Category: Uncategorized

Lourdes.

I haven’t been here for quite some time, but the journey here today from Barcelona gave me plenty of flashbacks.

Wakeup and out past mildly disgruntled desk staff to claim Bergman before the authorities get him. I then sat in him a short while until Tristan came. “I don’t think you’ll be welcome back at that hotel,” he observes, as he describes his checkout experience. Yep, I’m pretty sure of that. Linkback FUN. Mostly I’m extremely balanced and kind, but the scale got tipped just by city people after country peace. I can more or less keep my logic and my cool while I’m angry, and I did. It was all just so unnecessary and expensive and I had the misfortune to be speaking to the wrong human.

We stopped at a coffee shop and had an omelette and of course that was when I got my parking ticket. No idea how to pay it, and no instructions on the ticket, like I should know. I tried through a machine. Didn’t work. Big cities!!! Lou is right to just want to get out of them ASAP. This is why last time we went straight to Girona. It’s not a metropolis. Barcelona can go suck a pig.

Bergie Tristan and I struck out up through the Pyrenees, avoiding toll roads, following our nose. We took the route that looked pretty. Lakes and mountains.

At lunchtime we tried a place that is an albergue for pilgrims on Camino. We are in that familiar territory now. The owner’s son was having a kidney transplant, and an extraordinary sunpickled woman (“She could have been Andean!”) directed us to Entremont restaurant in Liguerre, just five minutes away. There we had one of the best priced and thought out set menus I’ve ever had in Spain, bearing in mind all the weeks of Camino. An incredible lunch. One to remember. In a beautiful place.

And I guess that this is the purpose of the return trip. We are taking it slow, and we are seeking beauty and nurture as we go. It’s no coincidence we are in Lourdes now, where so much started for me, and for my mother before me. Now I’ve carried that holy water to Santiago and committed it to the ocean and to God, now that Compostela is written and dedicated to her memory, now I can come back to this holy holy place and I can maybe find out about what the energies can shift in my life and the life of those I love in the NOW. Last Camino was about the past. I might get a passport tomorrow, stamp it, get dunked by the funky monks and then finish another Compostela in decades on the same passport. Intention is all. Once you’re on the journey you’re on the journey. I could fly there at 100 and finish.

Bedtime now for me. We found pizza. Now we are two men lying farting next to one another. We have to check out early. Perfect opportunity to go get smacked about by God on a Tuesday.

Oh I have not been well. Thankfully someone else piloted the boat. Bergman was just in the hold.

I woke at 7 after a feverish sleep. I threw myself into Bergie and slammed down the road to the port. Lou, meanwhile, was on the phone to my hotel checking I hadn’t died in the night. About halfway to the port I realised my phone was still on airplane mode from last night. I rang her. She was in the process of getting the staff at the Finca to check I wasn’t dead.

I got to the boat in time and bought a cabin. I felt just absolutely drained. Like I’d been in a fight. Seventy five euros for the cabin, but I honestly didn’t care. I got something for my money. A door I could close. An opportunity to sleep and go from place to place simultaneously! I slept the whole journey. Literally just down. Up briefly as I needed water, but I mostly slept all day. Woke up with a shock to hear that we were already in port in Barcelona.

I’m staying in the Hotel Paxton in Barcelona. Tristan is here. I persuaded him that a roadtrip was in order. He bit. I sent him the check-in details and warned the hotel that he would be there but shouldn’t pay.

I booked this expensive place for one night because it said it had parking. Turns out you have to pay €25 euro extra. They shouldn’t advertise that as parking. That’s garage. That’s for the Maserati crowd. Bergman doesn’t need to be safe. He just needs to be able to stop without a fine. I had a squabble with the woman at reception who seemed unusually gleeful about having access to a thing I couldn’t afford. Wonderful English, but turned to sarcasm. Terribly polite. Absolutely foul. I only booked this hotel because it said it had parking. I didn’t want to have to mess around, this place was expensive and it said it had parking. I booked it. No breakfast, as that’s €25 extra per person too. This is nightmare corporate hotel world. I made a terrible terrible mistake. She made me pay. Normally you’d expect to pay when you leave? Apparently not here. I had to pay immediately.

I eventually left that woman who was being horrible to me at her nasty reception, and went up to the room.

