23April1994

London: 23 April 1994
My dear folks,

This has been a good week - so far. (One of my Philosophy professors once made us write an essay to either defend or attack the proposition that the word good had no meaning beyond signifying the approval of the user. At the time, I vigorously rejected the notion. Now, I have my doubts.) We have been for a long walk - 2 hours - along the Thames at Cookham; we have been to France, and I have fallen asleep at the wheel on a motorway.

We enjoyed them all. The walk - this very afternoon - was along our extended route. It follows the river at Cookham for a mile or so and the houses that slumber along its banks. We peer over all the walls to see what the owners have done with their gardens. In the river itself, the ducks and Canada geese patrol, looking for grub. The swans graze in the adjacent fields. Solitary figures walk their dogs. The path then cuts inland and, after tiptoeing past another cluster of houses, creeping around the golf-course and skittering along some quiet country lanes, it deposits one back in the parking ground. We like this walk a lot.

But we liked the walk at Audresselles more. Audresselles is one of several resort towns that dot the French coast between Calais and Boulogne. For weeks, we had watched the weather forecast and my off-days for the chance of a French excursion. The weather's been vile, as you may have gathered - snow, sleet, rain and cold, cold winds from Siberia. And the forecasts themselves have proved hopelessly out. At last, prospects improved. Even so we were dubious. We made our decision only on Monday night when I returned from work.

Tuesday morning - still under grey skies and with the thermometer registering 4 degrees - we set out for Dover. It was ages since we'd enjoyed that sense of freedom....of being able to just get up and go. The drive down was unhurried, along motorways often very busy and occasionally funnelled into narrowed lanes but never actually at a standstill.

In Dover, the AA fixed up our continental motoring insurance in ten minutes, P&O gave us a ticket in another ten and - half an hour later - we drove into the gaping jaws of a ferry. I had to remind myself about the size of the ferry industry. In Dover alone, there are two companies, P&O and Sealink, each of which runs some 24 ferries a day. They load simultaneously at two levels, cars above and lorries below, I don't know how many per sailing, but scores. They're so slick, they make oil feel gritty.

On the boat, it's upstairs for a drink, a bit of duty-free purchasing, a snooze - if you're lucky, even some sunshine. An hour and a bit later, you're rolling off at Calais. The French customs have as little interest in the contents of your vehicle as immigration in the colour of your passport. Their sole interest is to sweep you through the docks and on to the motorway before the next ferry disgorges its load. (At both ends, vast new rail terminals anticipate the arrival of the Chunnel trains. Their launch has been delayed - yet again - to the end of the summer season, while computer control problems are sorted out. Very ouch for the already bruised investors.)

According to the books, Boulogne is the most ancient and worthy of the French Channel ports. I confess that we were disappointed. The cobbled, narrow-laned old town, the haute ville, around whose broad, all-embracing ramparts it is still possible to stroll, is splendid. But it is a cherry on a sprawling, semi-industrial cake with little to please the eye. We consulted an elderly guidebook on hotels and then drove down the main street eyeing the various options before eventually selecting a recommended, family-run establishment in the heart of the town. A room with shower would cost us 180ffs for our one night stay, the owner (cum manager, cum desk-clerk) informed us. We accepted and squeezed ourselves into the (maximum) 3 person lift to ascend to our quarters.

Have you stayed in a French hotel? The elderly ones, like ours, have accepted electricity with reluctance and plumbing with positive resentment. The douche was a sort of leaky, white, plastic telephone box squeezed in between the double-bed and the window. The bed itself had manoeuvred itself between the slim-line wall-cupboard and the shower with hardly a centimetre to spare. A solitary chair tried to make itself inconspicuous beside a corner table and a dislocated basin completed the room. It was to the Holiday Inn a Deux Chevaux to a Chevrolet. We hadn't expected the luxuries of the Hilton. But this was as Spartan as the book had warned us to expect. We didn't mind that the shower gave Jones 10 seconds of luke-warm water before turning her blue; we didn't mind the heater that created a Sahara within to combat the Siberia without. What we minded was the pre-Napoleonic mattress that tipped us relentlessly into each others' arms however much we struggled towards the modest outer edges.

