Author: chrisadmin

Ah yes.  This was a long one: 147km in two long stretches.  Looking back at the gpx record I see that I didn’t get away until 10.00 and I didn’t arrive in the next of the B&Bs in Blois until 19.40.  I honestly have NO idea how google maps and I managed to make the departure go so obviously well:

That is sensational isn’t it?  “Why don’t we just hop over to the roundabout, across it and straight off towards Orléans? We’ve go a long way to go today and we know we need to get a move on if we’re going to make it to Compostella.”  “Oh no, let’s go off in completely the opposite direction and then go on a loop, with a couple of side stabs for the sheer hell of it, before returning to almost exactly where we started and heading off.”  To be fair, I think it actually started with a very convincing combination of google and a road sign both saying that that first “L” was the right way to go.

Not a good start.  Then there was a long run from Chartres to Orléans on a fairly busy and not very attractive N road, the N154 by the look of it.  I remember cars, vans and artics coming past at speed.  I can also remember that kept up pretty much the longest, fastest stretch of cycling that I managed in the whole trip.  It wasn’t pleasant but it was pretty flat, the road surface was good, is suspect there was a bit of a tail wind or tailish cross wind and I can certainly remember thinking “Wow, I’m holding a faster speed than I manage to and from work [those were the days] in London despite the weight.  Feels good.  Will it last?”  That means I was rattling along at 27-30kph which I think wasn’t bad at all.

I had a late lunch in Orléans right next to the cathedral.  It’s a funny late gothic edifice with very strange (to my mind) towers with what look like circular temples on the top.

I’ve seen it, albeit briefly, before and remembered being underwhelmed.  This time, with a nice lunch glowing in me and a buzz from the distance I’d covered, I gave myself a while to look at it again and really liked it.  But enough of that now or I’ll never get to sleep.  As you can see from that ‘photo, it was quite a cool, cloud covered day that kept threatening to rain but never actually did.  I think that had helped the speed as there was no danger of overheating.

I set off along the cycle route on the south side of the Loire that would, in principle, take me all the way to Blois.  At first it was lovely.  Lots of other cyclists, mostly I would say, locals only going a short distance and often with children.

I managed to overtake him pretty soon after taking the ‘photo!  His parents were behind me and that was the rather lovely modern bridge to the west of Blois that takes you over and then you pick up the cycle route off to the right.

And you start seeing these:

And for a while everything is nicely signposted and grand.  Though actually, on a road bike, some of it isn’t easy going, very rough track.  One odd thing about this stretch was that I realised that I was exactly retracing a route we’d done as a family a year or so earlier on two hired tandems.  It was funny just how precisely some bits of the route, and even the individual trees and houses, came back.

Cycling was harder now and quite suddenly, the signs on the “voie verte” stopped … I think I wasn’t concentrating enough and missed one sign and took a while to realise it as it seemed I was following the obvious route.

I don’t know if you can see it but I am sure the voie verte takes a right just in the top right hand corner and ends up running right along the river bank there.  You can see a little stub at the point at which I had realised I was off the route and then that lovely straight bit along what was a pretty deserted local road, only for google to tell me, when the bridge over the Loire I needed must have been all but in sight, that I should hang that left to get to Blois. At first it was plausible and very straight but gradally that spike deteriorated into a dirt track that felt increasingly dangerous for anything but a mountain bike … so back I went, and was led literally into a farm yard and a complete cul de sac with quite literally no way out, and finally, with me deciding to guess where the river was from the sun (honestly) I made it back to the bridge.

Over to the north bank of the Loire and still a long hack into Blois:

I was exhausted when I made it to the latest B&B, another of the industrial chain of them that were proving convenient to book, but, as you can see again, tended to be on the edges of towns.  I was so tired that I opted not to cycle about 1km back up the road to the nearest cafe/bar for a drink and a last intake of food.  I just ate up what I suspect was the last of the Canterbury chocolate and some other iron rations (nuts I think) and collapsed into the bed.  I was frustrated by the diversions but proud and relieved that I was a 147km, further, well probably about 100km as the crow flies and I’d really enjoyed Orléans cathedral and quite a lot of the voie verte.

And, by some serendipity, I have just found the perfect quote:

“I think [the Merry-Go-Round] is a very good way of travelling if you don’t want to go anywhere … Especially if you have plenty of marmalade sandwiches to keep you going.”

It had been a bit of merry-go-round, but it was still proving a very good way of travelling, and Paddington Bear was right about the principle that you need a lot of food, though I found French patisserie much better than marmalade sandwiches.  How did Paddington end his stories?  I was looking for “and that was another good day” but that’s not popping out of google.  Hey ho, neither are PhD dissertations about heat related illness and death on the Haj!

This is going to be really short as there are only seven minutes of the day left and I’ve been working pretty much straight through since 08.00 so it’s time for bed!

Under “Days” on the pelerinage web site last year I wrote:

” First blog post appeared!  And some photos, still incomplete.”

I spent the 9th of August last year in Chartres, left most of my baggage in the room in my B&B and cycled into the town centre, spent hours in the cathedral and a fair bit of time in the two other lovely churches.  I failed to work out which building I’d rough slept in summer 1975 or ’76 when I’d hitch-hiked to Chartres.  It had been under construction and provided a hard bed but dryness and somewhere I felt fairly safe.  That was the only time in my life I did that sort of real roughing it.  Oddly it was the only time in my life that I’ve been offered both drugs and prostitution.  I guess I had hair down to my shoulder blades back then and probably an “Indian headband” I’d plaited of leather strips.  I would have looked  exactly what I was: an 18 or 19 year old wishing he was a hippy but knowing really that he was a decade or so late and probably also way too conventional and timid at heart.  Two men not much older than me approached in the gardens behind the east end of the cathedral one evening and said I could sleep with their sister and that they had drugs, all for small fees.  I was completely stunned and clearly said “non merci!” sufficiently clearly, and I suspect looked not worth mugging, so we parted company quickly.

