Spies Like Us

So you are 32, Tom Coryat, walking prodigious distances through northern France each day. Talking with who ever you find. Remember the words of his friend, John Gifford:

“the wonder of this age, which doth admire
How Travell, Wit and Art do all conspire
To make him Table-talke, and pointed at,
Filling mens mouthes, and eyes with Coryate.

let us not forget that, if we start thinking Tom is shy.



And when you arrive every evening at your place of rest, you eat, drink, talk and sleep. So when do you write this all down, Thomas? Do you dictate to yourself as you walk? Is your memory as prodigious as your feet? Was it that you are scared to write in case you look like a spy?

He was born in 1577; his Queen, Elizabeth, had been excommunicated from the Catholic church by Papal Bull seven years before. Throughout his childhood in Odcombe, Somerset, and his years at Oxford (Martin Amis’s college, though Coryat’s influence is negligible in later Amis), Elizabeth was funding and supporting protestant “cells” across most of the Channel “littoral”: from Brittany to the Netherlands.

In response Continental Catholic resistance to Elizabeth was widespread and cunning. There was an almost permanent terrorist threat to English shores: in the seminaries at Douai and St Omer, among many, priests were trained for their English “mission.” Martyrdom was the fashion…

…It was the supreme privilege, promised divine goods. “Of which only divine grace could make them worthy.” Peter Unwin writes in “The Narrow Sea.”

Once trained the priests were smuggled into England through small ports. Of these religious “spies” perhaps the most famous is Edmund Campion. “So the faith was planted; so it is to be restored,” he said in his “martyr-statement”. He was caught, tortured and executed. So eventually was Elizabeth’s rival throne claimant, Mary Queen of Scots. In 1587.

These were ideological times: the Pope’s secretary openly announced the price on Elizabeth’s head: “that guilty woman of England…whoever sends her out of the world…no only does not sin but gains merit…”

The Spanish Armada – off Calais, though it sounds as though it should be off Ibiza – was survived in 1588; by Tom’s adulthood another was expected in 1599 but was a no-show. The trial for the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 – the 9/11 of Jacobean England, sorry but it was – is a short memory, occurring two years before Tom’s journey. In the same year, 1606, Thomas Palmer wrote “Essay of the Means how to make our travels into Foreign Countries the more profitable and honourable.” He told most not to bother. Not unless it was strictly necessary. So that is Tom out, for a start. Lucky he was the Prince of Wales’ man.




Children, the infirm, anyone a bit mad, women: none of them should travel, Palmer says. He was most worried about the “barbarous lusts” of even the most friendly seeming continental. And so, in a twist on now, decadence was “there”, not “here”. Tom Coryat must have known this wasn’t exactly the case. Along with the Gunpowder Plot trial, London of 1606 is remembered for the orgy that took place at a party of the King of Denmark, brother to Anne, wife of the new King, James the First. Ben Jonson was commanded to write a “Black Masque”. The Queen and her friends painted their faces black, everyone got very drunk, and revels were…revelled.

They were still talking about it in 1608.

But sex is one thing; the main fear of travel was being “doubled”. Like one of Ben MacIntyre’s WW2 spies. Innocents going abroad might return a secret catholic. Tom does his forceful bit to disavow us of any catholic leanings on his part. Still it is fun to speculate: perhaps he was a spy – for someone. Of his temptation by vice, we have to wait, formally, for Venice.



Though I won’t be able to wait that long to consider Tom and Sex.

Clermont: Quite Quiet

Tim Moore sped through in his Rolls Royce, Tom Coryat found them mean and ignoble, but I like the places between Amiens and Paris.

They do not have major tour attractions, though in the country nearby there is horseriding, country club and golf, flights over Picardie - the brochures tell me.

I connect instead with the small high street: Clermont is built on a hill, the Church of St. Samson highest up, closest to God. From the church the view is down a narrow street, banks first, then the biblioteque, bakers, butchers, even a fancy kitchen shop with etiolated aluminium chairs.

There is no obvious destination for the Burgher-Roi the town chieftans, to hang out, though the two competing terrace cafes do good business all day.



As in Breteuil the white flag has not been raised to pedestrianisation; few 4x4 invaders are to be seen.

Foch, Petain, Clemenceau - their accents to come when a keyboard loves me - and the American general Pershing got together here, though I am more taken with the thought that St. Samson was reconsecrated in 1502 by a member of the Villers d'Isle Adam family: neqrly 400 years later one of the flock scandalized Paris with his Cruel Tales.

