Disgressed

Yesterday I finally saw someone actually drinking one of those small cans of gin and tonic on the train.

A while back, someone decided that small cans of gin and tonic (there are vodka, whisky and I think tequila equivalents too, but I believe it’s the G&T that leads the way) would be just the thing to sell to commuters. You can see the reasoning. Long tough day at the office, grab your first G&T at the station and your relaxing evening starts early. It does seem to me that there are a number of flaws in the concept though.

First, it’s not going to taste right, is it? A G&T is not particularly difficult to synthesise, but of course they’re bound to use horrid fake lemon flavour, and put unwanted chemicals in. You won’t be able to get it the strength you prefer, and the gentle clink of ice cubes is out of the question when you’re swigging from the tiny hole of a miniature can.

Second, the ambience. If we were all sitting in large first-class seats, preferably with no-one opposite, we might be able to kid ourselves that this was similar to relaxing at home. But in fact, if you get a seat at all, it’s a dirty uncomfortable one with some annoying woman’s elbow stuck in your ribs and a man with dermatitis who bites his nails voraciously through the journey sitting opposite. More likely you’re standing in an uncomfortable position and using one hand to hang on, while some git with a phone shouts in your face about his holiday in Estonia. The thought of trying to pull out your mini-can and neck some early alcohol in such a setting is merely sordid and depressing.

It must work, though: because every time I go in M&S their shelves have been almost cleared of G&Tettes (not so much the tequila). But if everybody’s buying them, why is it I never see anyone drinking one? I’d begun to think they must be taking them home, until yesterday.

There he was: brown briefcase, fiddle with the locks, and instead of a file or a laptop, out comes the can. I think to carry this off at all, you’d have to have something to read, and have mastered the art of holding up the reading material one-handed while taking the occasional thoughtful sip from the canlette using the other. This chap had left himself unequipped, so he was left with the problem of where his eyes rested between glugs, and he looked rather uncomfortable. Instead of looking relaxed, he looked like some desperate soul still clinging to the hem of denial about his rapidly growing alcoholism.

I don’t know what the best manner to adopt in these circumstances would have been. Make eye contact with the passenger opposite, brandish the can in a jovial way, give a little ‘chin-chin’ gesture, smack the lips with satisfaction? Try to hide the can in a handkerchief? Look fixedly out of the window and pretend no-one else is there? Look stern and put the whole can away in one swift chug?

Don’t think I’ll be going for it, anyway.

I seem to have been hearing a lot about Guernica recently: partly because of the exhibition at Tate Liverpool (which doesn’t include Guernica, but given the theme of  Peace and Freedom it is inevitably a looming presence), partly because of a couple of television documentaries. One of these in particular spoke of the picture with an uncritical reverence which prompted me to look at it again. I’m not a reflexive Picasso-detester, but he had his flaws and there is a negative side of the story to be told.  Guernica is of course iconic, and striking, and interesting: but as a war painting I think it’s a failure. It suffers particularly badly from two of Picasso’s main weaknesses: over-intellectualism and – I hardly dare say this because it’s so out of key with the consensus, but look at the paintings and see if I’m not right – a certain characteristic mimsy prettiness.

Over-intellectualism is a natural problem for all art which is abstract or not directly representational. Human beings respond emotionally to salient natural objects they can see; if the image has to be decoded in any way, it gets diverted away from the guts and towards the cold rational areas of the cortex, where the impact tends to be lost. In Guernica, the complex and rather scrambled composition tends to divert the mind into a frustrated effort to sort out the perspective, join up the pieces, and work out what is actually going on. Instead of engaging emotionally, we get drawn into trying to work out what’s in front of what or where the scene is set. And then there’s that light-bulb in the sky. I believe opinion differs over whether it represents a bomb or the sun – I don’t know whether the artist ever offered a view, but he might well have said it’s a light-bulb – but you know, either way isn’t it grotesquely out of place? It surely can’t be that Picasso thought a sketch of a light bulb would present the idea of an explosion, or of the sun, more vividly than drawing the thing itself? He thought that modern man is so used to light-bulbs they are now the most vivid available symbol of heat and light? Surely not (though that does catch a sense you sometimes get that modernist painters have always been producing art addressed not to the present but to a future, revolutionised, world which has never actually arrived).  Really the light-bulb seems like a little visual joke: but what’s a little visual joke doing in a painting of an atrocity?