I was reminded of that about 18 months ago when two patients in the group I was running compared notes.  One, who had had a long period of taking every illegal psychoactive substance she could but had been clean for years asked how it was that the minute she stepped off a plane in another country, someone offered her drugs.  Another, of similar age but who had never taken anything, commented that she wondered why it was that no-one ever offered her anything.  It was one of those good moments in group therapy when a comparison of experiences comes from the heart and spins into useful discussions that pull in more of the group.  In that case some of the discussion was about drugs but much more about how we are seen by others and how little we know of what we see in each other or of what others see.  A good group becomes a safe place, at the best of times, in groups that have got to that place, it becomes the safest place any of the members have ever had, in which to compare experiences and share how each sees herself or himself and how each sees others in the group and outside it.

I do miss that sometimes.  I miss the good group days, which can only ever happen when people themselves wanted and helped create the safety, that I had brought things to the mix that had helped the group be that sort of a place. Of course, there were also days when you couldn’t make it like that and there were some days when all you could do was try to limit the damage when lifetime bitter hurts collided and amplified: like a nuclear reactor going critical.

Today’s work has been all at a keyboard: going through two different draft papers and loads of Emails.  I’ve had a lot of interesting experiences over the last 60 years!

Today in London was not a day to have been out on a bike, or really to have been out at all so it wasn’t that bad to be locked to the keyboard.  It has poured with rain much of the day.  Hard to belief Chartres was glowing with sun and warmth a year ago.

OK enough.  If the blogging thing amuses you, do click through to that “First blog post“. Alternatively, if you haven’t seen them before, you might want to go to those “some photos“, which are still “still incomplete”!

OK, to sleep, perchance to dream … I suspect so, with all these odd memories bouncing around.  Question is, will I remember the dreams?

… today in 2017 has been mostly a day of Emails some of them personal and a pleasure to do, but others, in the personal/work overlap, less so.  It’s also been another grey, cool day mostly, frankly cold at times.  On balance, not really a day to remember.

The 8th of August 2016 was very different.  With some real relief I had set off from that campsite and managed to navigate the treacherous gravel and the potholed track back towards Giverny without more disasters. There did appear to be nowhere to eat or get anything to eat in the little village on the way back and so I trekked on, through Giverny to the nearest moderate sized town: Vernons. That was pleasant, with an interesting church and a good patisserie and well stocked little supermarket.  I remember stocking up with food and drink for what I knew would be a long cycle ahead as I really wanted to make it to Chartres, about 90km away still.  It was a more overcast day than I’d been having, I even thought it might rain, but that meant it was warm but cooler than it had been the previous couple of days and good for cycling a fair way.  Loaded up and ready for the challenge I set off briskly from Vernons with both my stomach and the bike well supplied for a long ride ahead.

And this was where Google maps really pulled out all the stops.  It sent me into a complete disaster of a dead end, up some tracks that deteriorated gradually from nice tarmaced walking/cycling track, to something that essentially ran out in woodland.  I could hear a road nearby and pushed Toto-to-be up what became a terrifyingly steep bank. There came a horrible point about three quarters of the way up when I thought that a fall backwards could really hurt both bike and me and by which the ground had deteriorated under me so that just standing still to catch breath while holding the bike with the load on it had become seriously hard and accompanied with an ominous sliding away of the earth beneath wheels and, much more seriously, beneath feet.

I did make it over the top with huge relief only to find that the audible main road was a dual carriageway on the other side of a field … and on the other side of formidably high and barbed wire topped fencing that seemed to stretch for ever in either direction.  Very, very bad moment.

I managed to find a slightly less steep way back down and retraced my steps.  Here, mapped out in all its horror, is the map of the last bit of the detour.

I lie this has none of the real horror of the earthy bank.  If you bring the full power of your imagination to bear, I think you can see in that loop at the bottom, me climbing the bank, getting to the top and into the field (I think it has or had been used as go kart track, hence those dotted tracks), and looking across to to the now visible dual carriageway behind it’s fencing.  If your imagination adds some foul language and near tears it’s not exaggerating but in your mind’s eye, following the loop of those yellow arrows to the right, you can see me tracking through the field with a now almost audibly grumpy Toto-to-be sulking under my tired hands, as we looked for a safer way back down. You can see the sharp little turn where we eventually found an easier route down, and you can see us retracing our steps.

By now Toto-to-be was absolutely not impressed with the whole madness of this trip and I could tell there were mutinous mutterings like “Should have got a damn mountaing bike … and probably some crampons and climbing rope.  Dunno what a quality road bike like me is doing in this squalor.”

Not only does the map lie in failing to convey any of the true contour line horror it should, it also shows my tracks crossing over the dual carriageway on a bridge.  Hence those of you who have been visualising all this, rejoining in the pain and terror of it all, might well be thinking that going over that bridge might of warned me that the audible road noise wasn’t going to work out well as a destination.

Well the map lies as that apparent bridge was a long and very dark tunnel and that point the trees were thick and I’d had no sense that what was above the bridge was a road, I remember having thought that it was a railway line, though I don’t know why I thought that.

If I zoom back out you can see the whole damn detour.

The tracks change colour from yellow to purple as for some minutes I turned the Garmin off there and sat, pretty disconsolately on a wall at the side of the road.  I sat and savoured my nettle stings, scratches and a few mosquito bites from that detour through the woods and rather mechanically ate something and psychologically licked my wounds knowing that I had lost well over an hour in all that and was now going to be very hard pushed to make it to Chartres and certainly couldn’t afford any more detours.

This pair of ‘photos from the sad retracing of my yellow path above shows the quality of the farm track shortly after the tunnel.

Oh boy!  Ah well!  My will to cycle came back slowly as I chewed, and the day went on much better thereafter.

That, very appropriately purple, track was from the nightmare-in-the-woods to Dreux.  It really was a purple patch.  The day warmed up without being too hot, it didn’t rain, there were no more seductions and that route was pretty OK I think, though I confess I don’t remember it well at all and have no ‘photos to refresh my memory as ‘photo stops were now out of the question.  By Dreux I’d done about 80km and it was late afternoon with 40 km still to go to Chartres and I was decidedly tired. However, I found another supermarket, all the food from Vernons now having long gone.  I downed some immediately and, breaking my usual rule, put away a can of beer as I felt I needed analgesia and any psychological lift I could get.  I couldn’t see any promising stopping points between Dreux and Chartres but the way looked pretty straight so I booked myself into a B&B in Chartres and, after this stop (below!), I set off as that green track above shows.