Clermont just is: Pirates of that Place at the cinema, a lovely wood-panelled library, a lot of kids - what else to do? - and not a hint of unfriendliness.



At eight thirty in the evening the centre is utterly silent.



As I take this photograph an elderly lady with a Tintin dog calls me over. “I didn’t like her, she had nothing to say. But she was a candidate. For the Presidency of France. They don’t respect politics any more. It doesn’t mean anything. But this? She is not a clown, Royale."

Passing Through to Clermont

Around the World in One Attic

Verne is everywhere, even Breteuil

In the upstairs study of the Maison Jules Verne in Amiens, we find the author’s Google; his version of the Elizabethan “commonplace” book.

Verne’s library is over 12,000 books strong, and there are maps, atlases, the works. “Long before I was a novelist I have always taken notes as I read newspapers, magazines and scientific journals,” he tell us. “These notes were and still are filed away, arranged by subject. I need not tell you how priceless such documents is.”

This doesn’t explain the wild imagination though; nothing really can. Jules Verne did go to Scotland before his novels made him famous (he’d written comic stage plays earlier); and later as success hit he visited America. But this story is not about a physical explorer, like Tom. The incredible journeys, the “Voyage Extraordinaire” are the product of the mind.

Maison Jules Verne would have been on the outskirts of Amiens in the nineteenth century, it is only very recently opened for tourists. The dark rooms on four floors – there is a tower/turret on the roof – echo to a discrete soundtrack: laughter and voices in the parlour; a pen scratching across paper in the study, and in a replica of the office of his famous editor, Hertzel – the man who made Verne.

There are few of us not touched by Jules Verne, whatever our disposition to science fiction. I seem to remember even Alan Partridge, or was it Steve Coogan, essaying a poor Phineas Fogg recently. Verne isn’t a geat writer, not Suzanne’s favourite, nor mine, but his best books do have a vital visionary quality. I particularly like the nineteenth century obsessiveness of “Around the World in 80 days”. There is a man doing much the same as we speak, armed with Conde Nast expenses and a gold card. Verne lives on.

Upstairs again and there is a certificate for Verne from the Alliance Française, for his work in popularizing the French language overseas. He is the most translated Frenchman, publishing even more than De Sade or Voltaire abroad. Literature not just as Proustian prose, but Age of Empire geo-politics as well.

He worked hard, Verne, up at five each morning. In this house alone he wrote 44 books. There are over seventy in all; before the plays, films and PC games added to the pantheon. By the 1870s Verne was all the marketing rage: plates, snakes and ladders, lotto cards, even wallpaper attested to his appeal And Méliès made his ground-breaking “moon” film of 1902, based on Verne’s writings.

There is a framed letter from the Boy’s Empire League of Ludgate Hill in London, praising Verne for his “wonderful imagination for the delight of boys all over the world.” The League sent a gold-capped walking stick in thanks.

Verne takes us to the centre of the Earth, the Moon, 20,000 leagues under the sea; to the “Lighthouse at the End of the World.” Takes us to places that even now are denied to Google Earth.




But what I like most about Verne is his social commitment; it is not really visible in his fictions, but in the world about him in Amiens he gave something back. Benjamin Barber or Victor Hugo, friend of Verne’s publisher, Hertzel, would be proud. Verne was a local councillor for the last 17 years of his life. He concentrated on cultural matters in Amiens, including the building projects. His masterpiece? The Cirque: Verne loved the circus.

Ah well.

In the attic of the house the exhibition is full of movie posters from every country, and in numerous languages, James Mason and Kirk Douglas stand out. Verne was not Hugo, nor Proust, but his stories are transforming experiences, and almost always for the good. He is a writer of the surface, not a stylist or one for psychological depth. But his vision is the up side of technological progress; besides, he didn’t have to see much of the twentieth century, dying in 1905.

The French historian, Etienne Gibson writes that Renaissance humanism was the Middle Ages, “not plus humanity, but minus God.” If this is the case, then Verne’s amazing positive view of technology’s possibility is “the nineteenth century plus imagination and disengaged love.”

At the station in Breteuil I tell Peter about Verne. “He never went anywhere, Verne,” he says. “Except in his mind. What a journey that must have been.”

Fi-fishing in Breteuil

The Renaissance humanist writer, François Rabelais said that laughter is the mark of humanity. In that case I’m having an on, off, very-on crisis of humanity here in Breteuil.

