Saintes – weddings

In the 80s when I lived in London I went on a day trip to Calais with people from work. Some went shopping. The group I joined went straight to a restaurant, ate a big meal and went back to the boat.

Today we went to Saintes, forty five minutes by train inland from Châtelaillon, with our friends the Local Government Honcho and the Professor who have come to stay. I thought of that trip to Calais because we spent much of our time in Saintes eating an unexpected excellent meal at an Italian restaurant called insieme. Tomatoes and mozzarella; spaghetti with mussels; icecream in a sour cherry sauce with pastry objects whose name I can’t remember filled with limoncello. We drank an apply rosé (Infinito Santi) and some limoncello.

Though it deserves to be, Saintes seems not to be a tourist town. The couple at the table next to us – they left while we were feasting –  reappeared later out of the house door opposite. A big advert at a bus stop assured a boulangerie’s customers that it would stay open all summer, opening at all its usual hours.

Unlike that trip to Calais feasting was not all we did. We also looked at Roman things. On the walk in from the railway station we looked at the arch of Germanicus

and other Roman items. I feel that the tourist office could market a 3D jigsaw offering a prize for who makes the most convincing set of arches and columns from the pieces of stone available.

It is not obvious that the present arrangements would win.

After our lunch in the old town we walked to the Roman amphitheatre. Different sources said it could seat 12, 15, 17 or 18 000 people. This can be compared to AFC Wimbledon’s ground at Plough Lane which has a capacity of 9 000.

My photos of the amphitheatre are no good. They are too small. So I can only plead with you to believe that when you are there you can imagine the arena full and the shouting. If you are near, go.

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Wedding clothes are visibly wedding clothes, even if you only see one person wearing them. We spotted several weddings in Saintes today.

Though it was a Saturday I thought of the song by Amadou and Mariam. Le dimanche à Bamako, c’est le jour des mariages. Sunday in Bamako is the day of weddings.

La Rochelle

Our friend the Aussie came to stay with us in our holiday house at Châtelaillon. Luckily it was a weekend when the Ashes weren’t on, and anyway he is an Anglo-Belgo-Australian and not too interested in cricket.*

We played the wargame De Bellis Antiquitatis on our kitchen table, giving me practice for a tournament in Nottingham next month. The Aussie won six games to my four.

One day we went on the train to La Rochelle, the nearest big town. We looked, at the old port, at a statue of admiral Guy-Victor Duperré, who defeated the British “many times” during the Napoleonic wars,

on the ramparts, at a sculpture by Bruce Krebs, “from generation to generation”, in which each person is reading a book formed from the head of the person who came before them,

and, above the “La concurrence” beach, at a memorial to the resistance and free French forces of the second world war.

Looking out over the beach, at the Yole de Chris, the Aussie gave Travelling Companion and I a fine lunch.

He and I ate Girardeau oysters. The waitress, looking at the scraps I’d left in the shells, asked me if I hadn’t liked them.

At the other end of the meal I had cheese. With it the waitress disapprovingly brought me a glass of bordeaux. She felt that with cheese I should drink burgundy.

For coffee we walked up along the linear park where the ramparts used to be to the café de la Paix on place de Verdun. Georges Simenon used to go there when he lived in La Rochelle in the thirties, continuing to come into town when he moved out to Nieul. The café put in a ring, perhaps this one,

for him to hitch his horse to.

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* From my tone you might thing that I am a fervent cricket follower of long standing. It’s not true. It’s just that since we moved back to England I’ve been to three cricket matches and am now ensnared.

Brother-in-law and I were at Lord’s earlier this month when the Australians stumped an English batsman in an unsporting way; the crowd turned instantly from a cricket crowd into a football one; and England’s captain Ben Stokes seemed to say Let’s get them in sixes, it’s the only option now, and almost succeeded.