Ah, you’re wondering about that orange thing pointing skywards there?  It’s a spork: a plastic combination spoon and fork with a serrated edge to the fork end which does fair duty as a knife too.  Except when I had really tough meat or cheese the spork conquered most things.  For the really tough stuff out came the all powerful Swiss army penknife I’d been given as a leaving present about ten days earlier.  I wouldn’t do such a trip without either tool!

I digress, reliving the recharging ten minutes or so there in Dreux.  And refueled, off I went on the final green stretch.

So the whole day ended up looking like this:

For what it’s worth, the colour coding there is my speed.  I think you can see just how slow the detour was, slow patches on some of the hills between Vernons and Dreux, and my exhausted crawl through Chartres at the end of the day.  The very cheap, rather horrid sort of mass B&B I’d booked into, the same chain as the one I’d used in Calais, of course turned out to be right on the ring road roundabout on the far side of Chartres!  I think it was gone nine in the evening when I got there and I do remember that the place itself was well hidden again.  I started to think the chain was taking a perverse glee in hiding from its guests.  It turned out to be entirely hidden behind a bigger, somewhat more upmarket competitor which had proper staffing, not just a code you put in on the door.  Fortunately the upmarket competitor’s night staff weren’t taking perverse glee in sending people astray and directed round the back yard of their own place to my box.

However, by then I was surfing a rather odd mix of tiredness, perhaps the can of lager, of having emerged from the nightmare-in-the-woodlands after Vernons, and the sheer joy of having had a wide, well tarmaced road almost to myself for most of that ruler straight green stretch between Dreux and Chartres.  There had been a wonderful moment on that ruler straight bit of and having seen one of my true pelerinage objectives come into sight against the sunset an hour or so earlier:

I know it’s a terrible shot, but that was my view, having crested one of the very slight inclines on that glorious cyclists’ road. That dark mark on the sun is Chartres cathedral standing proud and calling me on.  126km at the end of the day and I awarded myself a rest day the next day as I knew I needed at least one day in Chartres.  It has the largest, finest expanse of medieval stained glass in the world, in its cathedral. But which few know and perhaps fewer still go to see, it also has the third largest expanse of the same, in a church down the hill from the cathedral.  You can’t just whip round that lot in an hour or two and head onwards.

Oh boy, two very different days.  Returning to it really brings back some of the worst and some of the best of the trip.

And today in 2017 in London has been a very cold, grey day, finishing with some rain.  In more personal terms it’s been mostly work on a fascinating paper I’m co-writing with two colleagues from former iron curtain countries.  The paper looks at psychometric data from one particular former communist country, Albania, comparing it with data from the same questionnaire also in non-clinical samples from Germany and the USA.  Albania had spectacularly awful and dictatorial communist era under Enver Hoxha, and its earlier history included nearly 500 years of Ottoman occupation to 1911 and then a 20th Century history which, even by Balkan standards, was spectacularly troubled.  It’s a fun paper to co-write but challenging: what rights do I have, with my personally priviledged history, and my country’s pretty priviledged history, to want to put a slightly different spin on some things my colleagues write from their own and their families’ and friends’ personal experiences?  (Oh, it’s one of the many countries in the world where the UK’s historical rôle was pretty grim and slimey.  One magnificent exception being the extraordinary Edith Durham (1863-1944) who is so famous there my colleague went to school at the Edith Durham school in Tirana.)  One interesting challenge is that it’s one of those papers where perhaps we all three care a bit too much and that can make it hard to write in a way that will be acceptable for an academic journal.  We’re getting there.

That’s all very different from what I was doing a year ago!

A year ago it was another beautiful sunny day and I got up and explored the cathedral at Beauvais.  I thought I had seen it before but I really don’t think I had.  It is a very odd shape as it’s essentially unfinished and a mix of gloriously ambitious middle to late gothic with some very plain earlier bits.  The sun was so strong many of my ‘photos were burned or flared out and I did question my decision to leave a good camera at home and rely on my ‘phone camera.  Some of the shots are OK but again I’ll try to find a way to do them more justice than just pasting some in here. The interior of the cathedral had a number of absolutely massive wooden internal bracing constructions clearly trying to prevent potentially catastrophic structural failure.

With some difficulty I eventually tore myself away and pointed Toto-to-be southwards aiming for Giverny and thinking I could see the Monet collection there.  This was not a good day cycling as it was a day when Google maps really messed me around.  I look at the GPX trail with its spikes of completely wasted cycling and remember ending up in a completely impassable farm field and, less well, some other lost kilometers and time.  I got to Giverny to find that this time there really was no room at the inn, though it took some time to establish that.  I don’t really understand how a hotel can be unsure whether it’s got room or not but that was what I hit: twice!

Eventually I realised I had two options: to cycle some way in one direction to the nearest camp site, or a similar distance in the other direction where there might be hotel or B&B space.  The camp site got dialled first and had space so, very tired now, with a good 75km already done on a hot day, and not yet really used to this rhythm, the warmth, the weight on the bike etc., I set off to find it.

Of course, that involved a couple more Google maps detours I really could have done without.  Then to cap that, the final few km. to the campsite were on a very potholed rough road where my ‘phone bounced off the bike without me realising it until a good kilometer later.  Fortunately I found it by retracing my steps.  Then the final bit of road to the camp site was absolutely lethal gravel track on which I managed to put the bike over when I failed to control a skid.  Why the skid you ask?  Just from turning a very slight angle to avoid a pothole.  I arrived very, very tired and a bit grazed to find the only really unfriendly and pretty horrid camp site of the trip, and to be told they no longer had any food on site, not what it had said on Google, and that I would probably have to go right back to Giverny to get anything.  Running that gravel gauntlet twice to do that: no way!

Oh and in all that, I hadn’t had time to see the Monet.  I promised myself I would come back another time, stay in the nice looking hotel near it, and savour it all at leisure.  I went off to sleep easily despite a grumbling stomach: physical tiredness does really help with any insomniac challenges.  Wow, two days a year apart with great satisfactions but also significant challenges but so, so different!  Oh boy, I have been a lucky man really.  Onward!

 

… and today (in 2017) started with me using up a few hours sleuthing WordPress plugins that handle maps.  Despite trying several, including one that clearly gets used by thousands of people to embed active maps from Google maps with routes and the locations of photos on them I hit only blanks.