The style is a simple, almost naïve one: but it’s an affected, stylised simplicity, as we could tell just by looking, even if we didn’t know that Picasso was fully capable of high standards of traditional realism. The result is slightly cartoonish, with patches of bathos: do the horse’s eyes really inspire feelings of sympathetic distress, or does their ludicrous googly quality get in the way a bit? And those smooth curvy lines incongruously suggest calmness and peace. I know Picasso has a reputation for being a brutal, virile shatterer of old conventions, but just looking at the pictures, I think he spent a lot of time fighting a natural prettiness. In some earlier paintings and later line drawings he just lets the niceness rip, and we get something that would make attractive soft-edged commercial artwork: at other times he seems impatient with himself and works on the ugliness with jagged shapes and black patches in a desperate effort to butch up a bit. The Demoiselles D’Avignon may well show, not a turning point in Picasso’s thinking, but his loss of patience with the way everything he painted came out looking charming and attractive. The dark secret, of course, is that this helpless prettification is a significant reason for Picasso’s tremendous popularity: no-one else is so easy on the eye. In fairness, this stuff may have looked stranger and more alienating to people who weren’t so used to it; these days misplaced eyes don’t look the brutal distortion they perhaps once seemed.

To my eye, thought evidently not to most observers, Guernica lacks a real sense of engagement. Perhaps it’s in part because Picasso wasn’t portraying a scene he had any direct knowledge of: he was not in Guernica and in fact had a comfortable war. (It seems the nearest he came to actual conflict was getting tetchy with the German soldiers searching his apartment.) It is possible to paint scenes you didn’t see with conviction, but in this case the painting lacks a certain sincerity; and it’s made worse by the way Picasso’s attention seems not to be fully fixed on his subject. What does that bull represent? A real bull living in Guernica, a symbol of infernal power, a manifestation of nature?  It doesn’t represent anything: Picasso just liked to draw bulls (something to do with lingering concerns about the effeminacy of his images?), and kept putting them in regardless. It’s hard not to feel that an artist who was fully engaged with the horror he was depicting would have put aside favourite subjects for the moment. Compare Goya’s war pictures, which are intent on rubbing your nose in bitter, specific reality: they seem to have just the truthful, direct and virile qualities that Picasso’s effort lacks.

That’s the case for the prosecution, which we need to hear if we’re to reach a fair judgement. Not that anything is going to shift the consensus, of course. Ever since it was commissioned by the Republican government, Guernica was fated to be a powerful political symbol, more or less whatever it looked like. Nothing was going to stop people reading into what I think is actually a rather cold picture the passion they feel ought to be there, and giving it a significance which I don’t think it could have earned on its own merits.

I received eventually the two sets of comments on the extract from ‘The Dictator’s Daughter”, my revised version of this year’s Nanowrimo novel, which I entered for the ABNA competition. I think they are a bit less satisfactory than those for last year’s entry, but I suppose we must remember that the reviewers are only reading an extract, and apparently reading it rather quickly (The story isn’t set in the ‘known history’ of the Soviet Union, but in an imaginary country whose name is mentioned repeatedly).

Reviewer One:

What is the strongest aspect of this excerpt?

The author’s writing style is fluid and moves the story along well enough. I was interested to see where the author would take the story and to a limited degree there is at least an attempt at character development.

What aspect needs the most work?

This story is too closely tied in to the history of the Soviet Union. Simply throwing around words/phrases like ‘dialectic’ and ‘false consciousness’ does not make for an interesting excerpt. If the author wants to get into the details of Marxism/Communism then he/she should do so. Assigning random jargon in various parts of the story does more to take away from the atmosphere than add to it if said jargon is not contextualized. The idea behind the story is also not very original, especially when the author invokes Orwell.

