Disgressed

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.