Literally blanks: no damn luck at all, the place where the map should have been in yesterday’s post remained determinedly blank, varying only in whether it had a border round it or not, whatever I tried.  To add insult to injury, nothing even produced useful error messages and my attempts to follow debugging instructions on the web led nowhere.  Ah well, when I finally put that aside, (I hate to be beaten by an IT challenge) I did manage to finish my marking commitments, marking the near end of my relationship with Roehampton University, and I did get started on a final redraft of a paper. Meanwhile the England vs. South Africa test match commentary provided a bit of auditory background … which I’d never have listened to cycling in France or Spain!  And now here I am, trying to connect with last year.

6/8/16 started with me packing up the tent and a short cycle along the Somme into the centre of Amiens to find the cathedral.  Many years ago, probably 1979, I had cycled with my then girlfriend from Amiens round a necklace of gothic cathedrals that surroud Paris.  I think we had taken a train to Amiens and then cycled from there to Noyon, Soissons, Laon and Rheims before getting a train back to London.  That trip had had many glorious times and was some of the inspiration for this trip so it was a bit of a personal history marker to return to Amiens cathedral and one shock was how poorly I remembered it.  That was despite having visited it at least once more over the intervening years.  The last time was about 23 years ago.

There were things that came back and remembering that it is a glorious pile was undoubtedly right.  I could paste in lots of ‘photos here as I must have spent quite a few hours in the cathedral just doing the gawping, ‘phone camera pointing, tourist thing.  That had my own personal overlay of trying to remember my earlier visits.  However, I’m not going to do that today as I was a bit shocked yesterday by how bad the ‘photos I pasted in here looked so I want to do a bit more work on yet another aspect of WordPress technology so I can get things in formats that do their subjects more justice.  The system I used to start the photos section of the pelerinage web site last year worked OK though all I got to mount there back then was my (large) collection of ‘photos of Chartres. What I used for that allowed anyone browsing to see bigger copies of the ‘photos, but that system won’t embed here in blog posts.  More sleuthing to do.  No wonder I didn’t get the site or the blog anywhere near where I wanted it to be while I was also doing each day’s cycling, ho hum, and also coping with finding working internet and later with the malfunctioning keyboard! Interesting how much technology there is to sort out to do this travel blogging game well.

One technological trick I have learned in the last few days is to copy manually the latitude and longitude from the EXIF data in a ‘photo and paste that into Google maps. Something like this “49 42 34.2N 2 10 18.0E” works without the °, ‘ and ” units, which saves time.  That trick confirmed that this:

was lunch taken right next to the cathedral in Amiens and the EXIF data also told me that it was taken at 13.23.  That was leaving most of the day’s 70km still to do with nowhere booked to stay in Beauvais, camp site or other, assuming I made it there.  I think that explains that I have only two ‘photos from the journey in between.  Both are of a nice enough little church in the little town of Monsures.

It was a sunny day again: blue skies with lots of cumulus and light winds both making sure I didn’t fry.  I don’t remember the journey that well.  I think it was a day of frustration with my failure to get technology to do what I wanted, not unlike today.  Back then I was rueing not having better ways to find a good cycling route ahead.  I thought, I think rightly with hindsight, that I spent a lot of time failing to find the best ways to avoid (a) horrible busy roads with too many lorries going fast, (b) unnecessary detours and (c) unnecessary climbing.  The route I took doesn’t look too mad when I look at it in a GPX editor now but I think some of the road surfaces were pretty poor as I found myself unable to judge road quality from Google maps colour coding (you can’t: it’s hopeless) and also pretty poor at working out compromises between crows-flight directness versus rolling up and down the hills too much.

By the time I made into Beauvais it was pushing 19.00 and I found no camp site and that most cheap hotels I called or visited were full.  I was quite relieved when I think my fourth option turned out to have a very small room, with use of shared shower and loo on the landing.  The colour scheme was quite something.

However, Toto-to-be was happy enough locked up there on the ground floor below me, I think to that radiator.  I too was happy and hugely relieved to have somewhere to sleep for myself.  I went out to find a meal and got a beautiful one in the restaurant d’antan.  Hm, Google maps seems to have that as “Le palais bleu” with only ancient reviews, one of which says it had been renamed “Le palais d’antan”.  It was upmarket for me but they seemed unphased by a single diner in a clean but crumpled tee shirt and lycra cycling shorts.  It was just beside the cathedral, the food was beautiful and I was amused to be in somewhere “d’antan” as one of my mother’s long time favourite poems is the “Ballade des dames du temps jadis” or ballad of the ladies of times gone by (blame me for that approximation).  Here, from wikipedia it is:

Dictes moy où, n’en quel pays, Est Flora, la belle Romaine ; Archipiada, né Thaïs, Qui fut sa cousine germaine; Echo, parlant quand bruyt on maine Dessus rivière ou sus estan, Qui beauté eut trop plus qu’humaine? Mais où sont les neiges d’antan! Où est la très sage Heloïs, Pour qui fut chastré et puis moyne Pierre Esbaillart à Sainct-Denys? Pour son amour eut cest essoyne. Semblablement, où est la royne Qui commanda que Buridan Fust jetté en ung sac en Seine? Mais où sont les neiges d’antan! La royne Blanche comme ung lys, Qui chantoit à voix de sereine; Berthe au grand pied, Bietris, Allys; Harembourges qui tint le Mayne, Et Jehanne, la bonne Lorraine, Qu’Anglois bruslerent à Rouen; Où sont-ilz, Vierge souveraine ? Mais où sont les neiges d’antan! Prince, n’enquerez de sepmaine Où elles sont, ne de cest an, Qu’à ce refrain ne vous remaine: Mais où sont les neiges d’antan!

Tell me where, in which country Is Flora, the beautiful Roman; Archipiada (Alcibiades?), born Thaïs Who was her first cousin; Echo, speaking when one makes noise Over river or on pond, Who had a beauty too much more than human? Oh, where are the snows of yesteryear! Where is the very wise Heloise, For whom was castrated, and then (made) a monk, Pierre Esbaillart (Abelard) in Saint-Denis? For his love he suffered this sentence. Similarly, where is the Queen (Marguerite de Bourgogne) Who ordered that Buridan Were thrown in a sack into the Seine? Oh, where are the snows of yesteryear! The queen Blanche (white) as a lily (Blanche de Castille) Who sang with a Siren’s voice; Bertha of the Big Foot, Beatrix, Aelis; Erembourge who ruled over the Maine, And Joan (Joan of Arc), the good (woman from) Lorraine Whom the English burned in Rouen; Where are they, oh sovereign Virgin? Oh, where are the snows of yesteryear! Prince, do not ask me in the whole week Where they are – neither in this whole year, Lest I bring you back to this refrain: Oh, where are the snows of yesteryear!

