So Fashionable

Thursday has long been the new Friday in England; but today in northern France it is the new Sunday. Anne-Marie at Boulogne Tourism explains why the streets have that empty early on in a George Romeo movie feeling. “It is Ascension.”
“For Sarkozy?” I say: Nicholas Sarkozy assumed the Presidency of France yesterday. She thinks this funny. “No, for Jesus.”
“Oh yeah.”
“So it is like Sunday, everything is shut, all the hotels are full – and there are no buses.”
“Trains?”
“Non.”



Self Portrait after discovering people have holidays on Thursdays outside America.

I’ve just quit my hotel and am planning to follow Tom Coryat to Montreuil-sur-mer, seventeen miles away, he says. In fact it is about 32. “So I walk?” I say to Anne-Marie with confidence.
“Non, non, non.”

Outside the main church there is a solitary taxi-driver with Barry Gibb’s old hair from the strutting days of Saturday Night Fever. We haggle. A little. I will never win The Apprentice with these kind of skills. “Why is every hotel full here?”
“Ascension,” says Barry Gibb.
“For Sarkozy?” I say, seeking friendship.
“You have the cash?” he says.
And thus carbon-heavy we drive in the rain past wind-farms and mobile-home showrooms and George Clooney adverts to Montreuil, an old walled town, and the part location for Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. It is also where the English genius Laurence Sterne picked up a servant in 1765 on his sentimental journey through France and Italy.




Let’s see.

Anti-formula

Jeanette is tired, “It is a lonely life waiting for guests,” she says, dragging on a long cigarette. “They come, and then they are off to the centre, to the old town. It is empty here for long hours.” She’s had the hotel she runs with her son, Jean-Paul, for fourteen years. It used to be so much better: ferries came to Boulogne, day-trippers and others: her rooms were full and the bar busy. Nowadays the ferries have stopped, and there are too many chain hotels in the centre of town: they’ve cut her out. “Formula” places, she says, what can she do? At the weekends it is ok, with the people doing the drives around the region, but in the weekdays, like now…it is “plus calme, and yet every hotel in the centre is full.” Hers is located far from the front, close to the railway station, but perhaps not close enough.

Her parents came from Polynesia, in their early twenties. She grew up with them in Cambrai, where she had a big shop when she grew up. There are three children she had with a guy from Le Tourquet, but he left, “pushed me away,” and now two of the other children have “gone away” as well, only Jean-Paul remains, working in the centre, or here. There were other gentlemen, one took her to Italy, to Turin, but he died of cancer. “It is better in Italy, they have more family hotels, not all the chains. There is work there.”

She’d booked up next week with a load of motor-bikers – there’s a bike store nearby – and she’s happy when they are around. There was a convention in February and the entire street is filled with biker-boys, she has photographs, one signed by an “American champion”. Other parties come too, cyclists, X-treme bikers, gymnasts. But a lot of the people she talks about are from before, fading photographs in the Guest Book now: a Hen Night for “Lulu” in 1996, photos of a Croatian Heavy Goods Vehicle; cards from travelling salesmen, a Tunisian family. She’s been to England, on the ferry, to Dover and Folkestone. But Italy is better. Cambrai too.

“That’s the trouble here,” she says. “Too much formula.”

Escape From Clooney

I used to want to write a film titled, Escape From Sting: the Whole World is My Prison. Sting was everywhere a few years ago. Everywhere. But mostly in elevators. Now I’ve found the sequel: Escape from Clooney.

Hills

Boulogne's hilly old town auditions for the remake of Don't Look Now

In the old town high above the shopping malls of Boulogne I catch the first whiff of Tom Coryat; a smell that eluded me in Calais – as most things did. The winding streets up here remind me, curiously, of the streets of high Buda, close to the Hungarian Palace. It feels familiar.

In an old town café for breakfast I see that Hungarian-related man, Nicholas Sarkozy, on the front of the newspaper. “Installé,” I say.
“Hmm.” says my waiter.






Hills help cities and large towns, give them that necessary depth and difference: that’s what I missed in Calais, though the beach and its backdrop of high-rise apartments has – probably for me only – a quirky modernist charm. I imagine Tom marching along there (on a bloody horse, I suspect). No doubt the high-rises will fall again, be replaced with sea-view low-rises, and retirement homes.

“Formula”, as Jeanette says.

The Taste for Others' History

In the upstairs rooms of Calais’ Museé des Beaux Art, under the general title of Les Liaisons Heureuses there are pieces by Joseph Beuys, Picasso, and Andy Warhol. But I am taken with a work by Annette Messager.

A “History of Dresses” appears to be about the layering of our history, and the physical representations that we use to understand it. In Boulogne, at my hotel, it is Jeannette’s Guest Book, old and faded, held together by thick rubber band that is this type of representation. Jeanette turns the pages with a smile, remembering each encounter.

For me – as for all tourist/travellers – it is the buildings first of all, which is why I am so hesitant to generalize from a church, or a shopping mall. Tom Coryat loved his churches, I do too: but I am not sure they tell us much these days, not here in northern France, anyway. They speak of architectural moment, and that strange Philip Larkin-esque compulsion we have to visit them, despite our fiercely secular nature and, even more, the knowledge that we will understand little, so far divorced are we from the mythologies of the religions celebrated here.

In a sub-section of the show in Calais, Annette Messager gives us a wedding dress framed so that it is displayed horizontally. A photograph of a face, distorted beyond recognition, lies at the centre of the dress: once there was a woman, and a man. She is whole but absent, he is present but pulled apart.





Perhaps we are looking at a cloud, or the shapes of a Georgia O’Keefe flower. Or a religious relic, like the many items Thomas Coryat tried – but usually failed – to see on his trip. Is this a wedding dress or shroud?

The catalogue uses a phrase by the art historian, Harald Szeeman, who talks of the artist’s “individual mythology,” and I think this is right. “History of Dresses” considers how we conceive our personal history and other people’s. For me, though, the piece is redolent of death, not life. Perhaps it is history that must be forgotten for life to happen.

Two histories: first Calais, below that Boulogne, close to the Dance School