The Africans stopped hassling tourists and looked round, laughing. After a minute they resumed their work, making bracelets from multicoloured bits of string on the wrists of the gullible and friendly.


The woman danced backwards and forwards as people turned their heads. She tried to pull a few people into her world, with no success. As she headed towards me, bosoms flailing, I gave her a look that stopped her dead at five metres. She said something and a few people laughed.


She wound her way up and down the steps, her singing ebbing and flowing. A jazz trio played below, a tumbler did flick-flacks to applause and the Africans took a break. An hour later the woman thanked everyone, in Italian, and went home singing. As if a sign, the girl in green finished her call, the couple untwined and the Italians moved off. The Americans started their second bottle of wine and I packed up.



I had to go to the Arc de Triomphe to change trains. Besides, I wanted a beer on the Champs d’Elysées. But first I thought I’d go up to the top of the Arc, that is until I saw it wasn’t free. I wandered around taking photos when, at about 6pm, a policeman ushered me to the other side of a barrier. The centre, including the tomb of the unknown soldier, was being cleared. I was curious to know why. Now, my French is passable, but I hate talking French to the French, they speak it well and do disdain better.


“Do you speak English?” I asked him.


“Non,” he said, arms outstretched, sheep-dogging me behind the barrier.


Like a circus clown he raced around telling people to get out of the centre but, oblivious, allowed two or three in behind his back. He needed a plan or back-up. Luckily back-up arrived and the sector was slowly cleared.


A moustachioed old goat arrived and moved the velvet ropes and brass stands which surrounded the eternal flame. Soldiers in dress uniform, eight men, two women and three officers arrived. A drummer and a bugler came through the crowd.


What next? The President? As I gave birth to this thought a siren approached, raced around the Arc and screamed off.


Then the heavens opened. Black clouds had been gathering and an equally black guy over my shoulder had been making ‘ooh la la’ sounds as the thunder rolled by. The soldiers ducked out of the deluge to a series of titters from the crowd.


I waited, in my pole position, for something, but knew not what. I tapped a soldier’s shoulder and asked if he spoke English.


“Non, mais..” and he called another soldier over. His English was worse than my French but we established that it was a ceremony to honour the dead of 1914-18 and that it was held daily at 6.30pm. When we concluded his friend dug him in the ribs and said “I speak ze English” and laughed.


“Should the flame be out?” I asked, pointing at the eternal flame. It had been extinguished in the downpour and, after a lot of steam, had gone quiet.


“Is this a relighting ceremony?”


“Non, it nevair goes out.”


“But it’s out now.”


“Non, it is lit twenty-three hours a day.”


“Twenty-four?”


“Oui.”


It was as dead as Monty Python’s parrot and I wasn’t the only one who was pointing at it. Some minutes later it relit itself, the flame clearly visible and just as clearly showing it had been out before.


Ten minutes into the rain and it eased off. The sun even broke through. The soldiers marched out of sight around the corner and the old goat rubbed the head of a small child and invited him and his family through the barrier. About a dozen children flowed through the opening but when a rather too large kid tried, the old goat stopped him. The boy’s father had a small child, maybe two years old, in his arms and was already through.


“Français?” the goat asked.


“Non, Maroc,” said the man and, to a small murmur of disapproval from the crowd, was told that it was for French only, and forced back behind the gate.


“Like the last two wars?” I wanted to say, but the drummer drummed and the bugler bugled. I was fuming.


Afterwards I approached the goat.


“Do you speak English?” He didn’t even look at me, just saying 'non' without breaking stride. I was furious. I found another official.


“Vous parlez Anglais?” He made a face but tried, gave up and called a friend.


“Vous parlez Anglais?” I asked again.


“Oui, un peu.”


He asked if I was English. I admitted I was and he asked why I didn’t speak French. It rather defeated the point of asking him if he spoke English, I thought, but I persevered.


Without warning he told me about the second of September when the English Legion would be at the Arc.


“Why the second?” I ventured willing, for the moment, to follow this non-sequitur.


“Yes, yes, the second,” and he got his diary out to confirm.


“Is it an anniversary?”


“Yes they all come from London with the Ambassador.”


“Mais pourquoi le deuxième Septembre?”


“Oui, they come with the big hats, cyclists.”


So, English Legionnaires and the British Ambassador would be cycling from London to Paris in big hats? I steered the conversation back.


I asked him if all the children allowed through had to be French.


“Can you repeat?” he asked. I started again.


“No, in French.”


And so, with a bit of Anglo-Saxon swearing thrown in as my French basics escaped me, I did my best to say it was appalling behaviour of the old goat to discriminate against ‘l’Africaine.”


He shuffled nervously as he saw how angry I was.


“It’s for all the tourists,” he said, and shrugged.


“Merci,” I said; it took me two hours to calm down.


“Bloody frogs,” I said, and a lot worse. And as I cursed and drank a beer, I realised I was perversely happy. This was the France I had missed: the arrogant, English-hating, xenophobic “bloody frogs”. Now I could go home.



One footnote: the signs under the Arc are in French, German and Spanish. Did I miss something?

Been there, slept through it..

Limping back to the Gare de Lyon, minus my rucksack, I breakfasted and settled on a sit-down in the Tuileries, a park near the Louvre. Quite why then I rode past to the Louvre I don't know.

The Metro station lets you up past shops and the inverted glass pyramid that Da Vinci Code aficionados will recognise. It is not, as I imagined, an extension of the one above, that one hovers over the huge expanse that sits below the Louvre proper. Information in every language, tickets, food and drinks, books - though not a sight of the Da Vinci Code - gifts and knick-knacks are all available. A spiral stairway leads up to the pyramid base whence you can exit to the Louvre courtyard. Set all around were cool stone benches. Bliss. I sat and watched the Louvre crowds for a few minutes before I felt sleep coming.

I woke suddenly to find a soldier smiling at me.

"Bonjour," he mouthed, before continuing his slow patrol with his two colleagues. I'd seen them before on the Gare du Nord, beret, boots and battledress and, of course, automatic rifles at the slope. They patrolled every 30 minutes or so as did the other three or four patrols at the Louvre. Security men in suits wandered around on foot or rode bicycles waving the touts on.

It's a contrast, coming from a place where a policeman on the beat is unusual, to see so many soldiers; I wonder if it keeps petty crime down.

I didn't want to walk around the Louvre, even at the very reasonable €8, so after a few hours of napping, I wandered into the Tuileries gardens. Paris really is a city for lovers: snuggling pairs lay on the grass, kissing or sleeping, talking or eating. I missed the Moldovan one.

I gave myself a promised citron pressé at one of the cafés and watched the ever-moving horde of tourists pass in either direction. To one side a fair included a large carousel and a big wheel, to the other an exit to the Seine, which I took.

The Metro on the other side was closed so I limped past the street cafés and the street artists and booksellers and eventually crossed back across the river to the Louvre.

A man played the accordion whilst looking wistfully at the Louvre. I looked: he had no hat for money; he was just playing for its own sake.

I subjected my bag to the umpteenth X-ray scan and took the Metro back to the hostel.