See  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballade_des_dames_du_temps_jadis.  As it appears to have been written about 1461 I think no copyright issues are going to catch me up.

Mum has long used the refrain of “Mais où sont les neiges d’antan!” as a somewhat self-mocking plaint when she is nostalgic for times long gone.  She’s not alone in having loved the poem: have a look at the frankly stunning list of references to it, particularly to that refrain, in the wikipedia page.  Who collects these pearls to throw before internet skimming swine such as myself, capitalising on their work?! Well, hooray for them, it doesn’t beat cycling, but a quick tour of wikipedia rarely fails both to inform me and delight me.

On that note, and through it, encouraged to go on wrestling with technology tomorrow, I will stop for another night.  It’s a funny thing a virtual pilgrimage!

 

I am not sure if this is going to work, let’s see.  Day four was Montreuil to Amiens and I’m just going to paste in ‘photos from the day and see if my newly installed WordPress plugin will map them.  Montreuil is a lovely walled medieval town.  I’d checked into what was to be one of my more upmarket hotels just to the left out of shot if you follow the road in the shot below.  This gives a nice flavour of the town.

And this is the best external profile of the Abbey de St. Saulve.

And this is the worst: great, squat defensive monastic architecture but you can almost hear the building saying “you won’t use that shot in the promotional material will you, it’s not my best side”!

The inside is beautiful with lots of the early medieval stone carving that I love.  Here’s the roof of the nave.

And here’s just one of the capitals.  Definitely my sort of architectural art.

Hm, I must learn how to align ‘photos in posts.  I’m not so wild about saints’ tibias in silver settings but in case you go for that sort of thing, here it is.

And then Toto and I were off, first across huge fields with their modern wind turbine crops as well as the evidence that they still produce more conventional harvests.  There was a definite but easy cross wind on warm day that seemed just right for me and the turbines which were turning at a good steady rate.

And here’s the then unnamed Toto and the Garmin which was recording the route we took.  (I have no idea why I took this then):

And then I was again, as with the Great Stour, following a river slowly pulling nearer to Amiens and seeing lovely sights along the way.  That started, pretty well immediately I hit the river, with this rather grand ruined house.

And then this barge.  I imagine they would have been an important mode of bulk transportation well into the 20th Century.

Then there was this memorial to WWII.  The inscription says that it’s a propellor from a Lancaster (“ND 689 KMO”) and that it crashed on the 20th of May 1944 and “emerged”, I assume was dredged up from the river, on the 12th of September 1998.  I don’t know if the implication is that the thing below is a bomb from the plane.

And this was the earliest hydro-electric power station I’ve ever seen.  The battered sign was full of information.  It started generating electricity for the neighbouring town in 1903 and supplied another one from 1912 and was only decommissioned in 1974.

And finally, quite tired by then, I made it to Amiens town campsite where the pitches had their own power and water.

And a bit later I got a lovely sunset, not well caught by this but it’ll do.

And is this the map?

[wpgmza id="1"]

Ouch. That really, really didn’t work did it?!   In fact, it’s a pretty fine example of how things in WordPress can sometimes go very, very wrong.  Apart from just having a rather odd looking bit of code that is supposed to generate the map, it actually all looks reasonable in the editor.

OK.  I’ve got some more sleuthing to do but in the present day I must stop!

It really is quite an odd feeling revisiting such a once in a lifetime adventure a year on.  As with the adventure itself, it’s proving quite unpredictable: both lovely and a bit unsettling.

Day three a year ago was Calais to Montreuil and the first full day out of the UK.  It was quite a challenge with cool to cold headwinds and a constant roll up and down of little hills as I first headed off down the minor roads near the coast.  By late morning I decided there were no real gains in terms of views, as the sea was out of sight to my right, and I opted to turn sharply inland before hooking back onto a more major but still unthreatening road south.  I think this was the day that I started to be aware that I was going to need quite a lot of food (though the perhaps the pound shop chocolate was really the first acknowledgement of that).  That was a bit of a challenge as I had been more oriented to thinking of losing weight, or trying to avoid gaining it, for a few years by then.

I can remember two grub stops, one at a large hypermarket in the middle of nowhere where I stocked up with food, and the other in a tiny hamlet whose name I’d lost.  However, coming to 2017 and by the technlogical miracle that GPS in my ‘phone stamped the EXIF data in my ‘photos with latitude and longitude, and the complementary miracle that I can just type those into Google maps and, hey presto, I find that the lovely little church which persuaded me to stop and munch some more was at Le Wast

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another nice trick means I can just paste that information in here so you can look at the location on Google maps if that appeals to you. I can see I am going to have to do some more sleuthing to get better at handling these images and going back to mapping things.

But what about today?   I think I can’t do this revisiting to the exclusion of the present day and perhaps I really need to bounce back and forward between last year and this to start to link the two into a more coordinated and fertile meld.  It helps that today was a bit of a pilgrimage day and it involved a bit of cycling too though only a 19.8km round trip from home to the British Museum.

This was another of my trips with my daughter.  I had persuaded her that she really should see the amazing exhibition of Hokusai’s work before it finishes Sunday week (13/8/17).  This was my visit and each time I’ve been it been absolutely packed, you crawl around in a long queue moving very, very slowly as everyone, or pretty much everyone, is locked into the amazing prints and paintings.  It’s that packed despite access for non-members, who are paying quite a lot (£12) to get in, being rationed to keep it from being unbearable.  It makes having paid for family membership at the BM a joy as we can just walk in and join the tail of the queue.

I’m not sure I’ve ever found myself getting round an exhibition so slowly, and in such a millipede of fellow gawpers.  Oddly it brings back memories from young teenage years in the very same museum going to the famous Tutankhamun exhibition (hm, bit of sleuthing: 1972, so I was 15).

