Tracing Departures

The sunset was lazily running itself down to its inevitable conclusion, it’s only remainder a smug golden reddish glow somewhere over in the unfamiliar spread of French suburbia. After half an evening of nonsense talk stimulated by cheap supermarket wine and even cheaper food, we caught a dose of boldness and decided to leave the prim, functional hotel.

We’d arrived in Dijon after a week paying hasty homage to the great capitals of Western Europe. At this point it was impossible to say whether the van reeked of accumulated high culture or socks teetering on the fourth day of service. Our expectations were minimal, our concentration spans eroded by brief, earnest forays by day through crowded art galleries followed by long nights stretched over anonymous European motorway.

It’s strange how an afterthought can be the most vivid, like a signature at the end of a rambling letter. The only evidence of any planning was the greasy imprint of an index finger on a tattered map while a few rubbish jokes about the town “cutting the mustard” gave the idea some credibility.

These loose preliminaries had already grown cold in our memories as we shuffled through the intricate winding streets flecked with cathedrals and random outbursts of medieval splendour. We passed clusters of animated men jabbing their fingers at one another, perched outside cafes in squares that looked picturesque to the point of absurdity. The Phillipe Le Bon tower loomed dark and moody in the middle distance and seemed to watch our tired, uninformed group with benign contempt. Night, by this point, had overtaken and swamped the sunset. The hotel wine seemed a long time ago- it was cold and we resolved to find a drink, perhaps of the sweet local blackcurrant Kir liqueur recommended in the kitschy 70’s guidebook we’d borrowed from the hotel.

Some familiar music drifted out of a bar tucked into the corner of the next monument laden square we chanced upon. It was strummed on an enthusiastically tuneless acoustic guitar by a lank looking teenage boy- a faintly generic British indie song from the mid 2000’s, the type that you hear played at 2.58am on Wednesday nights at understaffed student unions across the breadth of Europe. Usually it would be a point for laughter, yet it seemed too odd here, on this evening, at the end of this trip. We turned away from the music and wordlessly our footsteps agreed on the path back to the hotel, back through the noise and the long cathedral shadows.