Rabelais was one of those betwixt figures, an ex-monk, lawyer and doctor before he found his feet as author of Pantagruel and Gargantua, long held as one of the greatest of novels, early or not. His catch-phrase was fais ce que voudras – do whatever you like. He’d shoot ads for Nike these days.

Breteuil was an overnight stop for Tom, one of his “meane and ignoble places,” that he describes only in terms of ruins. I quite like the place; it is quiet and the people more guarded than Amiens, but once again, it understands itself. Apart from the relation of a railway station to the town centre: Breteuil station is seven kilometres away from the town.

“Politics,” Peter, an American-Norwegian, says as he waits. “Some official there who didn’t want to see trains.” He’s at the station to meet a French social worker who comes down from Paris once a week. He offers a lift without question. “Many people make this mistake,” he says, in a “Dutch” accent. He lives nearby. When we part he worries I’ll have nowhere to stay, hands me his numbers.

There is no problem with the hotel room, just lunch. It is two and – unlike anywhere else in town – the dinning room is humming with “Burghers” in lunchtime fineries, (one is the double of the deadly VP in “24”, his ancient friend has an endearing ash-blonde ponytail) and all are eating what looks very good food. I get the purse-lipped “closed” from Brett One, the man behind the bar, and when I sit down despite this and get out a map the entire room gives me a master-class in snow-blinded self-importance. It’s only a McQueen leather jacket.



Brett Two and Les Burgher-Roi


There is a half an hour of absolutely no eye contact in a room the size of a medium-sized kitchen before the accident. “You want something?” Brett Two says, tricked into looking at me.

Later I double-check the times for dinner. “7.30 to nine. Then closed. The television is good tonight,” Brett One says. And Rabelais’s dictum kicks: he laughs, I laugh. We are human again.

But not for long.

The ebb and flow of laughter moves through me as upstairs I fish for wi-fi in my room. It is utterly unexpected, but suddenly I have three potential signals: I stalk my room over and over, a hungry Ahab in search of his whale. Call me Email.

The networks drift by and occasionally take the bait, but never let themselves be reeled in. “Lipsky, Neuf987, and Orange all play the Communication Coquette, allowing a few pages of download (farewell: Cutty Sark; adieu French-American concert in Paris) but never the right ones.

In the recent century studies of Rabelais have increased greatly: his writings never seeming more modern. The Russian critic and Dostoevsky scholar, Michael Bakhtin, was fascinated by Rabelais: he said that “to be human was to laugh,” though he believed that we’ve lost the ability to laugh at important things, and so we stick to the trivial. If we don’t know what is sacred any longer, how can we laugh at it – and prove our humanity?

By dinner – at 7.30 prompt – I am laughter-lite once again, tired from all the fi-fishing. I sit alone and order. The pate arrives on a square glass plate with: jam, brown sauce, pecan ice cream, cooked chives, red peppercorns, sea-salt. Is this a Rabelaisian moment to laugh out loud?

A short man enters, ignores everyone except me: I get a nervous “bonsoir.” He sits at a table for one where a half-decanter of red wine is waiting. He has nothing to read, no cigarettes to amuse him. He pockets a roll from the basket in his jacket pocket so badly it is an insult to the word “furtive.” He downs some wine. A fish dish arrives at his table without prompting, and unacknowledged by Bretts One, Two, or the Mysterious Man Himself. He nods his head and shakes his shoulders in time with a French jazz version of “I Could Have Danced All Night,” and then mutters through his fish. He talks himself into getting his countryman’s jacket back on, finishes the wine, and without a thank you or good evening he (and his bread roll) are vanished into the night.

Can I laugh now?
Non.

Brett Two is the Boss. He picks up the fat cat that has circled my table for hours: take it, pate with jam and chives – take it now, big pussy.
“This is my cat,” Brett Two says. He’s from Biarritz, Brett Two. No wonder he’s in Rabelasian Denial. “This is Pepper.”
“Pepper?”
“Non! Pepper.”
Bien.
It’s nine in the evening, television time for the Two Bretts. In a reflection at the window I can see myself. I’m not laughing.

In “Europe”, the historian Norman Davies wonders if Rabelais “was not the last European to be truly human.”

Writers Coming Soon

It was Godard, or Truffaut, both, who said: you can never
go wrong with an umbrella



I will be writing about Verne & Hugo, Montreuil & Amiens soon: social novels and the fantasticke take time.