What is your overall opinion of this excerpt?

This entry would be more interesting if the author stepped away from known history and tried to do something original in the ways of an economic system/government style. If not, then trying to stick to reality would only pay off if he created a contextually rich narrative and showed how his story differs from that of the well known stories we have for the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions. Simply mentioning them isn’t enough.

Reviewer Two:

What is the strongest aspect of this excerpt?

I really like the premise in this excerpt of THE DICTATOR’S DAUGHTER. The idea of a child compiling the stories of her famous father has she remember them (as compared to other accounts or histories) is unique and fresh. I really hope the other stories in this novel continue in the same vain as this first one. The daughter’s perspective is captivating and entertaining. Nice job.

What aspect needs the most work?

There some grammatical, punctuation, and spelling errors in this excerpt from THE DICTATOR’S DAUGHTER that need attention. Most of this excerpt is very well done, so these errors stand out glaringly.

What is your overall opinion of this excerpt?

The premise of THE DICTATOR’S DAUGHTER, as the girl tells the stories of her father’s life from her memories and her perspective, is fresh and interesting. She is telling us her memories of her father, and how things really happened, as opposed to the “true stories” or the “official histories. I find this excerpt to be captivating and entertaining, to be moving along at a nice pace, to be well written overall, and to contain interesting characters and warm relationships. While this type of novel is not normally my cup of tea, I would really be interested in reading the entire book. Nice job.

Hmm…

Last weekend as I was lying in bed I felt some little twinges in my right foot.  I thought little of it, really. I’ve had trouble with my feet before, though mainly on the left.  A year or two ago I was referred to a physiotherapist who, in essence, told me my feet weren’t on straight. If my knees are pointing forward, my feet point outwards, one only slightly and one rather more.

“To be honest I’m surprised you haven’t noticed it,” said the physiotherapist, “I would have thought you’d have had problems with that years ago. If we’d spotted that when you were ten years old, we would probably have taken a saw to your leg and tried to put it back straight; these days we know that just causes more problems. There are some pretty big bits of cartilage and stuff in there, so it won’t really fall apart or anything.”

Experience showed that so long as I wore shoes which were reasonably tight across the foot, I didn’t have any problems; it was only walking a long way in loose or no shoes that I had to avoid.

So a bit of twinge or so in the foot is not something I was worried about, and indeed in the daytime the feet were fine. But on Sunday night, as I got into bed, it suddenly felt different and worse.  A strange and nasty pain was suddenly making itself felt. It seemed like a sort of strain, but there was no position that really made it better: the best I could find after several trials was lying on my back with my leg bent and held there by my hands clasped in front of my shin. This is not a position in which you can readily fall asleep.

This didn’t feel like the other problem: in fact it felt very much the way I imagined gout must feel. On Monday morning the doctor listened to my descriptions.

“You’ve got gout.” he said, “No doubt about it: absolutely typical. The location in the big toe joint, the sudden onset, how it looks, your age, even the thing about it being worse at night and when lying down.”

And you being overweight and drinking too much, he didn’t add – but he thought it.

“How much are you drinking these days?” he asked, evidently following a similar chain of thought.

“Oh, I don’t know. About 25 units?”

“Oh – that’s down a bit, isn’t it?”

Down a bit? Have we talked about this before?

“Anyway, what we’ve got here is that the breakdown products of DNA in your bloodstream, which normally get flushed away, are accumulating and turning into crystals in the joint. The treatment is to drink lots of water to help flush it all out. Rest the foot. I’ll give you some tablets which should clear it up fairly quickly.  In the longer term, watch the diet, not too much red meat or shellfish, keep the alcohol down a bit. There’s a good website with all the details: I’ll write it down for you.  Some people only ever get this once, but I’m afraid the chances are that in eighteen months or a year or so, you’ll find it suddenly comes back again.”