As always, in France, it is the dinner that precedes the embrace of such a mattress and the breakfast that succeeds it which rescues the visit. Both were excellent. For once, Jones stopped counting calories and enjoyed every single mouthful. Clearly, if I want to fatten her, I shall need to take her more often to France.

In-between times, we toured Boulogne. We walked the length and breadth of the old city, the new city, the docks, the beach and the city centre. With a little sunshine and a few people inhabiting the chairs outside the optimistic cafes, much might have been forgiven. But we had to wait for the following day for the sun. We did find the cheese shops and a shop specialising in glace fruits that had inspired our author to outpourings of delight and pleased us no less. We left the city with enough cheese to go into retailing. Not only did we raid the ultra-special shop, we also got inveigled at a morning market by two charming Frenchmen into tasting several cheeses and buying pieces of each (I laughed out loud as I saw how successful their little gambit was). It was only when I checked the scanty change from 200 francs that I stopped laughing. The cheese was wonderful, but it cost us the equivalent of a night's stay in the hotel. We're rationing it out.

In the morning, we packed the car and drove several hundred metres to a big, space-age marine centre that I wanted to visit and Jones didn't, the more so when she saw it cost £5 a head. She waited in the large reception centre. I went in. Truly, I had to hand it to the French. They don't mess about. When they build these things, they go for it. What a centre! It took one on a fantastic ocean journey - with a strong environmental message. The place was dark and eerie, loudspeakers filled it with the sounds of the sea, televisions and projectors played endless (in English and French) marine documentaries.

One wandered into halls and out of them, each with great, glass-fronted tanks of fish, past recreations of coral cities and ocean biological systems, through the innards of a deep-sea trawler, past tanks where you could feel the fish (they didn't seem to mind) and finally into a glass pyramid around and above which swam sharks that could have swallowed me whole. I watched them in utter fascination - as they cruised endlessly, effortlessly around - before remembering that a wife waited without. (The centre is called Nausicaa. If you're ever in Boulogne, see it.) Jones was pleased that I was pleased. But she said it wasn't her scene.

If Boulogne was vaguely disappointing, the little resorts that line the coast north to Calais were ample compensation. Our guide book warned us that they were pleasantly somnolent. They weren't joking. Like Portuguese dogs, they lay curled and snoozing in the newly-arrived sun. We parked the car and the walked along the beach. It was a wonderful beach, full of great rocks and pools and a million amazing stones, the most delightful of which we collected to bring back for a miniature rock garden.

At the ends of the beach, huge concrete gun emplacements - each the size of a fortress - remind visitors of the history of this place. For those who overlook the gun emplacements, there are signs to war museums and cemeteries and - in every village - a stone bearing the names of those who had died in the great wars. (Have you followed the brouhaha over the British government's bungled attempts to organise D Day commemorations?)

I must digress for a moment to tell you of another phenomenon, this one the child of the European Union which has, technically at least, brought down customs barriers between member states. Alcohol - beers, wine and spirits - are heavily taxed in Britain and lightly taxed in France. It's no exaggeration to say that prices in the latter are often half those in the former. The result is a torrent of people and cars flowing to France, generally on day-trips, to buy gallons of booze from the giant hypermarkets that line the French coast. We drove to one such to make a few purchases ourselves.

The acres of car park outside it were generously splattered with British licence plates. From the automatic double doors came Brits all but invisible behind carts groaning under crates of beer and wine. Vehicles, loaded to the gunwales, heaved themselves back out to the road, axles in imminent danger of collapse. The ferry company we travelled with was doing a special that day, a £1 return voyage for day trippers (less than the cost of a bus to work) and the filled coaches proclaimed its success. Here, publicans are crying blue murder as they go bankrupt and the pubs close their doors. They are on their knees to the government to reduce taxes on booze - so far, in vain. Meanwhile, there's a cheap and valuable lesson in home economics available to any student willing to take a Channel trip.

So we came back home. This time the sun was shining. We took the remains of a bottle of wine on to the afterdeck and watched the double stream of vehicles clanking into the ferry tied up beside us. Overhead, knowing gulls wafted on the breeze, heads peering this way and that for a first glimpse of grub from a sympathetic traveller. Around us, noisy French school kids chattered away and took souvenir photos of each other. The adjacent ferry backed out of its berth, turned itself around in the harbour and foamed out to sea. Our captain merely backed right out into the ocean before doing his pirouette and setting off in pursuit. As each ferry left, another arrived to take its place. It's big business.