I had warned daughter of the queue and she’d worried that she might kill someone as, like me, she doesn’t like people in her personal space nor being constrained by a crowd in what she can do.  I probably shouldn’t have worried but I was relieved that she was completely engrossed.  I guess we found ourselves talking about probably over 80% of the exhibits as we went around, mostly alongside each other.  Hokusai has a very high and sacred position in my odd pantheon of humans who have fundamentally changed my way of seeing and experiencing the world and its possibilities.  I think, perhaps hence the recollection of Tutankhamun, that probably goes back to around that time, perhaps earlier.  I know I went to a Ukiyoe exhibition (BM again I’m pretty sure) with my father at some point in my teens or student years, but I think that was bit later.

This huge exhibition seemed very well curated to me and I learned a lot I hadn’t known about my hero.  One thing was how often he had changed his name, ending up with Gakyo Rojin: “old man, crazy to paint” (and daughter suggests I should now be dubbed “old man, crazy to cycle”!)  I also learned for the first time just how deeply his particular Buddhist faith had influenced him and that a part of it was, or became, a deep belief that all things, animate and inanimate, have a spiritual meaning and connectedness. I wonder if something of that has always communicated to me from his works.  As I did a lot on the ride a year ago, I am pondering exactly what that means to me but boy it does hit a chord for me.  That’s something I was able to immerse myself in on the ride last year but something I find harder to touch and hold in the pressures and mundane artificialities that so easily become my life day to day when I don’t grasp opportunities as we did today.

If you can, and can bear the queue and have some hours in London between now and Sunday week: I’d recommend the exhibition.  Ouch, sold out: if you can afford it, buying BM membership will get you in, I honestly think it would be worth the money but clearly I’m hopelessly enamoured of Hokusai and his work.  If that’s not on, I can also recommend pointing a bike towards Santiago de Compostella, or any other reasonably distant, transcendent, target, or starting to plan that.  Electric bikes are fine by the way!

Wow, I have just looked over the “pelerinage” site, at my ‘photos and my route tracking and realised just how little I mounted.  OK, work to be done!

Hm, ain’t that always the way?  One very important part of the ride was stepping out of that framework and being able to say either “No there isn’t!” or “Yes there is: just turn the pedals and keep Toto heading roughly south!”.  To be honest, I never entirely stopped thinking there was work other than pedalling to be done.  Right from day one I was telling myself there was a site and blog to create/write (and how little of that I achieved!)  From about day three I continued to answer many work related Emails. That was a bit easier than it might have been as I no longer had a clinical Email address.  Assuming that the Out-of-Office message I had set the week before before dashing across the road to my leaving do (see One year on and where am I?!) worked, then that told people I had left and referred them to sensible others.  Other Email addresses I had also had OoO messages saying I was off on this pilgrimage, not working, and that I was unlikely to answer Emails.  In fact, I answered a fair few.  I think I helped finish at least one grant application and worked on some paper submissions.  I’d be quite amused to look at the sent folder for the period to see what I did do.

But day two was a new world.  I had had my first night in my little tent with food and beer, and tiredness and satisfaction, despite some set backs, perhaps because of some set backs, all helping me sleep.  I know I slept very well.  I woke feeling great, a bit to my surprise and I was amused to rise easily to an early alarm (while my ‘phone still had some battery).  I remember padding across wet grass in bare feet with a towel wrapped round my waist to shower and scrub my teeth.  I remember admiring the fixed teepees in the camp site and saying a warm good morning to some others, then I packed the tent up, which proved fairly easy, another relief, and off I went.

I remember the run in into Canterbury went through a lovely long phase following the river, “The Great Stour” I see is its proper name.  It’s great in aesthetic terms but in volume, width, grandeur, that’s a faintly strange name as it’s not a very big river at all.  Perhaps my scales are a bit distorted by living a few miles from the Thames!  As ever when you follow a mature river you are sweeping a fairly direct but generally sweeping set of curves as it meanders along and across its near flat flood plain, and that was certainly the case with the Great Stour.  I hoped to see kingfishers but didn’t, but there was a heron and the sun was out and the a true sky blue with lots of very white cumulus and not threatening any rain at all.  The Constable paintings of the cathedral came to mind long before I got a sight of the steeple.

Then the wonders of the cathedral.  I think I have seen it before but I struggle to think when.  Perhaps I really hadn’t.  Some things felt familiar, mostly the exterior and I really do wonder if that was from paintings and ‘photos.  It was truly glorious: it’s a town in itself really as so many of the great medieval cathedrals are with their accretions of buildings sort of flanking them and creating a barrier territory between the gloriously sacred and the boondocks around where the laity lived and working.  There’s a buffer or border zone of dwellings and offices for monks, nuns or others with sacred offices.  For me it was absolutely crowned by seeing that the cathedral had a nesting pair of peregrines on the main steeple.  My new binoculars, bought specially for the trip, came into play for the first time for them and all the gargoyles and other features up on high, inside and out.

In the town I managed to find a cheap pair of glasses to replace my expensive ones which had chosen, not for the first time, to snap with zero provocation somewhere on the downs the day before.  I had picked them up to read the map on the tablet and one of the arms had simply broken off in my hand, seemingly mocking me with the challenge of balancing them on my great big nose and just one of my big flappy ears if I wanted to be able to read anything.  Clearly planning to make the journey all the more interesting.  I was greatly amused and felt a rather vengeful satisfaction that two pounds bought their replacement (in a “pound shop” as I remember it: something nominally or arithmetically awry there but I wasn’t complaining!)  I think that was somewhere between 1 and 2% of the cost of the ones those were replacing!  I also stocked up with chocolate there (also more than a pound but absurdly cheap).  Then, despite a real urge to stay and soak up the cathedral until it went dark, I headed off for Dover.

Coming into the docks in Dover I joined another cyclist, probably a year or two older than me and more in denim/cotton than lycra.  He turned out to be Dutch and finishing a six week solitary camping and cycling trip around the UK which had been great apparently, though it had rained every single day!  He was impressive but made me feel a bit feeble.  He had a hub dynamo, like me, but also a solar panel on his bike and he said that he’d needed both to keep his old ‘phone working.  He said that the solar panel had worked usefully despite the grey weather.  As by now I had used up most of the power in my various batteries and discovered that he was quite right that the dynamo hub alone wasn’t going to charge everything, I took note.

