A Gîte in Brittany

It was never my intention that this should be a travel blog, but I’ve only written one post since our trip up the length of the Outer Hebrides this May and now we are in Brittany and I have things I would like to say.

It’s not that there hasn’t been a lot going on and, potentially, to write about; more a question of being overwhelmed by the seriousness of those events, at home and in the world, and the fact that they are written about so copiously already.

Travelogues are safe, fun, provide a useful record for me, and possibly provide interest and entertainment for others – or even, it would be nice to think, useful information. After all, my daily posts from our Golden Wedding anniversary trip up the West Coast of North America were by far the most ‘liked’ pages in this entire blog, and the recent Hebridean ones are not that far behind.

The contemporary assaults on objective truth, public morality, and climate science, just for starters, are infinitely more important, and I will probably have another shot at making a contribution some time when I have the strength/inspiration. But for the moment, let’s stick to recreation, and my and my wife’s incredible good fortune in having such opportunities open to us.

So, as I start this piece, we are here in South Brittany, France. Bretagne to the French, hence Grande Bretagne, hence GB or ‘Great Britain’, which therefore has nothing to do with boasting about ‘greatness’, much as Last Night of the Proms flag-wavers might imagine, it is more that when the Normans arrived, a thousand years ago, and brought with them their language, the new Britain was bigger than the Bretagne they came from. (Not that it is bigger than France, needless to say; in that case it is the other way round.)

So here we are, in our little gîte. Gîtes, by the way, are privately-rented holiday cottages situated all over France. Long pre-dating AirB&B and the internet, they are typically quite basic conversions of old farm buildings in rural situations.

We are here for a week, with an overnight Channel crossing at each end. That gives us a whole day each way for a leisurely drive to and from where we are, near the south coast of Brittany.

Portsmouth is the obvious port of departure for us being barely an hour from home, and coming over to St Malo and returning from Caen works better with the ferry timetable. The 180 km (112 miles) down from St Malo would have taken 2½ hours if we hadn’t stopped to see Josselin with its fine Chateau and have a simple but delicious menu unique (three courses – no choice) lunch. And the 340 km (210 miles) back to Caen should take us about 5 hours on Friday if we don’t break. Which of course we will.

Overnight ferry

Last Friday’s crossing to St Malo on Brittany Ferries’ Bretagne was very much part of the holiday, with a meal in the a la carte restaurant – the lavish hors d-oeuvre and dessert courses laid out on the buffet bracketing a refined saddle of lamb main. Unfailingly courteous service completed the thoroughly-French experience.

The tiny en-suite shower/toilet in our cabin was beautifully designed with the kind of simple controls that made you wonder why all showers are not done like that. I slept soundly in my top bunk, lulled by the hum of the engines and the gentle rock of the ship, until 4:30am (3:30 English time) when a sleepy voice from below me called out “Somebody’s singing…” And indeed, for the first time I can ever remember, one of my dreams seemed to have burst into the outside world:

I had been lying – shirtless for some reason – on the floor of a rustic pub. Where I had been delivering a vital message to an old man – it involved running across a field with a gloriously bounding gait I have not enjoyed for years. I had been listening to a man singing in a corner who ended on a particularly deep and resonant closing note.

So, still in my dream, I decided to join in. I tried out a few croaky La la la‘s from my position on the floor, but eventually found the confidence to launch into one of my old favourites – Guiseppe Sarti’s Lungi dal Caro Bene. As I got into the song and upped the volume a bit, a party of revellers ceased their revelling and turned to listen – with, I sensed, a wild surmise. Progressively emboldened, I rose slowly to my feet, and as the song approached its climax, stepped towards the centre of the floor, into the beam of what seemed to be a spotlight shining from the ceiling ahead, letting fly the final phrase with more passion and sheer oomph than I have commanded for many years. It is, after all, a most passionate song – Far from my love I languish…bathing in a sea of tears.

Gorgeous stuff.

Fortunately Lesley went straight back to sleep after her gentle complaint, and after I had successfully negotiated the little bunk ladder to the cabin floor and back again after the usual night-time visit (thinking better, just in time, of trying the ladder facing out), I followed her back to sleep, filled with a wonderful elation.

The holiday had begun.

Driving on French roads

Apart from driving on the right, which I have done many times, you might say everything seemed to have become more curated in comparison to previous years . White lines, barriers between carriageways, sculptured islands leading you into and out of the numerous mini roundabouts, speed limits everywhere (strictly enforced, one is warned) – all this and more shepherds and controls you along the silky-smooth and pothole-free roads.

And now I must once again extoll the virtues of the Tesla, previously described during our Hebridean trip. By this car just as much as by the French roads, you are guided like a child. The sat. nav. is superb, displaying on the huge central screen – thanks to the ‘premium connectivity’ for which we pay around £10 a month we get a full-colour, zoomable image of the surroundings we are passing through. Points of interest near the route can be touched on the screen and details and perhaps a website will pop up. Then, if a particular place or attraction takes your fancy you can immediately reroute to see it, or you can ask the car (verbally if you prefer) to suggest a supermarket, or a car park, or whatever, and if you decide to go for it you are immediately shown the best way to get there.

