Anticipation

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The clans are gathering. Friends and family slowly amassing. There's a strange feeling about how this works because we are not on home territory, but camping out in a strange house in a strange landscape. I have a sense of the various ports and airports - their direction and distance, and I imagine each party arriving in those quarters, and starting to make their way over the green land. Some made it to our house last night, and these of course were old friends - people who have known our son since before he was born, so although we were all in a strange place, and there were all the formalities to be completed - checking in, mostly - there was an extra quality to their arrival. 'Hallo!!!!!' and hugs or handshakes, and smiles, and picking up the threads of the conversation which may have been let drop months or even years ago….  And all this is for a party. I imagine it must have been like this for the armies before the campaigns over many centuries - finding old friends, testing out who's with you and maybe who's going to let you down.  I am surprised by the turn my thoughts have taken here. No sense of war at all. Just a big crowd gathering for a wedding.

We bogged about a bit yesterday morning,  The bride-to-be, along with her mother and me, went for some pampering at the spa.  It was delightful to listen to Anita from Hungary - fluent in English but with a powerful Irish/Hungarian accent as she did my nails.  It turns out we have a common acquaintance - Father Liam! Back at the ranch we gathered a gang of 9 to go for lunch at Cashel. We headed for the Bishops Palace Hotel, which had been one of the possible venues, and there we showed Granny round the elegant entrance hall and drawing room, admired the fabulous 18thC furniture and staircase, and took her down in the lift to the Buttery Bar restaurant. There we met up with Margaret the waitress who looked after us last time, and had a splendid lunch - variously choosing chowder, black-pudding salad, hake and chips and cabbage and bacon.  We left Granny to sit quietly in the hall and went out into the garden - picking mulberries from the splendid sprawling trees which had been planted in honour of Queen Anne nearly 300 years ago, and then made our way up the path to the castle and abbey on top of the rock.  It's windy up there…  I think Mervyn Peake must have seen it because it's a kind of Ghormengast in miniature - a great tooth of limestone rearing up from the flattish lands, topped with great extravagances of towers, turrets, machiolations, conical and steeply sloping roofs, arrow-slits, sheer drops, all in grey stone, with the town sprawling around the base.  Inside, some small courtyards and massive ruins, scaffolding for repairs, and a small range of rooms furnished with solid practical oak tables and coffers in the style of the 16th or 17th century. There are chapels and corbels and barrel-vaulted roofs, and angels and wall-paintings and vanished music, and a panel showing the Queen's visit last year - when she wore a brilliant and very diplomatic green coat.

Then we hurtled round Tesco (sigh) stocking up for a supper tonight, for all these friends arriving - risotto was the plan.  We collected up all our party from the Palace and went back.  We were driving behind a convoy of three tractors loaded with huge straw bales - the first of these had its load wrapped in black plastic and was going very slowly indeed.  After a few miles, the second tractor driver decided it was too slow even for him, so he boldly overtook the first. Straw particles streamed out behind him as he scratched past the overhanging trees.  Eventually the plastic-covered load turned off and the great stream of traffic of which we were just a part surely heaved a collective sigh of relief as we assumed the speed of the 2 other tractors. But, more trouble - a bus was advancing towards us and the whole caboodle came to a halt on a narrow part of road as the front tractor and the bus had to measure their way forward. From our position 4 or 5 cars back it seemed there was plenty of room, as the drivers were walking quite comfortably between them (maybe sucking air in through their teeth), but it took a good while to reach a decision that one or other of them could move in safety.  Irish country lanes!

As guests we can use the swimming pool and other facilities - and how calming and soothing that is. No diving allowed - the pool is no more than 1.3m deep but how warm and spacious. There is a steam room, a sauna, a jacuzzi, and a stern requirement to wear a swimming cap.  This makes the men in particular look very purposeful….

Gillie and James were i/c of making the risotto - not so easy when you're in a poorly-equipped kitchen and the plan is to feed 20 - but they did a magnificent job. It was delicious, and one-by-one the groups of friends arrived.  There was texting and telephoning, and Andrew had to deliver THE DRESS and Lulu over to the bride's house at Thurles 20 miles away and bring back more stuff for today's party…. But in the end the evening went splendidly. Baby Maddox loved the singing. Young and old came to eat and drink - about 25 in the end.  'Hallo!' 'Hallo!' There were bouts of washing-up to have enough plates. The sky gradually darkened and stars could be seen…. It was all quiet by 11.30.  