“It looks like I’m your rent boy,” says Tristan. He’s already checked in. We are going to hit the road together. “The woman at reception was flirting with me,” he adds.

OK. So that’s why she was such an absolute bastard to me. She likes him and thinks I’m his sugar daddy. I hope she gets a really persistent pimple on the end of her nose.

It’s too expensive here. It’s not for real people. Avoid it. €25 euro each if we want breakfast. We won’t, of course. Still. Pigs.

I’ve slept mostly for the last 36 hours but I’ve got to get back on the road now. This is the most expensive night of the whole trip so far, and I’ve ended up putting Bergman on some local side street where I’ll have to move him at 8. The extent to which the reception staff at Paxton didn’t give a fuck about my car parking concerns is almost epic. I’m sad as I was excited about this night. “I’ve booked a posh hotel cos they have car parking,” I told Tristan a few days ago. I was looking forward to a luxury stay. I can’t relax though as Bergman is off on some street nearby where I only half understand the parking restrictions, and this is exactly what I was trying to avoid when I chose a hotel with parking, and they should be ashamed of themselves for their attitude.

Still. Bedtime. We went to see Sagrada Familia. Good God. Wonderful. Impossible. I had no idea. Organic architecture?! How did that get past the unimaginative people who run the world? I adore it.

I’m sorry to be so negative. I was thrown out. I’m so tired and spun out and it’s the combination of not being able to park and being treated like I’m an asshole for expecting it. Bad hotel. Bad bad bad naughty bad hotel. But these things are fleeting. I just wish I hadn’t given them so much of my money. They do not deserve anyones custom.

“What about all the lovely things we’ve done this evening?” Tristan asks me as I read this back to him. “We’ve done so many other things tonight! The best artichokes you claimed you’ve ever had. The best architecture humanity can create, free of restriction. And you talk about the parking?”

But this, Hotel Paxton, is what you are capable of doing to people who, like me, artlessly book thinking that “parking” means “parking”.

Lou is in the air on the way back home. What a lovely few days though stopping with her on this beautiful island.

As we sat for our last meal here I felt some familiar rumblings. There was once in Spain a long long night caused either by bad water or by spaghetti vongole. It taught me nothing. I still drink the water, I still eat spaghetti vongole. The curious thing about this evening is that things started happening before the clams got to the table.

Our gut is a brain. I think it was sending signals to my head brain saying “Gonna be emptying out shortly like the last time we ate clams, batten down the hatches.” My brain interpreted it as “Eat clams”. I ate them and then took Lou to the airport by which time I was feeling decidedly the worse for wear. Still I got driving and stopped at a filling station when suddenly there were two simultaneous very strong and extremely immediate needs.

Once I had successfully alternated shouting my croaky song and attempting lift off, the endorphins kicked in. I bought a bottle of water and made it the half hour drive to my hotel room. Now I am showered and shivery but it feels that whatever my gut didn’t want has been successfully ejected.

This beautiful hotel will just have me sleeping in it. I’m too tired and wrung out to visit the bar, too tender to enjoy the bottle in the fridge. Sleep wins.

I’ve often been told to be wary of the tap water here. I rarely give such warnings credence. But that certainty that everything will be alright has got me into trouble before, and will again.

The bed is comfy. I’m gonna switch off the Aircon as it is noisy as hell but summer is coming, and I’m lower than we were. Not gonna freeze even if I’m shivery.

This isn’t what I envisaged for my last night here, but we all know what happens when we have “expectations”. This is what’s happening, and there’s a best to make of it, even if that best is just sleeping.

More walkies. More food. No wine. I’m happy and replete and warm and well.

Last night at 2.45am I was pulled out of dream by a high pitched and loud beeping noise, growing more and more frequent until I had no choice but to pull myself from sleep entirely to investigate. I quickly ascertained it was coming from outside our door, as if someone was hitting a button repeatedly with incredible patience. In a state of readiness I threw open the door, but there was nobody there. It’s the battery on the lock. It’s an alarm to say that the battery on the lock is running out.

Theodorus of Samos is the name that history has chosen to attribute the first key to. Pliny named him, so evidently the first that Pliny had come across and we all know how these inventions often get credited to the loudest copycat or the one who was best at business. Theodorus was putting his stuff about some six thousand years before the clocks were reset into AD with the Nazarene prophet. Theo still gets a mention.