And that really came back to bite me in Calais that evening as it went dark and Google maps first led me miles, OK, kilometres, away from my hotel, which was really very near the dock … and then in quick succession the tablet, computer and ‘phone all gave up on me. That left me exercising my very poor French asking for a hotel, way away from it, in by now a rather cold, dank, late evening.  It was clear that the trip was going to have its ups and downs!  I found it in the end and the big bouncer on the door let me despite the pre-paid automatic entry system failing.

I must stop.  I’ll add some of the ‘photos tomorrow.  Always work to be done eh?!

I hope this is going to be an interesting adventure to revisit the ride, day by day, one year on.

One immediate shock looking back at the blog was to realise that I didn’t actually manage to start it until I was over the border into Spain.  Some things fade with the vagaries of memory, others feel very clear. I’ve always had what seem to very different storage for different sensory modes and experiences, so some visual experiences seem to store and be recallable with great clarity, though not always to be recallable to order, and it can be odd what prompts assist recall.  Since the ride I’ve had this phenomenon of “positive anti-traumatic flashbacks”.  I think I’ve had them much of my adult life but perhaps been too busy or active with other things to notice.  What happens is that I’ll get a flashback image of something, almost always good, though sometimes it’ll be of a more difficult time, a slog up the mountain of O Cebrero heading into the cloud with gearing too high for my legs and the load.  Oddly, it happens mostly if I’m doing different, boring exercise (the last five or more years I’ve tried to do some exercise daily: anything to keep fit enough to do more long rides).

By contrast, remembering names was never my strong suit and has become much worse in recent years and I think it’s related to that, and my very different storage systems for the visual as opposed to the written, that I really had forgotten that the site stuttered into existence early(ish) in the ride, but that the blog was so much later.

Enough navel gazing!  What do I remember?  Well certainly a lot of excitement but also a definite frisson of anxiety as I headed out the door and onto the South London roads.  I know it had taken me hours longer than planned for me to feel that I had everything I really needed properly aboard Toto … who wasn’t Toto back then.  Even then I was pretty sure some of the deliberations about what I really needed, about what was unnecessary weight and what was vital, were probably more about putting off the precise moment of departure than any make or break decisions. I remember well that it was a damp day, not unlike today, though it never poured as it did here this evening.

Off I went and gradually hit a good enough rhythm.  However, there were some early warning fights with Google maps.  I remember a spectacular one where she took me into a tiny dead end off a side street above a bit of motorway (M25?) or a very busy dual carriage way.  That was particularly surreal though fairly easy to resolve with a bit of common sense.  I remember a bit of panic in the early evening as I realised I had no chance of making it to Canterbury, let alone doing the cathedral and getting on the ferry and away.  (That had gone as a realistic prospect by the time I belatedly left home in all honesty.)

I did a bit of a dog’s hind leg off the sensible route to Canterbury in order to find a camp site that had space.  I remember that the owner seemed grumpy and unwelcoming but his daughter was compensatorily friendly. The site had no mains power so my ‘phone, garmin and tablet were doomed to die on me the next day.  The site was up a nasty, steep little hill from the pub which was the only option to find now rather badly needed calories.  I know that the food was very much “UK pub so-so” but it was meat and two veg and a couple of beers so it ticked carbohydrates, fats and protein and certainly ticked calories.  Probably even ticked precautionary analgesia though not, I suspect, many vitamins.

The publican, his wife the cook, and the student who was doing her holiday job there behind the bar were all friendly and a relief compared to some rather smug, public school sounding teenagers (including some Americans?) who seemed to be doing some falconry related training near by who left mid evening.  I remember good chats with both the publican and student: about their pasts and their plans for the future.  By now I am sure he must have moved on to a different pub (in Ryde?), much more where he’d always want to be, as I remember it.  I think he had the purchase of that pub (tenancy?) and the sale of the one we were in fixed.  She wasn’t sure where she was going but was clear that that village location, where she’d lived for some years before going to university, wasn’t a long term option, now she had seen the lights of the city.  Where was she at university?  Lost that.  She was reading psychology at least as part of her degree and was interested to hear a bit about clinical work.

Funny what you remember and what you don’t.  Or let’s be honest, that should be, “funny what I remember and what I don’t”.

Enough.  Oddly both reassuring, but also a bit disturbing, to resurrect this.  Tomorrow was another day, if you see what I mean, and it was warmer and … but that’s for tomorrow!

The last month or so brought an enriching new experience into my life, and guess what: it involved cycling!

What’s been interesting about this though is that it’s been a sort of vicarious experience, and the vicarious bit has been scary and sobering: seeing London cycling through another’s eyes.

This all started when my 23 year old daughter decided that she really should start cycling everywhere she reasonably can in London.  She’s back home and entering the final year of a four year degree at University College London (UCL), about 11km from home by bike.  She’s always been a stalwart user of public transport and passionately politically aware, socialist and particularly focused on gender, sexuality and disability equity issues.  I think she’s always sympathised with one of my arguments for cycling here in London: that my doing it frees one more space on London’s often horrifically overcrowded public transport for others who don’t have the choice to cycle.  However, until now she has said it seemed too dangerous and unattractive.

I’m not sure what changed her mind, perhaps her younger brother cycling quite a bit in London, though his cycling is almost all just around where we live.  Maybe him cycling pretty much everywhere he needs to when he’s at university up in Glasgow changed things.  I know it was partly that it was a way to get steps onto her fitbit and get around town while saving herself money!

Anyway, she asked if I’d lead her on some of the main trips she could do. We worked out that could take over the bike I’d had in Nottingham when my weeks were split between there and here and it, as luck would have it, it turns out that she likes it and that it can fit her pretty well.

So I’ve been sort of learning to cycle in London for a second time.  However, this time through the eyes of a very fit, risk and conflict averse, 23 year old, not a battered 60 year old who has been cycling most places he could for much of his life, certainly for most of the last 50 years.  It’s been an interesting experience as it has really brought home to me how desperately unfriendly to cycling London still is, and just how bizarrely incoherent much of the cycling provision has been.

