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.
200 miles south and one time-zone forward. (Screen grab from Google Earth)
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.
Chateaux Josselin – our break on the journey down
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.
Our 183km route down from St Malo and 341km return to Caen – with all the Tesla superchargers currently available in Brittany marked in – showing the extraordinary serendipity ofhappening to choose a gite only a few km from one of them.
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.
Our local charging station.Exploring Google Translate over coffee with Pierre
Saint’s Day procession going past during lunch in Josselinon the journey down.
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
3,000 menhirs, purpose unexplainedDisappointingly fenced off
beaches at Carnac Plage, Larmor-Plage and L’Orient.
Larmor-PlageTable d’orientation at 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
Heart-breakingQueen Elizabeth at the centre
Perhaps that is an appropriate ending for this account of our first return to Europe after the COVID pandemic.
On last weekend’s Sunday Morning on BBC ONE, a senior member of each of the three main British political parties was interviewed in turn by Sophie Rayworth, and they all avoided mention of what are actually the most important issues of the day. It seems that it is only ordinary people like me who remain free to refer to a whole list of unmentionable Elephants in the Room
So I have compiled the following manifesto for my ‘Dream’ political party:
> Implement Proportional Representation > Give the Climate Emergency the pre-eminence it demands in every aspect of policy. > Halt coal, oil and gas extraction (in that order) and stop using public money and tax loopholes to subsidise the fossil fuel industry. > Penalise (rather than reward) irresponsible extravagances such as frequent flying, private jetting, super-yachting and joy-riding into ‘space’. > Ban fossil fuel lobbyists from Westminster and future climate conferences. > Re-join the Single Market (in accordance with repeated promises by Vote Leave prior to the Brexit referendum). > Acknowledge the democratic invalidity of the Brexit referendum result and work to re-join the EU > Reaffirm the supremacy of the Law, both national and international. > Aspire to Honesty and Integrity in public life > Outlaw ‘Cash for Influence’ and other contemporary corruptions of democracy. > Investigate and if appropriate punish corrupt procurement during the Covid pandemic and £37 thousand million (twice the cost of Crossrail) wasted on Track & Trace. > Publish the report on Russian influence in the Brexit referendum > Reform Taxation so that it no longer favours the rich and the comfortable (from the obscenely rich down to the comfortably-retired like myself.) > Review and where appropriate remove privileges for second home owners. > Rebuild public planning authorities to establish key national infrastructure, starting with an efficient, unified vehicle-charging network. > Return the NHS to public ownership and work towards abolishing the internal market. > Restore professional autonomy to individual front-line teachers, doctors, probation officers and those in similar roles. > Roll back Managerialism in public authorities. > Enshrine the BBC’s editorial freedom from future government interference > Ensure the future of Channel 4
Who would like to join me? And has anyone got a name for my dream party? How about ‘The Unmentionables’?
This is based on a letter I sent yesterday to my MP, who is a Conservative back-bencher and former Minister.
I cannot express how profoundly worried I am by the fact that Dominic Cummings is not only still in post, but still wielding extraordinary power in Westminster. I want to know what on earth this means. And I want to know what hold this deeply-sinister man had over the Prime Minister, the Attorney General, the Minister of Health, and even the Chancellor of the Exchequer, that led them to trash their moral authority, and in the case of the Attorney General her clear duty under the Separation of Powers, by making public statements on the record in defence of what was so obviously indefensible behaviour.
They tried to take us all for fools, but it did not work because we are not fools. The resulting loss of the government’s moral authority, and its abject failure to punish Cummings’ gross irresponsibility, has been the cause, not only of further national humiliation in the eyes of the world, but of an unknowable number, possibly in the tens of thousands, of coronavirus deaths which could otherwise have been avoided.
‘Move on, nothing to see here’
I know the Prime Minister wants us to ‘move on’. I know he has declared the Cummings affair ‘closed’. But that is the trouble with throwing away your moral authority – you lose the right to respect for such appeals. If it had been me that had behaved as Johnson and the others have behaved, I would in addition have lost the right to something even more precious, something beyond price, my self-respect.
But in my small life, and in the small lives of my father, and of my closest friends, that reputation for honour, for integrity, has not been thrown away. And nor has that self-respect. And that is why we do not ‘move on’. And that is why the Cummings affair is not ‘closed’.
It simply beggars belief that with our proud history of scientific, medical and governmental excellence, the UK’s, and specifically England’s, response to the coronavirus pandemic has been one of the worst, or even by some measures the worst, in the entire world.
Mr Johnson has shown himself incapable of the slightest shame or apology for his dreadful performance. But as an intensely patriotic citizen, I personally feel a deep sense of humiliation for my country. While Johnson obviously thinks apology is a sign of weakness, people worthy of admiration see it as a strength. This government has brought shame on us all and all I could say to my own MP, who had been Minister of Education under Mrs May but escaped reappointment by opposing Johnson, was to congratulate him on his good fortune in not being part of it. The current attempt to shift blame onto senior civil servants just underlines the sub-Trumpian rottenness of these third-rate people, whose only qualification for office was their unswerving commitment to the imbecile cause of Brexit.