Keys were, of course, around much longer than that. They work. They work really well. Archaeologists found a clever little wooden one in Mesopotamia excavating the ruins of Nineveh. The Egyptians were at it too. Everybody for as long as we have been people with things that other people might want to make theirs – they’ve all been at that business of making and honing and making and honing keys and locks and mechanisms to open and close and seal and lock.

1778 London and Robert Barton the locksmith almost certainly didn’t invent the tumbler lock but by God he patented it in good old blighty the heart of the empire and so he has won the internet about who made tumbler locks. He didn’t I’m sure. But he ticked the box and somebody else probably died in poverty.

Over to Norway now and Tor Sørnes born in 1925 started having clever thoughts in the seventies. They say that we have passed a tipping point. That all the great inventions have been invented and now it’s just people making things worse. At fifty years of age, Tor patented a keycard lock that was taken over to Atlanta a few years later and became the basis for the complete fuckery that woke me up last night. It was recodable. Secure for hotels you see, where maybe I could stay one night, get a copy cut, and rob all the future guests. Arsehole prevention. Necessary? You tell me. Maybe…

My lock was running out of battery. It doesn’t know what time it is. But if it is running out of battery it starts shouting and it has no idea if everybody is sleeping or not. (I suspect there was a lot of life left in it – these things are all about creating a dependency). At 3am I find myself walking across this mountaintop complex shivering in a bathrobe in order to try and find the night porter.

I had to wake him up. I played him a video of a beeping lock. He came with a new lock and a tool box. With me holding his phone torch, he took the screaming lock off the door and replaced it with a brand new one. My Spanish is terrible, as is his English. But we are two men grumbling. “Key. Forever. Now this shit.”

We do insist on fucking with things we really don’t need to fuck with. We think we are so clever as we ruin everything. Look at what’s going on in AI. Just because we can we are once more going into a technology too hard and too fast. It will grow exponentially. We can’t predict how it is going to get out of hand, but these language models are not going anywhere healthy for us long term. In quest to prove what we can do, we are making things that will ultimately do the equivalent of waking us up at 3am. Or something much worse.

Anyway, theres a new lock now and we can only operate it with a code.

I still slept well, and today was relaxing and calm and happy. One more night here. Hopefully an uninterrupted sleep and joy abundantly before I hit the boat and gradually pick my way home.

“We aren’t going anywhere in the car tomorrow.” That was the only real plan we had. We are here on the top of a mountain. A little enclave of buildings. Most of them want more per night than ours does.

Huge and involved breakfast, and after that we walked. We walked and walked. We shouted with sheep and spoke softly with mules. Dogs rowfed and cats examined. We found a church with Tantony and his pig, vast and high ceilinged. Acoustically fascinating. Cold empty and resonant. Come to me my children and I will make you whole and give you pigs.

There was rain and sun and coffee and cakes. We continued until we had covered some good ground and could justify an afternoon of lounging around. They have a sauna here. It’s new and people don’t seem to know about it, so we went and sat in it for ages. Sauna shower sauna shower. That was essentially the rest of the afternoon. Incredibly restful, man made heat when God is being reluctant to provide. By the time I got back to the room my steaming skin was soft as putty and then I got into the jacuzzi bath. The road is well and truly washed off.

This evening, the local restaurant has pretentions to Michelin without the prices to match. A very helpful sommelier, rich considered gorgeous food. Today has been the most effective day of absolute idle hot joy. We still did things but the doing to being ratio was adjusted subtly in favour of being. I’m sometimes a bit too pointed towards do do do but we would have no swing without the be be be. do be do be do. That’s life. I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet
A pawn and a king, I’ve been up and down and over and out, and I know one thing : Each time I find myself flat on my face,
I pick myself up and get back in the race.

I was flat on my face drooling into a pillow at 5pm. It’ll happen again shortly. But then before I know it I’ll be pushing back up through France and thinking about what to make of this and that and myself and the other and on and on we go.

It’s bedtime. Good God an idle day with Lou here in gorgeous snowy Majorca and I’m so happy for it. A true delight. I’m lighter and heavier all at the same time.