One example is the cycle track on the Vauxhall Bridge Road to the north of the river.  This is one of the genuinely protected bits of cycle track in London.  That’s to say that there’s a kerb between the cycle track and the road. That’s great in principle as it’s so much safer than sharing the road with motor traffic.  This particular track is also “contraflow”: the track is two way to one side of the road so if you’re cycling north here, as we were, you are on the right hand side of the road with the motor traffic going the opposite way just across that kerbing on your left.  (International readers remember that in the UK we ride/drive on the left hand side of the road, the opposite side to most of the rest of the world).  I don’t much like contraflow cycle lanes as they almost always involve a point where you have to stop and cross the motor traffic and you’re usually waiting some time to be given permission to do that.  Because of this, though it’s been there for a couple of years, I’ve always stuck to the usual road going north on this route, eschewing the cycle track.  However, with my daughter’s safety in mind, I took the cycle track this time and we bowled along toward Victoria … and suddenly, with what seemed to both of us almost no warning, the track stopped.  There was a turning to the right up a side street, definitely not where we wanted to go, and the alternative was to haul on the brakes, shuffle up to the pedestrian crossing and hit the button and wait for that to stop the traffic on the main road and give us a chance to cross that and regain our northbound journey, now with no cycle track or protection at all.

Going the other way on that cycle track you have another daftness: the irritation of being stopped for minutes at at least two crossroads with minor side roads.  Cycling in the cycle lane you’re forced to wait when cars, and you had you chosen to eschew the cycle lane, could zoom on with the full priority of the main road.  Why so?  Because the road planners have correctly decided to protect cyclists from one of the principle killers of our kind: the “left hook without looking properly” death blow.  Great!  I love it when planners look after my hide.  I love it infinitely more, if the mathematical/obsessional among you will forgive the hyperbole, when they protect my daughter’s life.  However, why should cyclists wait minutes at each junction to stay safe?  It’s the same in the cycle lane on Blackfriar’s Road going north, another road I know well.  I’m losing minutes of my life every time I take these routes.

(I know, I know, I should slow down, be less impatient, get a life … and yet sometimes you really are in a hurry and, hey, the same can be said to the car and lorry drivers: if they just looked before hooking left in a hurry no-one would die and we wouldn’t need this daftness.  And while you’re on at me with this “slow down, get a life” stuff, yes, I notice that I lied there: we would all still die but not from the famous hook left, motor vehicle squashes human flesh, death blow.)

There is a very simple answer, far, far better in the long run than these infuriating lights that hold cyclists back for minutes while almost no motor vehicle actually does turn left around us: give onward traffic automatic priority even if that onward traffic happens to be a bicycle on your inside.  That doesn’t stop idiots hanging a left too fast, without looking and hence squashing and killing us, but it makes it far, far harder for them to get away without being charged with anything less than causing manslaughter by careless driving and, in the long run, it would change priorities and thinking.  All it takes is a small change in the law, one other countries have already adopted, see https://www.britishcycling.org.uk/campaigning/article/20170627-campaigning-news-Highway-Code-rule-changes-could-cut-traffic-queues-by-almost-half-0.

Now that brings me to my wider pondering: this really is an issue that kills people. I won’t put the factual links here but just remember two junctions I used to cycle across regularly on the way to my old job: Bank and the huge one on Whitechapel High Street by the Aldgate East tube station.  Within months of each other, both junctions gained photocopied pages in those A4 plastic wallets with photos of heart rendingly lively, smiling young women who died there cycling.   It took weeks before, in the harsh way of human adaptation, the lights might stop me there and me not feel nauseous thinking of the numbers of their family members and friends who had lost so much. Aye there’s the rub: it’s not for me I really fear, or rather it is: it’s my fear of my losing my daughter, my son, my wife (if she decides to cycle more), a friend, a colleague.

So poor provision for cycling in London kills and regularly, and the evidence that we can make it safer is there.  Certainly London with its pre-20th Century roads (and the largely awful, motor traffic oriented 20th Century ones that were cut into it) poses challenges but they’re not insuperable.  The evidence that increasing cycling makes everyone who cycles leaner, fitter, happier is strong. It’s clear it would free up public transport for others who can’t.  It’s crystal clear that it would reduce carbon emissions and global climate change, not to mention reducing other pollution.  So our politicians and civil servants will be getting on and fixing this, yes?

Well, yes, a little, and yes, I do thank you all for that.  Oh but so much of it, as I’ve been seeing through younger, less innured eyes, has been done oh so badly.  Now that’s because to do things well, you really have to change the way people think, not just do quick, and often flagrantly the cheapest, things.  To do things well needs real thought, experience, experimenting, and yes, it costs money, though still a fraction of what you will go on spending on motor traffic provision.  If you don’t know about doing it well you really have to assume that others (probably in the Netherlands, Denmark and some other countries) do know how to do it, and you have to go and learn from them.   Have a look at:

https://waronthemotorist.wordpress.com/2017/07/30/lambeth-bridge-shows-us-that-tfl-still-needs-a-fundamental-shift-in-design-philosophy/amp/

(Wow, that’s the second huge URL in this now rather long post.  I plead that it does warn you what you’re in for, and the whole post isn’t that much longer than the URL, … OK, I lied about that, it’s about an old fashioned page of A4 I’d guess, but it’s shorter than this post!)

Somewhere between every week and every month I get alerted to a “public consultation” like the one he’s referring to in that post.  I think I probably average over a hour a week digesting the plans, looking at the options, and replying.  I’d looked at that one already and given up trying to give detailed criticism as it seemed almost hopeless.  I was relieved to see that someone who clearly knows far more than I do about accumulated, collective experience on these things, had had exactly the reaction I had had: “great, real commitment … but wait a minute, this is rubbish!”

How do we get things to change?  Despite my obsession with cycling, I’m not really talking about cycling provision here, it’s just an exemplar, one of hundreds, of how collectively, but perhaps particularly in the UK and US at the moment, we seem to be making terrible decisions and failing to think things out slowly and carefully, and failing to think for the far distant future.  Another example of how we are abusing future generations, like this daughter of mine, who is continuing, courageously, to cycle, and beyond her, to the centuries and generations to come? How can we start making decisions that will leave them a less damaged world, fewer unnecessarily dead people, fewer bitter, bereft relatives, some real hope?

Answers on postcard … or, if you’re impressively 21st Century, you can sign up and leave comments!