Tom Today

I went from Abbevile about one of the clocke the same day, and came about eight of the clocke in the evening to a country village in Picardy called Picquigny, fourteene miles there hence distant. Most of the country betwixt these places is exceeding fertill, having as faire meadows, and fruitful corne fields as I saw in all France. After I had traveled sixe of those fourteen miles, I overtook a certaine Frier, attired in white habites, whose name was Carolus Wimier: I walked with him as far as Picquigny: he was Ordinus Praemonstratensis, a young man of the age of two and twenty years, and a pretty Latinist: he went to Amiens to be fully confirmed in his Orders by the Bishop of Amiens. I found him a very good fellow and sociable in his discourses; for he and I were so familiar, that we entered into many speeches of divers matters, especially of Religion, wherein the chiefest matter that we handled was about the adoration of Images.

Kitty, Esra and Chantal: a pit-stop

Abbeville

Kitty, Esra and Chantal grew up in Dreumel, a Dutch village; they were close for a long time, but with college they grew apart, coming together again at the funeral of Kitty’s father, ten years later. Nothing had changed, they began to meet regularly, to cook and talk; soon to travel together, not building their friendship but evolving it: this friendship has roots.

Now in their thirties they all live and work around the town of Breda. Esra is expecting a child.

Abbeville is the lunch-time pit-stop of their latest weekend break from Holland, Kitty says; tonight they will be together in Ault, or Le Trépart. “Eating fish, maybe we’ll rent some bikes.”
“At least the weather is good, and the people are so much more friendly than in Holland. It rains there, and people are closed, it is too cold.” Esra says. “Dining and wine, and laughing, the weather…” Chantal says, that’s what is needed.

They found the Bed & Breakfast at Ault with the internet, know nothing about it except that it is confirmed. This is an adventure: not necessarily of place but of renewed connection. What is “there” can only be a bonus. Good food and drink, conversation, and they are content.

English is a given in Dutch education, and they are fluent: are mildly surprised that in Northern France the bug for English hasn’t caught on everywhere. “To graduate in Holland we must have English,” Kitty says. “It’s the language of the world now, and computers.”





Kitty makes the signage and the interiors for shops. “Someone else does the psychology and the marketing, I make what they need.” But she, like Esra and Chantal, is not happy about the way the world evolves. “When I was a child I went to the grocery store and there were three or four kinds of yoghurt; now there are fifty. It is too much, we don’t need it all.”

Chantal agrees. “Too much choice. Once, you went to the meat shop, the vegetable grocer, the fishmonger, cheese…now you visit one hyper-market where everything is about choice and speed.”

“It’s business,” Kitty says. “I often say to my mother, ‘I wish I had been you, born after the war, growing up in the sixties and seventies’. That was a ‘real’ life. This – us – it is all too much.”

But what would that have meant? “I’m 34, that means I would have been married, had children, a house. No job. But there was a logic.” Kitty says. “They had a great marriage – we were lucky, so many end up in divorce.”

They think Amsterdam has grown like London, or Paris. “Too expensive for real life,” Chantall says.

Our times do see progress though, Kitty says. “My father, he was ill for a while. Mentally unwell, he was so ashamed to go into a hospital. When I told him I was going to a psychiatrist he said: ‘I am so proud of you, confronting your problem.’”

The women get together because it is fun, freedom; they can talk at a natural rhythm. “In Breda we have jobs, lives. It is all too busy,” Esra says. “When we come away we can just be.”

Chantal says that she was most happy in Egypt and India: each place gave her something unique. “India showed me other ways. Yoga, the spiritual, but perhaps the best was the desert in Egypt. The people were so friendly, and we were away from everything – the tourists, people. Even language. We didn’t need language, we just needed to see and experience.”

I too have felt that feeling: away from it all – the tourists, commercialism, language – and have heard so many of us telling similar stories from Madagascar to Tierra del Fuego. Of course our freedom has been bought: we are the tourist that the man and woman over the next dune are trying to avoid. For all our unique experiences, there is someone around the corner having much the same. And yet we need travel.

In The Attractions of France, a brief piece found after his death, Bruce Chatwin writes a short story about Africa. In it an Arab boy with “hard thighs” tells the narrator that he is:

“From Atar,” he said, “I will go to Villa Cissneros. I will take a ship to Gran Canaria. I will go to France, to Yugoslavia, to China, and continue my profession.”
“As sanitary engineer?”
“No, Monsieur. As adventurer. I will see all the peoples and all the countries of the world.”

Is this not all of our dreams?

And now there is Google Earth. All three women use the internet every day, but worry about its hermetic nature. “The kids now, so aggressive, so forceful. I think it is the games.” Kitty says.

She has been to Australia, which changed her way of seeing the world: “it is beautiful, but it is not a place for shy people. I learnt not to be shy.”

Now all three are “not shy”, there is communality as they speak, a shared confident view. “I think all of us northern Europeans need lightness sometimes, the sun,” Esra says. “Even just to go to Spain.”