I think I had a spot of culture shock, going from France to Spain like that. The French just slump around and eat well. The Spanish are Catholics and they have this macho thing going on so all the men are up in your face but they want you to be obedient to a vast web of made up rules yeah!

I’m into it now but I’m knackered. Picked the wrong day to go to Majorca. There was a huge unprecedented dump of snow in the mountains. They’ve had to ship brand new ploughs over from Spain and some areas are totally cut off, with no power. Lower down there’s loads of localised flooding. But the snow – well it shut down our hotel entirely and because they had no power they had no internet and couldn’t warn us. First I heard was when I tried to drive there and kept running into roadblocks. I tried to message and ring asking if they knew how to get there short of hiking for three and a half hours. Eventually had a very brief explanation of what had happened over the guys 3g connection, so I asked for a refund. He hasn’t issued it yet … I hope he does though otherwise this will be an expensive day.

Lou lands shortly and then we will both get to actually relax for just a little while. A few days of very little. Nature and hopefully sunshine. Good company and hopefully good food. A moment to stop after the miles and miles of go. I need it. I’ve had no sleep and those long hours on the road do accumulate after a while. One last push while Lou gets through security and I try to get back to the hotel in the dark with some of the roads closed. Of course there’s only one person checking passports and all the flights get in at the same time. Of course. I’m gonna look at the route back on maps.

—

Back up at Finca Binibona, our last minute excellent backup plan. All the roads on the way up here are tiny little flooded pathways, both treacherous and unfamiliar at this time of night. By the time we were halfway home I was feeling extremely emotional. I cried a little bit about breaking a bird bath. I even wept momentarily at the idea of a cat. Everything is right up at the surface. Sleep will maybe help, although perhaps we are always supposed to be this sensitive.

I’m on my back in a vast bed. We are in a suite. Free upgrade baby. Chamomile is coming. I might not be awake for it. The Aircon keeps switching on and there’s no way to kill it. I’m so tired I barely mind.

Good God they actually employ potatoes to help you park cars on the Trasmed ferry from Barcelona to Palma. They put them in hi-vis and make them look like people but after listening to them and obeying their instructions, they are definitely potatoes.

A few of them became interested with me when I stopped to let someone open their door in front of me but behind them. They began actively patronising me about my line in the narrow ferry lane. “I know the size of my car,” I tried to tell them, “I just stopped to let that guy behind you unload!” but my potato is even worse than my Spanish. They were actively telling me what to do with my wheel. Eventually one of them was happy with where I was. Had I been driving on the other side of the car like everybody else then fine, but I literally couldn’t open my door in the line he put me in. He seemed happy with that outcome and finally fucked off whereupon I was able to go back to the line I originally had and get out of the car. The whole situation took AGES though. When you take into account that Trasmed are giving work to root vegetables that would otherwise be consumed in a wide variety of dishes, perhaps it’s acceptable that three of them spent so long making sure my vehicle was parked badly. The excitement of being a vegetable with a job would maybe forgive their otherwise unforgivably patrician tone too. Had they been people I would obviously dismiss them as ridiculous unforgivable proud morons.

I’m on the boat. I hope that the boat isn’t being driven by a potato. I’ve found a bench type thing that I might be able to sleep in. I’m gonna explore the boat and make sure I can’t find a better option, before I take something that makes me sleep and just wink out until about 4.30 when it all starts shouting. Gotta say I’m surprised. My expectation was a totally packed ferry but there’s loads of room here. Maybe I’ll get lucky.

The roads south today in France were frozen, with snow on both sides. The beast from the east. There’s been snow in Majorca for the first time in years.

Getting into Spain was a relief. The evening sun was warmer. Things felt more like summer. I’m hoping it’ll be a warm few days in the Balearics. I’d hate to finish this big old drive with bad weather. The potatoes affected my mood getting on this boat. Now I’m on it I’m gonna see if I can find a sleepy place…

I’ve eaten well. Having done this before, I went and got tapas in the city, and enjoyed a bit of the liveliness of Barcelona. After France it is lovely to have been somewhere anglophone. This geographical stretch is okay for me as I’ve got enough French to fill the gap and as soon as you hit Spain everybody speaks English…

—

This ferry is evil. In the daytime, Lou and I found the doors to the VIP area etc open. Now people need to sleep it is very secure.