A cheery prospect.

The pain is actually very varied and, as it were, phenomenologically interesting: sometimes it feels as if I’ve stubbed my toe quite badly, sometimes there’s a stabbing pain, and sometimes there’s that indescribable bad sensation, that abstract essence of what you really intensely don’t want.  For a while during the day it sometimes feels exactly as if I’ve grazed the top of my foot and toes quite badly and have a plaster on (which I haven’t). Sometimes it’s quite mild, at other times, especially at night, it’s insistent and if you touch the wrong place the foot, which you’ve been trying not to move, goes into a sort of spasm all on its own which triggers a generous rush of the unpleasant abstract essence thing. I spent three night sleeping in an armchair because lying down just wasn’t working.

I finally gave up on going to work and took Friday off, which was a good idea; apart from resting the foot it saved me the tiresome process of explaining to everyone I met why I was limping. With rather limited amounts of sleep I was getting I probably wasn’t at my best anyway.

The dietary position is a bit odd: it’s good to lose excess weight, but the things that are perfectly OK from a gout point of view include cake, chocolate, and especially dairy products – not really slimmer’s foods – while lentils, cauliflower, and some other veg are bad.  On the drink front, beer is clearly the worst thing while some research suggests that unfortified wine in reasonable amounts does no harm at all. Actually, although lowering the intake of purines (the aforementioned DNA breakdown products) does seem to help, the problem is actually more complex, with some people generating too much of the stuff and others just unable to get rid of it.

Anyway I think the current attack is now on the way out: I can walk almost normally; the foot doesn’t actually hurt, it just feels a bit strange; and last night I actually slept in bed!

I’ve been doing a refurbishment of Conscious Entities recently; a nice new widgetised theme that is fully up-to-date and looks good; a new dynamic blogroll which is far better than a dull set of title links, and the addition of a front-page display of recent comments, all good stuff. In addition, I will now gradually bring over all the old content into the blog, in effect sweeping up some of the mess left over from when I actually moved to WordPress. Some old posts that have been absent ever since then will eventually reappear and then I may be in the position where I can use redirects so that the old hand-coded html stuff is no longer seen. I can’t get rid of those pages altogether because some of them remain among the most popular pages on the site.

Sorry about that geeky outburst; what I meant to explain was how I’ve gradually become fond of WordPress.  When I first contemplated blogifying the site I knew very little about the different options and I could easily have gone for one of the other options; but I’m glad I didn’t.

One of the things I like about the internet is the way you can get into the technical aspects gradually. It was a revelation to me when I first discovered that you could see the code for any page on the internet, copy it, muck about with it, slap it back in your browser and see what happened. This kind of idle tinkering was how I picked up enough html to start cobbling a site together by hand (and how I completely failed to pick up any knowledge or concern for prescribed standards).

WordPress sort of facilitates a similar gradual approach. You can use a hosted blog and never look under the bonnet; but if you want to host your own and choose a theme, you can do that too.  You really have to add your own masthead graphic. Then the temptation to fire up the editor and change a few variables, colours, fonts, spacing, and so on, is irresistible.  You can do a surprising amount without great difficulty; you randomly lob in a php file from a different template and lo: it works!  Let’s just snip some of that code there that looks as if it does this and see if it will do that…

Sorry. What really amused me yesterday that there was a particular feature I wanted and I couldn’t see how to do it. I started googling and visiting likely places for advice, and it turned out some woman had been on the forums and asked for advice on exactly the same point a year ago. She didn’t get a proper answer: I looked at the next possible place to find advice and she’d been there, too. I ended up following what must have been almost exactly the same path she had followed a year before. She got unhelpful advice, advice that was correct but not really what she wanted, and incomprehensible advice (I’m no css expert, but I’m pretty sure that some of this was actually just wrong).  At last I came across a post from her where she happily explained that now she’d found the answer – and luckily she said where.