Sans CAD-CAM?

Amiens



On July 7th, that is 7/7/7 – one of those Dan Brown numbers – the results of the new Seven Wonders of the World competition will be announced. The short list includes The Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, the Mall of America, that Gherkin…actually it doesn’t, but one day…

It takes four visits to begin to grasp the enormity of achievement that is Amiens Cathedral. The thing is a beast: like some prehistoric creature that time forgot. People started building this in 1220. In thirteen years that makes it 800 years old. Even calming down and contemplating the finished article, around 1450, say – these things evolve – its creation is an act of pure awe. If memory is remembering then, now, but with all of our conceptions since, then the first question must be: how did they do this without computers?



Visiting Tom got the travelling vapors for the first time:

The Cathedral Church of this Citie is dedicated to our Lady, being the very Queene of al the Churches in France, and the fairest that I even saw till then. This Church was built by a certaine Bishop of this Citie, about foure hundred years since, whose monument is made in brasse at the west end of the Church, with certain Latin inscriptions about it; but such is the strangeness of the character, I could not understand it.

….The principallest relique that is kept in this Church is the forepart of St. John Baptists head, which is inclosed in a peece of gold that is beset with many precious stones. Againe, the same peece of gold is put into another rich Cabinet, made of crystal; out of the which it is taken whensoever it is shewed to any strangers or any other: it is never shewed but at sixe of the clocke in the morning, in a certain little high Chappell, consecrated to that purpose…

and rightly so: this is a wonder of someone’s world.



“They go in, they click, click, click, they buy my coffee.” Patrick sounds as if this is a bad thing: it is his coffee shop that we congregate afterwards, but there is hurt pride in his voice. Amiens Cathedral demands time. I give it hours.

When we visit churches what do we seek? On my first visit there is a service, a woman priest. The hymms have a curiously modern melody that sounds like a choral version of the songs in “Les Damoiselles de Rochfort.” Liturgical Legrand, I guess. And all around the pews we scurry: the stained glass is too far away, the paintings dark. There is an audio guide but few bother. We come together – this is a church – and we remain apart. All there is really is massiveness, light and shade. The form outweighs the function so heavily Le Corbuiser might scream.

The Victorian author-critic John Ruskin loved this place, helped him to form his over-arching aesthetic of the Gothic. He was one of those few that changed the way we see things; to this day people flock to lectures on his vision: of art, literature and architecture. Ruskin will return.

On Monday morning I have the place to myself, the only sound that staple of Mondays in every major city: construction work, the clang of girders, ladders; cranes spinning like El Greco ice skaters. Here it is work on the east wing. This is my chance to imagine Tom for the first time, gazing up and thinking – surely – this is impossible. For days know I’ve wondered what must have been going through his head as he “walked” on horseback. I think today’s sight must have shaken him: for any building of this size comes with a preternatural power, for good and bad. I’ve watched the light blaze through the stained and not-stained glass at four times of day; on each occasion the mood here is different, however many of us are inside consuming the experience. This is a building of a black and white God; of absolutes. Here we are dwarfed, perhaps as Chantall was in the dessert oasis. Except that here there is language, sculpture, paintings, architecture. And its collective imperative is: have wonder.

Believe.

I feel Tom must have known then that England wasn’t everything. But then he wouldn’t have been travelling if he’d thought that. However much he kept it under his hat.

Downtown

I choose the Baroque café in Amiens, right by the Somme, because Tom Coryat was active in Europe in the “Baroque” era, the history book tells me. I must research this. Here all is riverside cafés, Cathedral views, and Pink Floyd. “Wish You Were Here.” It reminds me vividly of the center of Ljubljana.





Sunday night: all is quiet but the coach party-people.The centre an oasis.

Missed it

The two most terrifying words in the English language are “clown” and “Toby.” Toby is a “Clown contemporain”. He played last night in Amiens. I watched Rugby League.

Hollywood:Amiens

Suzanne

At the good cake shop on a somewhat soulless, very wet, pedestrian drag and I’m talking Izzard and getting confusing instructions from the cake ladies for la Maison de Jules Verne, the Around the World in Eighty Days man who lived here almost fifty years. An elderly French blonde woman tiny beneath a massive umbrella takes my arm, “I’ll drive you,” she says, “it’s too complicated to explain”.