Here’s a standard bank of seats:

We are as full as we will ever get. Nobody is in this area at all. Six people will be upright in seats because of this fuck you design.

Up and out in the morning and considering the consumption of wine last night I was surprisingly alert as I got back in dear laden Bergman and spanked it down the toll roads to The Auvergne.

I was hungry and stopped at Bourges, only to discover that nothing in France is open on a Monday. Late last year Lou and I found lunch with vegetarian options on the cobbled streets by the cathedral. We sat on a bench in late autumn sunshine. We marveled at the buttresses. We goggled at the stained glass windows. We sighed at the iconography. It’s a gorgeous cathedral inside and out.

It was literally the only open door in town today though. Nothing to eat. And so unbelievably cold. I didn’t stay long. Just long enough to whistle stop the cathedral again and light a candle. Good old God, keeping the door open for us while he stands at our own door knocking.

Back on the road, hoping for better things from Issoire, stopping briefly for a three day old Croque Monsieur and a rubber coffee from one of the aires (which is what they call the service stations). They are less dominated by the fuck-you brands that turn everything to shit. You can still find MacDonalds and Pizza Hut and Starbucks etc, but there’s a bit more independence. Sometimes there’s a lovely one with actual food. I didn’t find it though so I was hungry as the dusk fell in Issoire.

There’s a little Indian restaurant in Issoire, Jasmine’s, which opens at 7pm even though it’s a Monday. I found it at ten to seven, and it was locked but the lights were on. Washed formica and strip lights. Generic curry and rice on the menu. We have the best curry in the world in London. This is only going to be disappointing, I think, as I try to work out what the hell is going on.

Inside was a concerned looking woman. Outside, possessive of his space, stood an uncommonly short man, faceblown by long days working outdoors. He was singing through the locked restaurant door in terrifying falsetto. Ten minutes later, when it was supposed to be open, I came back round and the situation had not changed, nor the tune. It creeped me out. She evidently didn’t want to open the door and I couldn’t blame her. I decided not to be a real customer and make her have to unlock to him. I went to a takeaway pizza place which, apart from Subway and the chemists was the only open door. I slung my disappointing pizza back into the car and hauled it back to my triannon.

The ice cold wind whistling down the ancient and modern streets in Issoire, the total lack of anything open – no bars, no restaurants, just pharmacies in their dozens – it didn’t endear me to the place. There was a restaurant in the square, lights on but shutters closed, lively conversation inside. I knocked: “What time do you open tonight?” “Ah no tonight we do not open.” In Issoire at 7 on a February Monday, either the staff are getting drunk without the punters or the singing gremlin is preparing his next victim to put in the curry. Hopefully tomorrow will be a little better. I’ve had enough cheese now thanks. Never thought I’d be saying that so quickly.

Last night spoiled me. The sheets here feel like plastic, and the huge room feels like it is intended to feel – a generic room in a party house. This place is for getting smashed as part of a group of twelve. This place is for all night thumping music and for shouting your head off. No party here tonight thank God. It’s just me. At least it’ll be quiet.

Over 500km to Barcelona and then it’s a difficult sleep in a chair on a crowded boat. I’m over halfway through the journey though. The miles go by fast on those toll roads. Joseph Campbell still droning away on the radio, helping me frame and rethink journeys and identity and psychology and how we seek meaning. He’s a product of his time, but there’s always a moment or two to take home from his extrapolations about myth to religion to science, about how tales grow from needs until needs grow from tales. I’m enjoying the thoughtholes. The miles feel shorter with JoJo even if he wouldn’t stand up in the Twitter age.

Oh my God. I feel great.

I am just pumped full of endorphins.

I’m in bed. Tout ça change, but this bed is in France. It’s all natural fibre with beautifully reupholstered antique bedware in a little tiled nook in Champagne. Chez Fred et Cecile.

In season these guys are gonna be sold out, even at this price. Out of season this is still a luxury first stop on any journey south from London. It was an easy day driving. The later sunset helps, as Chartres was roughly equivalent and it was dark when I got there. This time I had a bit of light on arrival.

I’m on another mission to Barcelona and beyond. I decided to treat myself this time as last time I stayed in budget places and ended up spending loads on meals. Fred fed us. It was extra, but I was happy to pay. This journey is less stressful now I understand it. A working holiday, en effet. I choose whether or not to come home with profit, and I choose not to.