The thing is, you can avoid techie details altogether if you like, or you can spend days writing up your own hand-crafted plugins. Or, if you’re like me, you can occasionally indulge in a little bit of fiddly customisation and then stop while it still works…

“Have you been reading the Bible?” asked Katharine suspiciously.

“Well, not reading it exactly. I was just checking a couple of things.”

“Looking for loopholes?”

“Yeah, yeah. Did  you see that they’ve found a tablet which suggests that the Ark was actually circular?”

“But that’s not in the Bible.”

“No, well I was also checking what the KJV says compared to that Crumb Genesis – you know? The comic book thing? Anyway, how did you know I was looking at the Bible?”

“I noticed it had moved.”

I got a copy of Robert Crumb’s comic-book interpretation of the Book of Genesis over Christmas; incidentally I also re-read Joseph Heller’s “God Knows” which is sort of the story of King David in the style of Catch-22.

There’s been a lot of fuss about Crumb’s version of Genesis – he’s always been popular and over the last decade or so has been taken increasingly seriously as an artist, a trend epitomised in Robert Hughes’ notorious comparison with Breughel (something Crumb himself disavowed). There’s always been an undercurrent of dissent from those who object to his nastier images, so maybe a Biblical subject is calculated to add respectability, though this being Genesis there was bound to be plenty of sex and violence.

I do think Crumb outclasses most of his peers in talent, style, and hard work, and it shows again here, with some striking images. He points out his own strict adherence to the material; not for him the interpolated passages and omissions of other cartoon Bibles. Even the ‘begats’ are dealt with in little groups of portraits.  But reviews sounded a bit disappointed, and I can see why: overall, I’m afraid Genesis exposes Crumb’s limitations more clearly than they have perhaps been exposed before:  in two main ways.

First, while doing things straight is a virtue, lack of imagination is not; but some of the most noteworthy challenges offered by Genesis are sadly muffed. “And there was light” – what could an artist do with that? Crumb gives us a white blob on a black background. The Tower of Babel? A realistic spiral minaret in a low-lying Middle-eastern town. Yes, realism is good, but if you weren’t going to do anything more than this with it, why bother?

Second, it becomes disappointingly clear that at the end of the day Crumb is a cartoonist; albeit a cartoonist who can rise to painstaking bits of graphic art at times. The mark of a cartoonist is that instead of drawing things, he represents them; this particular squiggle represents a nose, that one an ear. One result is that cartoonists sometimes struggle to make their characters look different. Here I’m afraid a lot of the beardy old men are at times hard to distinguish, and the same goes for many of the stout, big-breasted women. Fair’s fair; Crumb conscientiously tries to throw in a thin woman (Hagar) or one with unusual cheekbones once or twice, but for the most part we are dealing with small variations on the well-known Crumb Ideal Woman with huge legs, buttocks and breasts, (and a mouth not quite big enough for the inordinate number of teeth she seems to have). In the begats, it’s a different matter; we have a series of portraits of distinct individuals; but it seems these are copied from Hollywood stills taken from old Biblical epics. Even the range of facial expressions seems to lack something – there’s an awful lot of wide-eyed staring going on.

All in all, it seems that Crumb is not only not the Breughel de nos jours; he isn’t even the Gillray. Gillray’s Genesis – now that would have been an altogether livelier, funnier, and dare I say, probably ruder piece of work.

I remain a bit perplexed, because I’m sure Crumb could have done better. Is it, could it be, reverence that holds him back – or is it actually boredom, old age? The comparison with God Knows is instructive: Heller adopts a breezily anachronistic manner and language which, in my view anyway, work much better. Heller has King David refer in passing to Sarah, ‘who laughed and lied to God. I got a big kick out of that’. Crumb, naturally, portrays the episode in detail; we see the laughing and the lying, but it’s never half as vivid as in Heller’s David’s throwaway remark.

Maybe I’m dwelling unfairly on the negatives, and maybe it’s the high expectations that mainly cause the disappointment, but I’d still say don’t do Exodus.

Just to mention that I’m intending to attempt Nanowrimo again. Follow my maunderings here if you’re so inclined.