We Izzard, and she asks where I’m from. “English? But my husband is American, I speak English.” We drive around the city in the rain, the traffic here is in “permanent crisis” Suzanne says. There are about six cars that I see, Straus plays on the hi-fi. Suzanne was a social worker before she retired, working with children in Amiens’ school system. “I liked it, but they have many problems these days.”

Suzanne Redmond’s family knew an American man during the Second World War. They kept in touch afterwards: their daughter eventually married the Redmond’s boy, Steve. She was born in Amiens; shows me the street, the hospital now a BestWestern hotel. The name Redmond is Irish, Suzanne says, but Steve is from Los Angeles. He was in the film business.
“In France?”
“No, no. Hollywood. He was a camera man.”
She asks where I am from.
“London.”
“We’re so closed here, I have never been to London and it is so close; my daughter, sure: she travels everywhere with her work. But not me.”
“But you saw Hollywood?”
“Oh yes, we lived in the hills in LA for quite a time.”
“And any films I would know?”
“You’ve heard of Clint Eastwood? He was a friend of Steve’s. We all went to Switzerland, where was it? You know, the Eiger.”
“Ah, that would be “The Eiger Sanction”.”
“Yes, that’s it. The Eiger Sanction.Steve had a small part in it as well. He was the first character to die.”

Jules Verne is not Suzanne’s favourite writer, “but, oh, what must have been in his head. Where do you go, next?”
“Eventually Venice.”
“Very beautiful, Venice. Especially for the Film Festival.” Where this years retrospective in on Spaghetti Westerns. “Of course,” says Suzanne.

If only I had Jules Verne’s imagination to make this up. “Enjoy your adventure,” Suzanne says, but I am enjoying it too much already.

Real Walkers

Amiens, up early for Church


Les and Pamela have been visiting Australian war cemeteries in the Somme for a week. They’re from London. They like the café we’re sitting in because it isn’t fake, is logo-lite. “Not like those in the city centre, I didn’t like those at all,” Pamela, the Australian, says. “It’s going that way everywhere, isn’t it? Uniformity. Dijon was nice though, different.”

Les is a walker. He edits the South East Rambler magazine in England and it is taking up more and more of his time. He’s been walking since his teens when there was a weekly walk column in the now-defunct “Evening News”. “I used to take the walk every week, the author of the column encouraged me,” he says.

Les once walked from Dieppe to Paris, it took a fortnight. He has stayed in Montreuil, but doesn’t understand the bikers. “Walking gives you a chance to experience something, to feel closer,” he says. “Bikers…I don’t understand it. Passing time, I suppose.” And walking you can drink a little more, of course.




Head out for the Highway: looking for adventure

Pamela has worked on several newspapers in London, The (now-defunct) European…hmm…and The Guardian – which she remembers for the champagne on Thursdays (readers insert joke). She reads the Telegraph now. “20,000 people died at one battle, can you imagine that?” she says. “I don’t think we should be at war now.”
“Harry isn’t,” I say.

“Nobody listens any more,” Les says. “We had the biggest demonstration ever against war – nobody listened. I don’t agree with fox-hunting but they have a good lobby. What happens? Nothing, it was banned. Nobody listens.”

There is a sign in the centre of town informing visitors there are 48 CCTV cameras in operation.

I once interviewed the American academic, Benjamin Barber, a historian of American democracy and constitution. He’d become famous for one of those cross-over books, McWorld vs Jihad, that spoke to the times. He posited the problem of democracy thus: it begins locally, in small ways, just as it did in classical times. In this case: in the town hall or the local community. But these kinds of meeting were not meaningful any longer, government higher up was in charge and “not listening”: Barber held great hope for the internet’s power to shape democratic change, though he was very worried about its power to “infantilize” us as well, to pare down to black and white views.

Pamela likes to photograph food and drink when she travels. If it is good, it gets a snap. She remembers a particularly good hot chocolate in Salford, Lancashire. “People think I’m crazy, but I love it.” She takes a picture of her coffee. One for the virtual scrapbook.

Les returns with his change. “I’ve paid,” he says.
“I always love the hear that,” Pamela says. She likes to “research things,” and gives me the e-mail for a hostel in Monmartre, and the address of a Quaker House café and restaurant near the British Library. “Where were we before Google?” she asks.
“We didn’t exist,” I say.

“I don’t usually like churches,” Les says, looking at Amiens cathedral in the rain. “But this one is something else.”