That night, our downstairs neighbours joined us for a cheese and wine supper. They had a selection to choose from that would have graced an emperor's table. The wine was part of a bargain Bordeaux offering...buy a case and get one free. We did.

Our trip was nearly spoiled by some bastard who smashed my car window a couple of days earlier in the vain hope of finding something worth having. A passing police officer buzzed the bell to draw Barbara's attention to it. What the thief hoped to find is beyond me. I leave the gaping hole in the dashboard where the previous thief ripped out my radio - after breaking a different window. His successor was so pissed off that he didn't even bother to remove from the cubby-hole the miniature radio which I now use in place of the other. For £70 pounds, Autoglass put in another (small, triangular) pane in an hour. I suspect they hire people to go around smashing car windows. They certainly were not short of business.

You will note that I have (just about) steered clear of politics for some time. This does not come naturally to me. I have been writing dozens of South African election stories in the run-up to the big event - and agreed to work a series of special shifts during the week concerned to help provide intensive coverage of the poll and its outcome. Like other South African friends, we plan to vote ourselves on the 26th. Jones and I discussed prospective parties. Suffice it to say we disagreed on who best to vote for. We always do.

We have had a feast of letters and faxes for which, as always, a BIG THANK YOU. Jones's younger brother, Robbie, points out to me that if I find it hard sharing my bed with a pensioner, I can only imagine how he feels being married to a grandmother. It's a good thing we're so resilient. The girls don't know how lucky they are to have us.

I got involved the other day in some political semantics over the London Marathon. The man who came in first was described as the winner of the Marathon and the woman who came in first as the winner of the woman's race. Did that mean, I enquired, that the man had won the men's race? Much discussion ensued. (The women I work with are not repressed!) I rewrote the report to say that the man concerned had won the marathon and that the first woman across the line was X. I'm not one for political correctness normally. But this was a model of its kind. Later, some other sod updated the story and the winner of the woman's race was back. I shrugged. You can't win them all. Sometimes, I feel a sneaking sympathy for the other sex.

You may have noted the ordination of England's first women priests. The church remains split - not exactly down the middle - but with a sufficiently noisy and hostile minority to steal the show. One despairing vicar sought a last-minute injunction from the high court. His Lordship hesitated to pronounce on priestly ordination and declined to rule against the monstrous regiment clamouring at the vicar's door. Many such vicars have hammered in turn on the doors of the Roman Catholic Church for relief - and some devout Anglican women too. As always, I marvel at the ways of the world. Christ never asked his followers to give up their prejudices and they're not about to begin now.

Jones has been planting up our patio garden, removing fossilised traces of Mavis's toilette and the victims of winter's bite. The occasional warm, sunny day brings us islands of relief from the gloom. The occasional neighbour is seen out of doors. Cats are beginning their noisy challenge for territorial sovereignty. But the summer whine of lawn mowers and conversations across garden-walls with neighbours newly emerged from hibernation are not yet with us.

Jones faithfully peruses her gardening programmes, garden pages and garden magazine for new ideas, drawing my attention to desirable features that might be usefully translated into Portugal. I try to be constructively non-committal, to appreciate the advantages of the schemes without necessarily committing myself to implementing them. I am still ploughing through Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. It's a big field and there are several weeks of cultivation ahead of me. Beyond that life is back to normal - shifts, bicycle commutes, intermittent soakings, long walks, African and Arab affairs, trying to find Fatcat of an evening, fighting the chaos that ever threatens to overwhelm the study, getting along with neighbours, making sure that the post has not brought news of a big win on the premium bonds.

(I nearly forgot the little snooze on the motorway. It was on the way back from Dover. It was near the end of a long, warm very pleasant day. The traffic had come to a dead halt. I asked Jones to wake me up if it showed signs of moving again. But, as it happens, I woke myself, much refreshed, at just the right moment. I often drop off at the office for ten minutes or so. I find it a great gift.)