Thank you everyone who took the time to comment or email - I will do my best not to sound too pompous, though I'll struggle. Anyway I'm back in Paris now, after nearly a week camping in the forest of Fontainebleau in a trip in which so much went wrong it became a parody of itself, like some sort of bouldering version of The Ascent of Rum Doodle. Because I've been in the woods for a week, there are blogs queuing up to be written and they'll all just have to be written now...
You wait for about a year
And as soon as one approaches your stop
Two or three others appear.
I'm getting ahead of myself. I became so concerned with how to begin the blog, the opening lines, I gave little thought to the real beginning of the story and how I got here (not in the birds and the bees sense, it's not a biology lesson). It is traditional to trace the beginnings of a journey far back beyond the actual events, looking for causes and traces as far back as they can be found. But we live a conditioned existence and, short of tracing this back to some time in the pre-Cambrian, it is probably best to start simply and begin from the beginning as it was.
Stuck in a traffic jam. The wrong side of the Kessock bridge, with less than ten minutes before the bus left. We made it, of course, but I'm beginning to suspect the timbre of the journey was set right there, in those fifteen minutes before the first bus.
I took the bus from Inverness (near enough home) to Edinburgh and train from there to London. I spent two days in London, drinking fine, but reasonably priced, wine and sitting on the tube. Sometimes simultaneously. I was there to see friends and with friends in London, long journeys on the tube and the consumption of wine are guaranteed. It was a good two days with many highlights, but if you are down there, I must recommend an exhibition I saw - Life Before Death - a brilliant photographic study of those who are nearing death. If you want me to go on about it, I will, but I'll spare you the faux art criticism for the moment. It's brutal and beautiful all at once. Go see it.
From London was the fateful bus journey. The dicing with death on the road to Portsmouth before facing three days of having my ass kicked at various Wii Sports (most notably bowling) by a six year old. At least I could beat him at golf, but that was mainly because he seemed to think the higher the score the better.
I had a wonderful three days in Portsmouth, before taking the ferry to Cherbourg. I had really been looking forward to the ferry journey. I love the sea and the chance to get out into the open, feel the breeze, hear the calling of the Herring gulls and imagine you are sailing to some 'distant Ophir'. Ferry journeys are always my favourite way to travel, perhaps evoking even more distant memories of living in Orkney or sating some ancestral need to get away from it all.
This one, however, failed to satisfy. A tiny deck outside provided little space and no breeze. The Channel lay flat and greasy below our too-smart high-speed ferry. Not a single gull trailed in our wake and even the tankers we passed were moored listlessly in the mist, awaiting who knows what. I gave up eventually, falling for the lure of a spectacularly uncomfortable window seat in the restaurant, and fell asleep.
Cherbourg on a drizzly Sunday night proved little better. There were three of us in the hostel, all British. I was happy to leave for Paris the next morning.