Leek and potato tart, pork entrecote, local 50% Armagnac and CHEESE.

Everything very well presented and very convivial. It was me, Fred, and an antique Polish couple who have lived a lifetime in France. We ate and mostly I tried to let conversation flow. I was perfectly happy but my ear is not so quick yet that I can immediately keep up. Add to that the fact that I hate small-talk in English. They were talking about jam for ages, then livestock. French landowners. After the cheese they got onto COVID and how it is scientifically impossible for the disease to have speciesjumped from pangolins in the protein form we first had it, so it must have been adjusted in a lab at some point and therefore was it released on purpose or by mistake? In this day and age that’s still small-talk, unless you’ve got a friend who has indoctrinated themselves one way or other and speaks in certainties. Still I hate the potential for smug in that conversation. “Do you understand us?” “Yes, I’ve got you well enough about pangolins and proteins etc but I’m not really sure if you’re saying it’s deliberate or accidental, but don’t worry on my account I’m happy with the cheese.”

Then the old fellow got onto Brexit. He wants something similar for France. My my this goats cheese is remarkable what is it again? I must message my girlfriend about it. If my French was better and I wanted a long night, yes, there’s material. But I was already tired out from live translating. I took myself into the shower and from thence to this bed and these endorphins.

We are in The Marne, where the trenches started. Occasionally I go past fields of white crosses. These quiet hills and plains carried so much death to so many. Now much of what is left is this – stone houses, beams, the smell of burning logs. Good wine. Light. Warmth. Happiness. Whatever those boys were fighting for, I hope their spirits are happy with this peace, here, far enough West for now from where the death is raining down once more.

I’m back in my wonderful warm room now, cosy in these excellent sheets after a good hot shower. I’ve eaten my fill of local produce. This is half a day’s drive from London and it feels like another world. Not as neurotic, nothing like as polluted. Good food, friendly people, heated houses, clean products to consume. Surprisingly though, the petrol prices here are worse than London – although that’s maybe on the exchange rate too. I filled up at Applegreen Vauxhall on the way out at £1.43 and again locally to here, between Reims and Paris at €2.08. Although I guess motorway stops in UK want £1.88 and Applegreen is the best in London.

Ahhh though. I’m so relaxed. Gonna sleep like a baby. I’d stay here again happily on the quality of the bedding alone. I want a duvet like this at home. And it is SILENT. Mmmmmm.

Ahhhhh. So I think I’m packed. Got my passport. Got chargers and three travel plugs and my Kindle. Kindle is a horrible way to read books, but it’s the only way to do it if you travel lots. For decades the bulk of my weight was books. Now I have this piece of plastic. It makes everything much much lighter. It’s bad for the book industry generally, as I am sure I’m not alone in noting what people are reading and trying the book. You can no longer see what people are engrossed in, and marketing algorithms really don’t understand people who don’t have patterns. They just try to sell you things like the things you consumed already as if we all just want to get stuck in a rut.

It’s much earlier than I’d normally be in bed, but I’m trying to start this long drive positively. I’m going another way through France this time, so first night will be in the Champagne region and then down from there. If I get up earlier, the sun is setting later, and I might be able to appreciate something about the places I’ll be sleeping in as I go. I’m not hammering myself on the way down, but I will be covering a lot of ground every day.

It’s not even ten and I’m exhausted. All I’ve done is admin and packing. I have no business being so tired. I think its just my body and mind preparing for the big adventure to come. Eurotunnel tomorrow and then out into the world. If last time is anything to go by, it isn’t as horrible as anyone could have expected post Brexit. I didn’t even get stamped on the way out last time though. Fingers crossed it’ll be as easy this time.

I needed time at home, and Lou wanted me to take her walking boots to Majorca and some heavy clothes as rain is forecast. She popped up to London as a return ticket from Brighton is cheaper than a checked bag. As if in a dream we spent a part of the early afternoon together today and then she went back and I got back to admin. Her stuff is already in the car. Bergie is downstairs packed to the gills. Barely room for my stuff. I’m looking forward to another little trip together, covering some ground, learning a thing or two. Down down down. Distance. A change. And surely before long some good news on a casting?