I like the extra structure cricket has compared to football. I like how every ball can lead to a wicket or a boundary. I like the athleticism of the fielders. And I like trying to work out, from how they position their fielders, as a novice, what the bowling side are trying to achieve.

SW13 to Charente-Maritime – suite (in France) et fin

Our channel crossing by taxi went fine, though we sat in the taxi for three and a quarter hours while travelling 50 km.

Calais-Fréthun, where we had more than an hour to wait for our train to Paris, is not quite a gare des betteraves (beetfield station). There was a village to whose boulangerie I could walk.

It flew the flags of France, the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands and, as far as I could tell, the Isle of Man. For lunch on the train I bought excellent cheese salad sandwiches (emmental and brie), a strawberry tart (tarte aux fraises)  in the crumbly sweet pastry for which we love France, and a crème brulée that dripped on my trousers and left a stiff residue. From a book display in the shop I could have bought Ma soeur, serial killeuse.

The new railway tracks of Calais-Fréthun are not particularly near the new station building. With Dog and our big bags we got to the platform in time, going down up down in successive lifts.

In Paris we missed our train to La Rochelle because there were roadworks and because one of the two lifts at gare Montparnasse was out of order and the other was full of slow people. We could have still have caught it, though, if I’d taken the time, as we came into Paris, to realise that our meeting point with the dog taxi driver needed clearing up (when he said he’d be in front of the Casse-croûte I thought he meant there’d be a snack bar with that name, in fact he meant the Burger King, which he  was calling a casse-croûte because he was not willing to call it a restaurant); because I didn’t think that he might need to be paid in cash; and because we didn’t think of charging up the stairs at Montparnasse, bags in straining hand, instead of waiting for the lift.

Luckily Travelling Companion could get us new tickets on the next train. In early evening sun the countryside looked good .

Unluckily the zip on my rucksack broke as we got off the TGV at La Rochelle. Luckily only a jar of apple compote and a couple of pieces of paper fell onto the track.

Train people ran up to tell me not to try to get these things back. Of course not I said. But if it had been my laptop. Or if it had been the map of the Mediterranean on which for months I have been plotting the movements of Nelson and Bonaparte’s fleets in 1798. Can I be sure I would not have needed the train people to stop me being stupid then?

Luckily there is a local train from La Rochelle to Châtelaillon at 8.30, which there never used to be. At Aytré you can see the sea from the train.

Now we’re here in  Châtelaillon. The journey took fourteen hours – not so much more than the ten or twelve it takes normally. In Market street people were dancing to a brass band. At home, Dog ran around the house and garden for an hour or so and now is sleeping.

By train and taxi, from SW13 to Charente-Maritime

Ferns in the bath to keep them moist while we’re away

Travelling Companion and I are lucky: we have a holiday house in Châtelaillon-Plage. It’s the place that is the furthest you can get down the west coast of France from Brussels, where we used to live, by train after work on a Friday night. We’re heading there today for our summer holiday.

You can get to Châtelaillon from London by fast trains. Eurostar to Paris, TGV to La Rochelle, local train from there. But not if you want to take Dog – Eurostar doesn’t accept them. Ferry companies do, but only if you go by car. (The exceptions to this rule are Harwich-Hook of Holland, far to the north,. and Newhaven-Dieppe, which gets you to France too late to travel on to Châtelaillon the same day.) So we are hiring a taxi in Folkestone in order to sit in it on the shuttle through the Channel tunnel to Calais Fréthun railway station. It is lucky we love Dog as we do because otherwise it would be cheaper to get a new Dog on the other side.

Getting the bags out the front door I let her escape into the street. The taxi we’d booked in London was twenty minutes late. In both cases it helped that the streets were quiet at six in the morning.

Travelling Companion lured Dog back with food, and we didn’t miss our Folkestone train at St Pancras. There a Eurostar waited on the next platform, taunting us from behind a fence.

I’m writing at 7.30 from the Folkestone train. I’ll let you know how we get on with the rest of the journey.