I thank all three for their time. “No, it is different. Meeting new people. We saw your boots, we knew you were “travelling.” ‘

“We thought you were a writer,” Chantal says.

Sometimes I think the same.

On blogging

To Abbeville

The sacrifice of blogging is poise; the pleasure of books is their craft. It is hard to read the many books and extracts I carry on my tiny memory stick without feeling a surge of jealousy as I revel in their depth and fluency. I’m still finding my voice against the backdrop of northern French internet-absence. (Perhaps everyone is still on Minitel).




When I came “home” to London last year after most of this century abroad I instinctively liked my new city. But it would take years to know it as it is now. Who was it that said memory is how we think about then, now? Now the new memories are things such as HSBC bank adverts in Polish, in South London. In Golders Green there are swathes of Japanese food stores. Free newspapers grow in the tube, telling stories of bad behaviour by performers who I’ve never seen or heard in nightclubs which surely can’t exist. Pilgrims flock to Top Shop to buy clothes they will immediately sell on E-bay.

And now, like Tom, I’m trying to respond to fresh European places after a few hours observation: I have many resources, aide-memoirs, Wikipedia; my eyes and ears. But little hope of depth. I hope somehow that the manifestation of the journey can exist online as a somewhat surrealistic snapshot of a trip that my friend Ian has always said should be called The Last Tourist.

But I remember all that fuss about The End of History. This is merely an attempt to follow one man closely, and celebrate the lives – real and imagined – of thousands of others.

War: virtual, almost and back to Boujis

Almost every town in Western Europe has them now, well-thought-out shops in neat streets whose uniformity is striking. These stores come with compelling logos and fittings, and windows designed by the great-grandsons and daughters of Lorelei the Siren of the Rhine. Here, in quiet northern France, we can find dresses and foods and communication tools, and book holidays to Zanzibar or Rome – and still be in Picardy-country for an early paté and wine lunch. Everything, Everywhere. That's how it is now.

Abbeville, very close to the Somme river is the first place I’ve visited that doesn’t appear over-run with tourists or travellers – or bikers. It is full of local inhabitants moving around. I like it for that immediately.

In “Continental Drifter”, Tim Moore’s take on Tom Coryat, he observes early on that the French do averageness much better than the British. He says Montreuil is France’s equivalent of Ashford, Kent. In that case Abbeville is Maidstone, but a Maidstone in which the pace of life is not dictated by London. Abbeville doesn’t appear fast; sandwiches and fish and pizzas are lingered over, for the young and old. Later in the evening drinking is slow, calm. Very un-English.

As the sun comes out on Friday lunchtime it is easy enough to take the unilateral decision to avoid the First World War memorials in the countryside nearby, despite their potency (I have been before) and continuing allure for visitors and travellers. I have nothing to say that hasn’t been said.

This morning my fellow Contemporary Nomad posts that Prince Harry won’t be going to fight in the current war in Iraq. Iraq being too dangerous for Princes. Pas du merde, Sherlock: wars, however justified, remain the ultimate “Betwixt” experience, demanding a personal bravery we don’t naturally possess, I suspect. And yet on those computer games “bravery” comes so cheap.

As I re-read Coryat, rushing to churches, quick to condemn Popery and yet clearly – naturally – filled with a faith that draws him to all manifestations of religion and the spiritual life, I wonder about our religious and secular compulsions now, and wonder how on earth we are still at war. [This is one of the dangers of solo travel: it doesn't take much to start thinking and speaking like Captain Kirk].

Just as Tom’s generation was “Betwixt” the ultimate sanctions of a cruel, medieval god, and the cool liberating discourse of science and the Enlightenment, so quite a few of us are now “Betwixt” a visceral sweated world and the odourless synthetics of the virtual. How do we ensure the merging of these two is creative, not divisive? That the overwhelming desire to destroy in computer games does not manifest itself in other ways: in personal relationships, say.

In “Monocle” magazine recently there was an article about a nightclub in Barcelona where entrance was solely possible via an in-house computer recognizing an “embedded” microchip in the guest. VIP meaning precisely: “very injected person.” Whilst absurd enough for any era’s most fashionable club, the injected chip is an apt image of Early-Adopter syndrome: those who get the first benefits of technology are the rich.

And the strange. People like Coryat…

On this walk I’m trying to at least see how we will soon enough have access to knowledge and information wherever we are; can look at a church or a mosque, modernist architecture or a painting, even the hills from the rampart, and “know” a little more than how much it costs, or how to destroy it with a “magic” sword. Day by day these stores of information grow, not always accurately but neither as bad as some might say. This doesn’t mean I think we’ll all become “Terminators” one day, watching the world through Rose-Tinted-Google Goggles, but we are in midst of an extraordinary transformation in what we know, see and experience.

And yet still Princes (almost) go to war.

It seems apt, I think, that in quiet, modest, Abbeville, close to the Somme river, there is wi-fi and it works.