“John Keats was a walker,” Pamela says. “But he died young.”

Turf & Numero Neuf

Picquigny

Civilized Saturday mornings at the Bar Terminus, betwixt Picquigny train station and the main street (where village quiet is vaguely distracted by a modern – albeit closed - Homeopathy shop). High on the hill, a Chateau; all around the periphery, war cemeteries filling with people. Here in the Terminus all is handshakes and kisses; non-stop banter – even with Eddie Izzard-in-France me.

There is sparkling wine to down, lotto tickets to buy. “I have no chance,” says Yvonne, “I choose my telephone numbers these days, that way if I win I can afford the bills.” She’s going to the Jules Verne clinic in Amiens next week. “It doesn’t exist,” says Francis the owner, bringing laughter. Perhaps it is at the Centre of the Earth.

Francis wears a “Walking Man” t-shirt. It as, as Robert Langdon might say, “significant.”
“Moi aussi,” I say, “I’m walking to Venice.”
“It’s just a t-shirt; tomorrow the garden,” Francis says, rubbing a beer belly.

It is a morning for chance: not just the lotto, but scratch-cards for Bingo and Sudoku – even Scrabble. I boggle at the chances of scratching off a triple word score with “x” and “z”. On the bar are several copies of “Paris Turf,” the daily racing guide. Men and women enter to drink, consider the form pen in hand, and then wander off to make their bets. Down the bar one middle-aged man scratches card after card.




Rien.

Later on Canal Plus is Manchester United versus Chelsea, the English FA Cup final: more gambling opportunities to come. “A match of revenge,” Francis says, calling out his teenage daughter Charlotte to show me the Amiens football club shirt she is modelling. “Third division,” he shrugs. I am reminded of Crystal Palace for a brief and wistful moment.



On the obligatory ignored television in the corner is a moment of civilisation clash – Samuel Huntingdon would be proud. Whilst games show contestants go through their moves The Clash sing “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” Upstairs in Rock Heaven Joe Strummer lights a spliff with Jimi or Jim or John and whistles a bar of “Career Opportunities,” and all’s almost all right with the world.

Picquigny was an overnight stop for Tom Coryat. I’m sure he liked it here, the people are friendly, everyone shakes my hand and says hello. Yvonne notices this, “everybody does it,” she says, as if this is strange. “Are you German?”
“Anglais.”
“You look German, but not tall enough…or red.”

At The Treaty of Picquigny, drawn up in 1475 between England and France. The French King Louis XI paid our boy, Edward IV, 75,000 crowns and a yearly pension “thereafter” of 50,000 crowns to hold off his claims to the French throne and stay put in England. These days English Steady-Eddies use similar city bonuses to fly-drive and buy estates around here, no doubt.

But I don’t think they’d like the Bar Terminus, it is too full of community; it knows what it is – the heart-beat of the village. Madame “Lolo,” – Laurent, Francis’s wife (in Las Vegas t-shirt) checks the train time-table for me, shakes my hand. I explain the trip, Tom Coryat, walking (in the modernist manner – sometimes on trains). “Ah, you are crazy,” Francis says. “Now I understand.”

I shake everyone’s hand again. Francis gives me a house pen. “For the writer.” On the train to Amiens everyone in my compartment – everyone – is plugged into an I-Pod. Some even share.




Must be a student town, Amiens.

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.

Tom's Montreuil and a Question

The Citadel Ramparts this morning, after Bill Brandt

“Montrell is a strong walled towne, situate on a hill, having a very strong fortification on the toppe thereof, invironed with a strong wall. There are two gates at the entrance to the towne, at each whereof there is a guarde of souldiers that examined us before we came into the towne. The principall Church of the towne is our Ladies Church. Our Hostesse of Montrel prayed the Virgin Mary to blesse me, because she thought I was a Papist, but when shee understood I was a Protestant, shee seemed to pitty me.”

Tom is a polemicist for the Protestant way, and a geek for the Classics – he’s allowed, it was one of the big things then, Baroquely post-Renaissance and very Wiki-friendly. In a sense his Crudities do set a template for much travel writing: disengaged by nationalism, it arrives, takes and often makes a joke or two. Subjective superiority is all, damn the context. In Tom’s case his raw enthusiasm – which hasn’t emerged yet, five days in – overwhelms much of his observation, which makes it all quite lovely. For Tom literally everything was brand new, and definitely not viewable on Google Earth.