The car beeps to warn you if it thinks you are straying out of lane (which is rather annoying and I can’t turn it off) and it does a pretty good but not infallible job of displaying the speed limit currently in force – all in kph because I chose a simple control panel option to change from mph as we left the ferry at St Malo. Cruise control defaults automatically to that limit, or in my case (another choice) 3kph above it. While we are here in France we have chosen to have a voice call out all the directions as we go along. When we miss a turn the gentle, well-spoken lady betrays not the slightest impatience or censure, even if her prescribed correction is astonishingly lengthy and convoluted, as it was at one major junction on the way.

Overall, the experience of motoring along and finding your way in hushed, gearless serenity, with effortless power instantly available, feels incredibly cossetted. I simply don’t know how we ever used to manage in the old days without these aids. Compared with memories of trundling for hours along the empty roads of Europe in our family VW minibus when I was a boy, it all seems strangely unreal and disconnected. But while everything has been made so very easy, at the same time ‘progress’ has added layers of official control on top of what used to be self-sufficiency and autonomy.

Charging – and some conversations

Brittany is much bigger than we were imagining, in spite of being only a small part of France. We had been far too casual when planning the holiday in assuming the charging network would serve our needs and it was incredibly fortunate that when we finally decided to check, we found that one of the very few installations in Brittany was just a few km down the road from our gite. We topped up there three times in the week, including the 100% charge ready for the journey home, and the whole experience could have been very different if we had not been so lucky.

But charging there threw up one of the happiest moments of the trip: it was the first morning after our arrival and we were sitting reading our books in the shady charging station as the range clicked up when I noticed that the blue Model 3 that had pulled into the adjacent bay seemed to be having trouble connecting up. So I eventually got out and made ‘do you want any help?’ gestures.

Indeed he did – for reasons I never established (as he had had his Tesla for some time, charging at home, but must have managed the 500km from Paris somehow) he was trying to decide which of the two leads to use and was looking on the point of giving up. So I lifted the CCS lead out of his stall, plugged it into his car, and pointed at his charging light until it started flashing green. Bingo.

Pierre (my new friend) spoke a little more English than my rudimentary French and after we had established that I had a brother called Peter (=Pierre!), and, for that matter, a Father called John (‘no no, long dead’ – I drew an ’80’ in the air, prodded my chest, and said ‘Novembre’. He responded with an ’82’. At which point I called Lesley, who stopped reading, got out, and joined in with her much better French, and Pierre pointed to the anonymous building next to us, indicated it was a hotel with a café and insisted on taking us there for coffee. And so we spent a happy half hour there before the battery was full.

Conversations turned out to be highlights of the trip. We found all the French people we encountered, without exception, heartwarmingly friendly, but our first such conversation was actually in English with a lone cyclist from Aberystwith who happened to be on the lunch table next to us at lunch on the way down in Josselin.

Then there was an elegant lady manning an exhibition of photographs in a lovely public garden in Avranche who told me that my being English made her very happy because she was having weekly English lessons. She was thoroughly conversant with Google Translate and used it skilfully when we got into difficulties – another piece of tech which has transformed the practicalities of communication abroad.

The Gite

Our little cottage was fairly basic, with a dearth of comfy chairs apart from a two-seater sofa. But everything worked, including the hot water and the simple shower, and the thick stone walls kept it beautifully cool on hot days. There was a garden (with ponies) shared with the other gite on the site, with table tennis, badminton equipment and Frisbees laid on, and we had our own little private courtyard for al fresco meals. Everyone friendly and helpful and all very peaceful, very French and quite delightful. Worlds away from the expanses of confluent modern development nearer the coast.

Here are some pictures:

Exploring

We had a drive out each day, visiting the Alignments of Carnac

beaches at Carnac Plage, Larmor-Plage and L’Orient.

We went to the Port Louis Citadel on a day when the National Maritime Museum was closed, but the outdoor memorial to the 60+ Resistance prisoners murdered there in 1944 by the departing Nazis made us wonder again at the way France and Europe have somehow healed the ruptures of that terrible war.

Another day we went north along empty, wooded roads

to the ornate 15C church of Kernascléden with its celebrated frescoes.

Our favourite church was the one at nearby Calan, where we (or usually Lesley) went to get fresh croissants for our breakfast, Originally 11C, it had this superbly-tiled and impossibly slender spire.

And we walked marked footpaths in the nearby Foret de Trémelin

Coming home

The week was gone very quickly and it felt a surprisingly long drive home with heavy traffic and finishing with a rush hour crawl around Caen.

We arrived in Ouistreham with plenty of time. So we walked to the great stretch of D Day’s ‘Sword Beach’ with its memorial to the gathering on the 60th anniversary, 6th June 2014 of 25 heads of state and 900 veterans.

It was heartbreaking to see our Queen depicted at the centre of the heads of state and these words of Winston Churchill engraved on the stone:

“Men will be proud to say I am a European We hope to see a Europe where men of every country will think as much of being a European as belonging to their native land. We hope that wherever they go in the European continent, they will truly feel. here, I am at home” 7 mai 1948
Winston Churchill, 1er ministre Grande Bretagne

Perhaps that is an appropriate ending for this account of our first return to Europe after the COVID pandemic.

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