Sleepy Suffolk

Midnight faded into dawn, dawn gave way to early morning traffic which eventually yielded to my alarm clock. A quick breakfast of French bread, croissant, and unsalted butter (Parisians…) took the final yawns and wrinkles out of my face. The day seem daunting. With a three hour presentation in the morning in front a twenty-odd crowd of academic people, I was going to be the unwilling star & start of the show.
The underground stole past Central Paris to drop us off in the southern suburbs of Paris where our meeting was to be held. The meeting in itself wasn’t worth mentioning. It’s all work and no play for poor little Jack. However, there were two items to remember. Firstly the food which, in these premises, is as good as ever and so much better than those grim triangular club sandwiches which make you feel like Pascal. Secondly newcomers. The project I work is an EU funded piece of work and is not in its infancy - far from it. But over the past few months, it’s been accepting new members two of which were at the Paris meeting. Two Spaniards from Galicia with whom I hit off very well. Probably the liking of Spanish culture in general and the friendliness in particular of the two new members, Daniel & Marta (I’m quite tempted to write it the English way, with an h tucked in between the t and a). I also met up with familiar faces from past meetings.
The meeting eventually gave way to the evening which I spent with my brother made single for the week as his wife was off to a photography exhibition in Southern France and his toddler was in the good caring hands of the in laws. With no family about, there ain’t nothing like quality time with the bro’ round a bottle or two of cool refreshing beer. Belgian beer might I add. Coming from England, it’s a treat. Ollie (that’s his nick) and I split a pizza over a game of foozball. I won the first leg easily and we drew the ‘return’ leg. The game’s still a bit rusty (maybe fading away altogether). We had a nice chat about family, work, life in general, and rooftops. Well yes rooftops. Not that my brother’s recently taken to the roofs like Giono’s hussard. It’s just that having only just bought a house, he sorely discovered the roof needed work to be done: reshingling if there be such a word. Those things are not cheap (no matter how real the word is). He did need that beer after all. We soon parted - Ollie walked me back to the underground (RER) and I headed back to central Paris to sleep the pizza and the beer off.

London Saint Pancras - The train is due to leave at ‘five past eight’. It’s nearly 7:30PM and still no sign of Theo. The fellow made a desperate dash from his home in Colchester at six and if anything he should be arriving in a couple minutes. Surely enough, I soon receive a phone call and down the main hallway of the newly renovated train station I can make out the man’s familiar silhouette. Spot on time.
While I was waiting for him, I strolled around the station stopping at a bookshop (Folger’s I believe?) for I had forgotten a book I had bought for my niece in Ipswich and wanted to make it up to her by getting another. I found the perfect nugget in a nursery rhymes book illustrated by the very same illustrator as the ‘Gruffalo’ series. At the same time, I also picked Bram Stoker’s notorious ‘Dracula’. During the following two weeks I would share Harper’s and Seward’s trek throughout England and Europe against the fiendish Transylvanian Count.

It’s finally 8PM gone and rung at London’s main belfries, the last Paris-bound Eurostar is slipping away past the capital’s cityscape. Soon we reach the eurotunnel (which would be more interesting had it been equipped with windows and been built on the seabed rather than under. I’m sure engineers will disagree on that point so would perhaps aquaphobic passengers) and after having downed a glass of red Merlot along with some spice-stuffed olives, Theo and I eventually set foot in Gare du Nord. We talk of upcoming meetings & work while he nervously puffs away on a cigarette. I stare at Mercure’s Hotel Terminal wondering whether this is where they filmed Hotel Chevalier, a short starring Natalie Portman. No time to check. Duty calls. Theo throws his stub in a nearby bin and we make our way to the underground. Line 4. Purple line if memory serves well. I truly don’t know why we took the regular underground. We had to stop by what seemed like every single station in central Paris before actually making our way to Denfert Rochereau. Those more familiar with the ins and outs of Paris metro life, will know that in fact Gare du Nord is merely a handful of stops away from Denfert provided one takes the RER fast train which runs on a special track and only stops at certain major stations.
Nonetheless, once our touristic deambulation ends in Paris, we make our way hastily to the hotel. It’s nearly midnight and although September is barely starting, the air is fresh with a pungeant automnal scent - a mixture of fallen leaves with night dew.
The hotel is a five-storey XIXth century building typical of central Paris. Its elevator is so minute we’ve difficulty fitting the four of us together (Theo, myself, and our suitcases) but at least the porter found our reservations, gave us our keys, and even provided us with free wifi access codes. To IT professionals, a free WIFI access code is like free candy to an eight-year old boy. It’s not often and always well appreciated.
Unfortunately, as we were to find out soon enough, the said wifi wasn’t all that good. Free, yes. Functional? Not quite. That - now - is a bit like finding a sour candy in your stack of sweets. It takes another three lollypops to wear off the taste.
That didn’t matter for my room, though minuscule, had a view on the flat across the street: a top floor apartment tucked under the rooftops and with bookshelves spanning the whole width. Whoever lived there must have been a literary person. One might have thought in a lurid fantasy that I would have started telling the tale of the neighbor, some tall blond French lady, slipping seamlessly out of her clothes, to shyly exhibit herself to any onlooker such as myself. But unfortunately, this sort of mishap (for the subject) only happens once a week - on TV only. And it’s pay TV too. Not that I’m an expert of course. It’s just hearsay.

Now some folks when they dream of holidays, adventures, and the likes immediately picture themselves in a hammock on some remote Carribean island or in a safari or even perhaps coast-to-coasting in the USA.
All’s that nice and well but we tend to overlook our own countries - our home nations that often have more than one surprise round the corner.
Having said that, I’d like to go to a safari too. My friends at http://www.longerwaydown.com/ are doing one hell of a roadtrip. BUt with only a few days to spare, it wasn’t quite feasible.
The other thing is that one of my housemates (a dude from Madrid - poor fellow) has recently agreed to pile in another six months of Ipswich life and would therefore like to drive his little Fiesta all the way from Madrid to Ipswich. Now, to do that, there are roughly three ways:
1. take a ferry in Bilbao or Santander that goes straight to W&E Sussex / Kent
2. take a ferry or the Eurostar in France that goes to Kent
3. drive up all the way to Hoek van Holland and ferry your way across to the quiet Essex town of Harwich, only a stone’s throw away from Ipswich. You can even avoid Colchester, its rowdy military and its Essex girls…

So, JL (that’s his name) were stroking our beards and pondering on our options: obviously we wanted to taste Spanish Rioja, sip French Bordeaux and abuse of Belgian beer! And hey presto, here we were pinning out on a map which cities we were off to.

A. Madrid - starting point - in the wee hours of the morning (so by Spanish standard that’s a few minutes shy of high noon)
B. Bilbao, spend the night there, hopefully hook up with some Spanish Erasmus friends
————— the border ——————
C. My hometown(s) - with a bit of luck my family beachhouse
D. Paris, the capital bien sûr, to hang out with the BT ring there
E. Bruges because I must say the movie with Colin Farrel was a riot
F. the ferry (Hoek van Holland / Harwich)

This blurb on a map looks like this:

Ver mapa más grande

More to come…