Which brings me to my explanation for the extraordinary immunity of Cummings. There is only one issue which is sufficiently massive to explain the bizarre dominion of this ‘unelected bureaucrat’ (to use one of the Brexiters’ favourite phrases). Having been the Director of the Vote Leave campaign, he has chapter and verse on aspects of the 2016 referendum which render its result invalid and he has threatened to spill the beans if he is sacked. That would cut the ground from under the government’s sole uniting cause and place them in a wholly untenable position. Avoiding that is more important to them than anything else. Even the health of the nation and its international reputation.
The trouble with what is now almost certainly the pro-EU majority in Britain is not that they are ‘moaners’. They don’t moan enough. Too many are ‘bored’ with the whole chaotic saga and have switched off. They don’t talk about it, and they dare not think about it. Still less do they try to influence the outcome.
It is not that those who wish to remain in Europe are undemocratic. Exactly the reverse, a great many believe, however despairingly, in the democratic legitimacy of the 2016 referendum. Otherwise the cries of protest would be overwhelming. That is why it is so important to point out, as I have been doing from the start, that the way the 2016 referendum was a conducted was a travesty of democracy. Read more…
I was a young doctor. I had it in my power to help this guy. So I did.
He was a drug rep. Sitting opposite me in my consulting room. Half a century – most of a lifetime – ago. He had been waiting outside for much of my morning surgery, as reps used to in those days, hoping I would see him before I started on my paperwork and visits. As usual it had worked – me being too soft-hearted to say no and send away a fellow human being with a wasted morning. ‘There but for the grace of God’, and so on… Read more…
To Damian Hinds, MP for E Hampshire and Secretary of State for Education
9 April 2018
Dear Damian
You may remember that I never accepted the validity of the 2016 referendum. I gave my reasons in a letter to the (Alton) Herald immediately after the result and last November I added a further ten reasons in a blog post which I shared with you. Only one voice disagreed with me. This was on Twitter and when I asked the anonymous author to specify which parts of my piece they disagreed with, they said ‘all of it’, because I was a ‘remoaner’. At the other end of the intellectual spectrum the people who agreed with me included a professor at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Princeton, which is where Einstein and Gödel worked. I sent you his comment as well. Read more…
This is yet another reason why the ‘Brexit’ vote cannot be said to represent the democratic ‘will of the people’ to add to those given in the post immediately below this one.
Meanwhile, among the many messages of agreement that I have received since that November post, I quote here a particularly powerful comment, quoting Edmund Burke, from a friend who happens to be a very distinguished American academic:
“I am so glad to see you pursuing the truth and logic of this lamentable situation. There is one overarching principle that is completely misconstrued by many members of parliament. It is so evident that you do not bother to state it (taking it as a tacit given).
“Greek democracy involved the ability of a broad swath of citizens (not slaves or women) to directly vote on laws and regulations. This rapidly became untenable as populations grew and issues to be decided became almost hopelessly complex. The modern world—the UK included—has entirely replaced the direct democracy of the Greeks by representative democracy, in which a small set of legislators is deputized by an election process to make laws and decisions for the country. The technical inability of the average citizen to understand the detailed consequences of most laws, foreign relation treaties, business regulations, defense policies, … makes direct democracy an impossible form of government today.
“So instead, the UK has representative democracy. The duty of a representative was well stated by Edmund Burke:
“It ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion, high respect; their business, unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs; and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But his unbiassed opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the law and the constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”
“Forget for the moment the fact that popular referendum is an utterly inappropriate way to make a decision on so complex an issue; forget the fact that the voters were lied to and were lamentably ignorant of the likely consequences of an ‘exit’. Burke eloquently points out that the fundamental duty of a member of Commons is to decide the issue on the analysis of the likely consequences of Brexit for her/his constituents. The members of parliament who bleat ‘we must carry out the will of the people as expressed in the referendum vote and exit the EU’ and use this as the basis for their vote in Commons on Brexit are failing at a fundamental level in their moral obligation to the voters. Their voting should be determined by a rational analysis of consequences to the people they represent, regardless of how it might influence the likelihood of their being reelected, and regardless of the ‘expressed wishes’ of an uninformed electorate.”
Theresa May says the reason she is continuing to lead Britain out of the European Union is that she is “delivering on the will of the people “. This is in spite of her previous convictions, eloquently expressed two years ago, and very probably in spite of her better judgement today. The same can be said of the many MPs—including my own, Damian Hinds—who previously made up the parliamentary majority for Remain but who now claim this same justification for their altered course. Even pro-EU newspapers, the Observer for example, have declined to question the validity of the June 2016 vote as a democratic expression of the will of the people.