We’d had a slightly overcast week in Brittany, but when we arrived in Paris, with lots of queueing in store, it turned hot. The high thirties in centigrade – when you came out of the air-conditioned hotel, the sun just hit you.

Still, we did alright: Eiffel Tower (now with sparkly lights every hour at night), Arc de Triomphe, Louvre (We did a pretty good day-long stab at it, walking about five miles through all the galleries. Did you know that at one stage the Louvre was only half of a gigantic palace, with a mirror image western wing? The mind boggles.) and all the rest.

We were treated to a performance of the Parisian Gold ring trick: as we were walking along the banks of the Seine, an urchin picked up a “gold” ring ( I actually saw them drop it, too, which was a bit of a flaw in the pitch). “C’est vraiment de l’or? Vous pensez?”.

The idea is that this lucky urchin has stumbled on a real gold ring lost by someone: there’s a complicated proposition they work through but the gist ultimately is that you should give them about 20 euros for a ring which is actually some crummy thing worth 20 cents at most. The depressing thing is that they can rely on your not wanting to hand it in to the police and also on your being keen to rip off the apparently naive urchin by giving them a fraction of the ring’s supposed real value. I imagine this helps them to think you deserve all you get: but in my case I literally saw them coming.

There seems to be an unlovely trend towards tourists having their pictures taken in front of famous pictures or works of art (it seems to be mainly oriental tourists for some reason). It’s annoying enough to have people in the way when you’re trying to look at something, but now it seemed matey often wanted to stand in front of the exhibit too, and took it for granted that everyone would clear a space for five minutes or so while his mate was fiddling with the process of immortalising him.

You wouldn’t mind someone standing in front of, say, Castiglione if they appeared to be scholars who had worked on The Courtier for years and saw this as the nearest thing they could get to visiting the Master himself; but it was painfully obvious that the sub-text was always more along the lines of:

“Hey! Check out me with some really weird beardy guy in this kind of a gallery place or some sort of shit full of like all sort of junk that the French were really crazy about. LOL!!!1!1!!”

My expectations of hostile or condescending Parisians proved baseless (to be fair most Parisians were absent, it being August). At one point some friendly French people stopped and asked if they could offer us directions or any other sort of help?  Even the waiters were fine. Watching my fellow tourists in a place north of the Rue St Germain, I even felt some sympathy. OK, so you don’t speak any French at all and you’re not even going to try.  OK, so in fact you don’t even speak English particularly well, but that’s your language of choice for communicating in Paris. You want all the tables rearranged, but some of you want them rearranged differently to others. You don’t want anything on the menu or anything you could reasonably expect in a French restaurant: some of you want a kind of German food I’ve never heard of; others want American hamburgers; and some of you want to be offered vegetarian food.  You haven’t sat down yet, but you’ve already asked me three times whether service is included. Can I be forgiven if the edge of one nostril just trembles ever so slightly?

For someone like me, who spends a lot of time in London, it was impossible not to make comparisons between the two cities, but also impossible to get  the conclusions quite right. Paris seems more compact and coherent, and sort of older (with modern insertions), though London’s ancient roots are much more evident. In some ways Paris seems much more tourist-friendly, though the sense London gives of a vast, almost indefinite labyrinth of varied districts might be more appealing to the adventurous visitor.

It was so hot and we did so much standing in line at Versailles and elsewhere that the girls spontaneously suggested that we need not go to EuroDisney after all.

Recently this blog has been absolutely plagued with comment spam. This stuff is more sophisticated than it used to be; it often has only one link in it and it reads like a real (if somewhat lame) comment, so it can’t be warded off just by blocking anything with the word ‘viagra’ in it. I wasn’t sure why it was so bad – Conscious Entities was getting very little spam, in spite of its massively larger traffic.

So eventually I looked for a captcha plug-in. You may know that captcha is that thing where typically you have to type in a word shown in a distorted picture to prove you’re a human being rather than a spambot before your comment or whatever will be accepted. I’m told that really good spambots are now getting better at reading from distorted pictures than human beings, but in most cases it still seems to work well.