But I am aware that my kind of “knowing” project has severe responsibilities: to honesty at the very least. Tom’s view appears to be that of well-educated Jacobean Roast Beef, but I’m already nagged – have been for months – by what on earth he was really after on this journey. Others who travelled came for trade, diplomacy, education, even spying. But they would go home with glory (as long as they hadn’t turned Catholic, Gay, or Both), and their careers be made. Tom was “Betwixt” all that.

Tom got home, hummed and hawed, finally wrote up an account, invented modern travel writing, and then…left again.

What was it?

Very Easy Riders

In 1969 towards the end of her marriage to the French film director, Roger Vadim, Jana Fonda went with her father, Henry, to a screening of a new film her brother had just produced and co-written.

“My father didn’t know what to make of it but was awed that his son had co-written and produced it. I loved parts of it…but I secretly thought it would be too rough and far-out for most audiences. It was Vadim who understood that here was a no holes-barred cinematic breakthrough that would resonate immediately and become a classic.”

I’m with Fonda today in Montreuil because I’m reading her life story: Paris, Vadim, the Sixties, marriage, fame, radicalism: these are all areas I’ll consider in the coming weeks; Fonda and Vadim too. Fonda is 70 this year: that makes people like me think.

But now as I sit watching bikers at breakfast in Montreuil, chilling out over corn-flakes to the ambient Indian music that plays in a breakfast bar with light design out of a 1990s nightclub’s chill-out zone; and as I sat last night watching German bikers fidgeting over beer at dusk (literally: “ach so, Montreuil” the rest was silence); and considering the memories and memories to come of the many bikers at Jeannette’s hotel, I’m wondering how influential was that film?

One of the key ideas of this trip is to explore the technologies and artistic creations that changed the way we see the world. I’m going to see the places where printing, the web, surrealism, photo-journalism, the documentary, mirrors, even modern accounting got going. In Amiens – in a few days time – I can confront Jules Verne (and John Ruskin). Here in Montreuil there is Victor Hugo to come, but he must wait until I can write clearly. Instead I think about Easy Rider. A picaresque creation, like Coryat’s, or Sterne’s sentimental journey. Like Don Quixote, published three years before Tom’s trip; like Candide. Only with cocaine in the side pouch, and Steppenwolf on the soundtrack.

Did Easy Rider inspire all these roads to freedom that buzz past me? Now so many people can be high-speed road movies, after all, though I am not sure what is gained in passing through countries at 120 miles an hour other than the act of passing time itself. There are the sweaty pit-stops; the aching evenings, surely; the sense of having passed through but not committed. I will have to ask. It can only be a matter of time.



And the one that got away in fifth.

Not so miserable at all - sur mer...almost

At eleven this morning Montreuil resembles one of those perfect and utterly empty villages that The Avengers stumble across in black and white – sometime around 1965. In those old television shows everything was happening around the corner and underground, and Montreuil has the same sense. It is Sunday, after all: even if it is really Thursday.

Henry IV of France came here a few years before Thomas Coryat and declared the town Fidelissima Picardorum Natio, which means “quite nice”. Two years after Coryat was here Henry was assassinated on the same dateas Thomas and I set sail, but that is for Paris, perhaps.




High up and to the north west of the town on the Citadel, built in 1567, it is easy to feel content. There is a great view across the country; ramparts; sheep-flocks of people with audio guides; and even a Shell-Suit, though it is a rare sight in northern France these days, like an old Citroen DS or a George Sand novel. I can imagine Tom up here, checking out the cows.





From 1916 this was the British Army’s communications centre: its internet hub, only its wi-fi (if only) was more like wi-fly, as the major form of message-sending was carrier-pigeon. Douglas Haig who led the British forces lived a chateau a few miles away, but this was where plans were sent, and lives first lost.

Montreuil has pleasingly winding streets, and is high: thus its long-term military importance; once it was the northern most point of France. It wouldn’t be so great a surprise to see Binoche selling spicy chocolate here in a shop on the main square; no sign of Depp in bad Irish accent though, or Leslie Caron (of whom more soon). There are more bikers (ditto) in town, taking a pit-stop, and I’ve read that the Knights Templars made this a centre for a while.

As I will be hot on the grail-trail in Paris, I search Montreuil’s churches, including the one Coryat visited, in search of a bloodline, or a painting to misinterpret. I even try making an anagram of Montreuil-sur Mer. I quit on Coca-Cola two and: “Um, Les Mort Rien". There was this mysterious symbol though.