Today's the day!

Nostalgia.... memories, school dinners, old photos

After the long hours of the last two days, we've had a quieter time today - late breakfast with Tasha, Lulu and Matt, getting some ironing done, looking over childhood photos of David (and Lulu) to be embarrassingly or cutely displayed at the party on Saturday.

I wanted to append a couple of thoughts…. Why it is that so much of the place looks French, for instance. One reason is the scattering of tiny little 'model' farms which are very like the ones you see all over France, with a small farmhouse set back from the road, flanked by two sturdy buildings which stretch forward on either side, creating a neat courtyard. This seems to reach back to Napoleonic or even Roman design - the same practical arrangement created and recreated wherever you go.  We see very small versions of this layout all along, many if not most abandoned or in poor repair.

Another thought. Why is that while we are experiencing being in one particular place, with its own characteristics and details, we are constantly driven to compare it with some other place? "This reminds me of - France/Northumberland/England…" We do it with people too. Doesn't he look like x? No, I thought he looks like y.

We had a brief misting of almost-rain this morning, but set off determined not to do too much driving. Tasha suggested we go to see a ruined abbey - at Athasell and by golly we found it (tourist roadsigns are excellent). The old abbey was  colossal, stupendous. Makes Tintern look cramped.  We climbed over a neat stone stile, across a liitle field and then over a gorgeous old 4-arch bridge now spanning a muddy gully but once (presumably) a real river. The bridge had no walls. Then through various portals, courtyards and ruins, with violent changes of door arch, height, wall-thickness, level and design all evident in the stonework, and all higgledy-piggledy. What a story these stones could tell. Parts of the structure rear up - 3, 4, 5 storeys tall. There are blocked up arches, new supports, vaults, even a pair of silent medieval larger-than-life statues in prayer emerging from a wall, and some modern graves in old the nave, the chancel, the centre of the cloister.  I have never heard of this place, and it is astonishing. There are no interpretation boards.  What was the business of the abbey - we couldn't see signs of (say) a water-mill. Whatever they did they must have been very rich at various times because of the great range and spread of buildings.

Then we headed to Tipperary itself. The tiny lanes are very quiet and wiggly, but at this time of year they are the natural pathways of huge tractors loaded with massive bits of gear folded in, so they look like some kind of massive insect in a stage of transformation.  These creatures are frequently driven by very young men.

To the south lies the range of the Gaity Mountains which looked fabulous - velvety-purple, swooping down in a gentle curve to the  Aherlow river - itself a branch of the River Suir whose name offers endless possibilities for bad jokes.

Tipp seemed to us a less merry place than Nenagh but very business-like and we found lunch (genuine Irish cooking) in a place which seemed ridiculously French in décor. Only when we left did we realise it was called the Shamrog Bistro. The service was initially dour, the food was hearty and nostalgic as regards the cabbage (chopped fine and cooked to a brownish pulp), but the lamb's liver was tender and delicious, the beef casserole sweet (all our beef is Irish), and the chips and creamed potatoes were sweet and memorable. Two of our number chose pudding: apple crumble with custard for one, and jelly and ice-cream for the other. Nostalgia? School dinners.

Shopping (I am ashamed to say) was back in one of Lord Tesco's accouterments). Lulu couldn't face it.  We'd be feeding a large part of clan Mussett at our house so we chose a menu of mushroom stroganoff and what not….  All accomplished v easily. 

Texts still flying back and forth about arrivals, arrangements.

Home - to unpack, walk about, meet up with new arrivals.   We changed the booking for the second s/c house to be a 3-bed one, so the Hills with their three kids could come over - Tasha showing them in after they'd called on us to say hallo.

The afternoon was warm enough, and light.  It was a blessing not to be driving around…  Andrew started making the supper, I was steam-pressing my outfit. Gradually people gathered - by seven o'clock we had the wine-boxes open and the party began.  Everyone was looking through David's childhood - the masses of pictures I brought with us from the days of prints… Here he is new-born, here in the arms of my mother, then his other granny and his aunt Gillie, then being pushed in a pram, feeding the ducks,  here in his daddy's arms looking alarmed at the sound of a steam-train at Tenterden, here half-naked having fallen into the duckpond at Worth Matravers, here crashed out on the back seat of the car, here eating ice-cream, here on a horse for the first time, here looking divinely glamorous in France, here in school uniform for his first day at the Chaucer…  Everyone is delighted with the photos. It's all so long ago. The photos bring a whole different world back to life, just for a moment or two.