Anyway, browsing through the WordPress plugins which offer some kind of comment captcha, I found one that, by dint of doing something far too clever for me to understand, was apparently able to detect robotic submissions without requiring human users to do anything. Couldn’t be bad. I downloaded the files, installed and activated.

It was 100% successful in warding off spam; unfortunately it was also pretty good at warding me off, too. I found I was no longer able to log into my own blog. But now I’m back! In the end I had to go in and mess with the database manually (or by means of PHP something or other), which although it was actually perfectly straightforward, I find a bit scary.

As I was about to install a different anti-spam measure, I noticed that Akismet was deactivated. Am I an idiot or what? (Akismet is the basic anti-spam plugin which is normally the first line of defence for WordPress). In essence, I’d been running with nothing but a blacklist to protect me.

Anyway – enough of that.

The general plan was that we would spend several days getting out to visit places and two or three days on the beach at one of various places along the coast (Dinan itself being inland a bit, not to be confused with Dinard). In the event the weather failed us a bit, being overcast on several days, so that we only ended up doing one beach day.

One trip out, inevitably, was to Mont St Michel, where the girls had been before – I’d only seen it in the distance.  It’s a bit like the Eiffel tower in that the crowds are terrible, but you sort of have to do it. Apparently the sea is gradually silting up, so that left to itself the island, or peninsula, would be fully incorporated into the mainland in about twenty years, but there are plans to dig out the sea bed at either side and build a tram (wtf, as they say). I understand the Benedictine monks who originally created the place were induced to return some time late in the last century, but bitter experience having shown them that the place was no longer suitable for any serious monking, they left again early in this century.

Brittany is full of neolithic monuments to an absurd degree – alleged covered walks (ie six collapsed boulders), menhirs and dolmens: you should assume in imagining this part of the trip that every so often we stop and follow erratic signs into a distant field where a few ancient stones, usually overgrown with weeds, are lying around. One farmer had surrounded his allée couverte with a field of maize, leaving one row out to make a narrow path so that visitors still had access.

Another hidden item was the charming little castle of Hunaudaye, which somehow remains invisible until you’re quite close. The rest of the party, I think, believed I had led them astray, and was preparing to pretend to be interested in another low pile of stones, but although it’s not in mint condition, it’s definitely a proper castle.  Apart from climbing the towers, etc in traditional style, you could visit the rather odd exhibition on medieval humour which had been created in several of the rooms. I think it may have lost something in non-translation.

We also got the ferry (the vedette, which I now learned means ‘launch’ as well as ‘film star’) over to the Ile de Brehat one day, sort of a small French Channel Island, and not altogether like a smaller Guernsey in being rather over-full of both houses and tourists.

With a kindly goodbye from Mme Dabare, who made a last-minute bid to have us eat and drink in her place, we set off for the second stage. Here we came across the only snag in our flawless planning. Having returned the hire car to the ferry port, we assumed it would be easy to pick up a taxi to get us to the station. Not a bit of it. There were about six taxis there, but they were all pre-booked and would have nothing to do with us.  Katharine asked the person at the Britanny Ferries to ring, which she grudgingly did, but nothing much happened. After fifteen or twenty minutes a lone taxi appeared which someone else got because we were standing at the wrong end of the rank. We rang ourselves, one of the companies whose drivers were still hanging about waiting for their ‘pre-booked’ customer.  Ah no, they said, not worth us sending someone – you just wait, there’ll be one along in a minute. Another twenty minutes or more, and at last a single taxi did arrive. We hurried forward. No, sorry, this one is pre-booked. Eventually, at long last, we got one. As we left, the pre-booked taxis-drivers, still waiting patiently,  looked up from their cigarettes and jovial conversation for a moment.

Luckily, our plan had included a drastically over-long margin for error, which proved just long enough for us to still catch the TGV. At Gare du Nord, no taxis.