But I question it. I questioned it immediately after the referendum, writing a letterto our local paper pointing out that the Leave camp had secured its result
“by telling lies,
by deliberately inciting hatred and xenophobia,
by allowing its media to give an exclusively partisan account of the issues,
and by shamelessly urging voters to discount the wisdom of ‘experts’“.
For these and other reasons I said that calling the result ‘the will of the people’, would be “to say the least, disingenuous” and it would be irresponsible not to question its validity. My letter was given prominence in the Alton Herald and a great many people, not just in the town, went out of their way to thank me for it and tell me how strongly they agreed with me.
Since then nothing has happened to raise the slightest doubt in my mind about the points that I made. On the contrary, some have been strongly reinforced. To give one example, deep in a long Spectator article describing how the referendum was won, the director of Vote Leave, Dominic Cummings, asked himself the question “Would we have won without £350m/NHS?” and replied ” All our research and the close result strongly suggests No“.
How to celebrate the 10th anniversary of our twinning with the town of Pertuis, Provence, way down there in the glorious south of France? And return the compliment of their having named a major roundabout
(circle in American, Rond-Point in French)after us, showing the genuine warmth of their appreciation of the link with Alton.
Well, by a sheer stroke of serendipity, there was a second bird, as one might say, just waiting to be killed with this stone. Because, by a curious historical anomaly, Alton has for some years rejoiced in the possession of two parallel roads both called Whitedown Lane. That’s more Whitedown Lanes, you must agree, than any town strictly needs.
OS map showing too many Whitedown Lanes
And, by a further happy chance, one of these two Whitedown Lanes was completely devoid of houses, so that nobody would have to change their postal address were it to be renamed – obviously a no no if it had been otherwise.
So, the responsible authorities swiftly agreed the proposal, new road signs were ordered and erected, Google (if not as yet the OS) updated their map,
Pertuis Avenue on the (Google) map
and the unveiling of the new road sign was arranged for the Saturday morning of the Anniversary visit by two dozen of our friends from Provence – the 22nd October. Just over a week ago.
First thing that morning I loaded the car with potted greenery and set off to join Don in decorating the sign, leaving Lesley to finish breakfast with our two French house guests
Not quite the breakfast Ramond and Simone gave us in Pertuis last year
and then take them to the Mayor’s reception in the Town Hall.
Nearly ready for the unveiling
It is an amusing thought that Altonians will have as much difficulty pronouncing Pertuis Avenue as Pertuisians presumably have with Rond-Point d’Alton.
But less amusingly, while I was bending to plant the flags you see on the left of this picture, a bag of rubbish thrown from a passing car bounced off my shoulder. Which interested me, because the marksman either showed astonishingly quick reactions coming round the corner, or, much more probably, took the trouble to get his driver to turn round and come past again for the sole purpose of expressing his (I assume his) xenophobic venom. Which suggests a level of calculated malice sufficient to raise an appreciative editorial eyebrow at the Dailies Mail or Express. Indeed, should either of these publications wish to award a prize, the till receipt from the Petersfield MacDonalds which the lobber thoughtfully enclosed in his grubby bundle might help them in tracking him down. (Funny that – Petersfield says more ‘Telegraph’ to me, but ‘Daily’, just the same.)
I had these thoughts during the hour I spent guarding (yes, in these Brexit times it did seem to be necessary) the site,
while Don, in his capacity as Twinning Association Chairman, joined the meeting in the Town Hall.
Passers-by, hearing why I was grumpy, fell over themselves to cheer me up – “Here – let me take the rubbish so that you can forget about it” “That sounds wonderful, I was just setting off for Dartmoor but I love France and I’ll stay for the ceremony” (She did, plus her dog) “Can I get you a cup of tea?” To which – “How very kind of you, but there isn’t a loo…”
The happy Ceremony
That afternoon, in the town, was endlessly heart-warming. Everyone seemed to know about the Anniversary visit. Walking with our guests around King’s Pond, we introduced them at random to a lady with two children feeding the ducks near us and found that she was an enthusiast for twinning, and that her son was corresponding, through school, with a contact in Pertuis. And the little son who was with her, probably no more than five, had learned a few words of French and exchanged them, in an utterly charming scene, with our visitors.
Happy faces at the dinner at the end of the weekend
On the way back from leaving Simon and Raymond at their coach on Monday morning, I stopped to photograph the three flags flying on the Alton War Memorial flag poles, a symbol of our better selves, and of hope for the future.
Does the panel agree with Michael Gove that we’ve had enough of experts?
That was the question I submitted in advance for the EU referendum debate in Alton Assembly Rooms this Monday evening. Unfortunately it was left to the very end – in fact five minutes after the very end (timed for the England/Slovenia match) – and the panel were asked to give it a one-word answer.
I had been hoping for more than that.
I had chosen my question, after much thought, specifically to Read more…
Generally Speaking 