And this:


In the courtyard of the Hotel de France there’s a lively outdoor painting of Laurence Sterne looking every inch the late-starter success story. I’ll write more about Sterne later, but it is worth remembering that his classic, Tristram Shandy, was an immediate best-seller in France, some time before the English got it. Here, on his – as it were – promotional tour, he picked up a Press Officer.

“Nor was it till I got to Montreuil, upon the landlord's asking me if I wanted not a servant, that it occurred to me, that that was the very thing.

A servant! That I do most sadly, quoth I.--Because, Monsieur, said the landlord, there is a clever young fellow, who would be very proud of the honour to serve an Englishman.- But why an English one, more than any other?--They are so generous, said the landlord.- I'll be shot if this is not a livre out of my pocket.”

It’s easy here, compact, circular, carefully nurtured, customer-friendly (very friendly); cyber café-less. A tourist town though, with its West Indies bar and quotes from Hemingway, but restrained; not theme-park. The visitors are older, largely, driving through.

The bronzed quartet from Ramsgate recognize a fellow Brit with a smile – what is it that gives us away, even without the England shirt on? The four often travel in Northern France, they enjoy the food and drink. “It’s more civilized than Kent, you can stay out to eat and drink without the fights.”

How is Abbeville [the next stop] I ask.
Katie says: “It’s beautiful. We go there often, but you could try Berck as well.”
Katie’s partner has a great-great grandfather who died at the Somme.
“It was sentimental really, to start,” she says.
We return to roots, and then we just return.

“I’m on a route, I have to follow,” I say.
Her partner finally speaks: no hostage to familial emotion.
“Then it’s straight down the N1. Easy”

Everyone’s a car driver now. Or a biker.

Mystery Two: a love story via Wodehouse

But who is Valentin?

I’m in Montreuil-sur-mer looking for the hotel with the courtyard painting of Laurence Sterne, the eighteenth century English writer – one of the Godfathers of the modern novel. He came here in 1765.

I ask the guide at the Citadel: “ah, yes, and your Mr. Forster?”
Well, if E.M Forster stayed in Dover with Auden, and the Hill of Devi in India, he could manage Montreuil, I am sure.
“Mais oui.”
I am given a guide to L’hotel d’Acary de la Rivière, it is down the road and around the corner. And so it is: gated up, a museum now only in July and August.
Ok. No Laurence Sterne painting today.
Around the corner some more and there is the courtyard to the Hotel de France: Sterne, the picture, the flowers…and in the dark faded grandeur of its woody reception there is no information whatsoever about my man.

…but what about L’hotel d’Acary de la Rivière, and E.M. Forster?

I read the guide brochure to L’hotel d’Acary de la Rivière that I am given at the Citadel. What follows is a kind of Eddie Izzard translation, and a tale worthy of Laurence Sterne: in 1910 after a day of golf at La Boulie, Le Baron Eugène Fould-Springer heard an Englishman, Frank Wooster, talking about une ravissante maison in Montreuil…in 1914 they met again and the Baron asked if he’d bought it. “Hélas non,” said Frank.

Whist convalescing from “Phlebité” in 1917 the Baron said to his wife: “It’s a shame you never met the Montreuil-boy.” Because meeting Frank Wooster changed one’s outlook on life, it seemed.

Wooster contracted typhus at Gallipoli, was rushed home on the orders of George V, and then was taken prisoner at the battle of L’Yser. In 1922 he moved to Paris, and was friends with all the Fould-Springers and le Vicompte Joseph de La Goublaye de Nantois.

In 1928 everyone went to Montreuil and bought the house, L’hotel d’Acary de la Rivière. It’s not Forster, but Wooster, ah-ha. Then next year the Baron died, in Shanghai. The hotel wasn’t big enough for children and so Wooster built another house, the Chateau de Montreuil. Then he married Marie-Cecile de Springer [who I assume is the Baron’s widow, though where the “de” came from, I am not sure] in Paris, but they came home that night, to their “dreamhouse.”

They went to Canada for the Second World War. Frank died in London in 1953.

If P.G. Wodehouse had co-written written this with E.M Forster the characters would have probably told each to bally well connect. But “Fould-Springer’s End” doesn’t sound right, though “Wooster Springs To”, might just.

Instead the true lives of the Woosters and the Fould-Springers remain the second mystery of my footsteps.