Gillie and James brought Granny Rye to the hotel so Andrew and Lulu whizzed down there with her cases to install her in her room, and came back  saying she was pleased to have her toast and pate in her room and crash out. 

We sang Dubliners songs over supper, ate and drank liberally, and then split up for the evening - the young heading to another music evening in a pub/farmhouse, while some of us oldies stayed around the hotel at their Irish night. A roomful of even older people, sedately and expertly dancing to ceilidh music - they knew all the steps, needed no caller.  It was brightly lit, charming, friendly, another trip back in time. Gillie and James took to the floor, glowing with love and happiness. My brother in his white suit took photos and flashed his smile at everyone.  Eventually I left them to it and came home and went to sleep in about 4 seconds.

The Emerald Isle

August is perhaps the one month in the year when you might not get drenched in the south of Ireland. In fact, we keep seeing people suntanned to the point of being bronzed. Men are - no! - surely not! - wearing SHORTS!  Children, some quite fat, are out on their own riding bikes… they've been spending a bit of time practicing doing that.  The skies occasionally clear to a marvellous, high, shining emptiness, filling the land with radiant glory and sharp outlines. In the towns, cafés have outside seating which looks more or less plausible as a place to stop and while away a few quarter hours.

Today we had a naughty breakfast - scrambled eggs on toast. All the ingredients were brought from Kent, but hey, never mind. This is Ireland. We've booked ourselves a self-catering house in the grounds of Dundrum House Hotel in Tipperary - and we're making the most of it. The house is new, huge in comparison to most new houses in England.  We arrived about 9.30 last night, dead tired. Unloaded most of our kit, padded about a bit, sorted some stuff out, eventually crashed out.

This morning, after our delicious breakfast, we went into the main hotel in search of wifi, and a short list of other items: more coat-hangers, some bedroom chairs, tablets for the dishwasher, light-bulbs for some of the table lamps, a salad bowl, a fruit bowl, loo-brushes for 2 of the 4 bogs….    The hotel staff were fantastically accommodating and helpful. In this downturn, they are really keen to encourage their customers and look after them. We had coffee in an upper lobby, looking out over part of the golf course and some fields, with black cattle grazing. A big old oak guards the carpark.

After we'd installed our top-up booty, we headed off to Nenagh (Nee-nah) to pick up €200-worth of cheeses for the wedding party on Saturday.  Our drive was along small, almost-English-looking country lanes which nonetheless have a French look to them….  Each house is firmly and cleanly placed on a dry, stone or concrete-based footing, and with plenty of space all around it.  Some are adorned with flowers like Hawaiian brides. Some are as stark and bare as prison cell blocks. The fields are small, hedged, loved. The roads have familiar (English) beds and twists. Every now and then a castle rears up, pure Norman, mostly ruined. 

Nenagh has the benefit of being a county town - Tipperary having a N and S Riding - and this is in the north, and it's bustling and fun. Lots of spacious shops, lots of choice. Almost as if the downturn has not happened. We collected cheese for the wedding from an ebullient delicatessen-owner, learned from him how to construct a cheese tower using wine glasses to hold the cheeses up, promised to look after his splendid mirrored Victorian cheese-stand which he was lending for the party, did some errands including buying a couple of maps, and went up to see the newly restored and opened castle. This is, frankly, perfect. A single cylindrical tower dating from Norman times with subsequent losses and additions, its been done up by the Ministry of Public Works to an exemplary standard and has free entry and not one but two lovely men guarding it and handing out free postcards. Up the spiral staircases, tighter and tighter, out to the roof, see the distant views…. We learned that one disgruntled farmer, 200 years ago, tried to blow the whole thing up because it housed too many sparrows which ate his crops. He only succeeded in blowing a crumbly hole at the base… that is now the duck-your-head doorway into what would have been a very dark donjon or store. Every child should be brought here.  If I could take this castle  home, I would.  

Then we idled along the shores and slopes of Lough Derg (which allows the River Shannon to leak out at its southern end)… beauteous distant views, little farms, green woods and fields, hovels and millionaire houses tucked in here and there, and smart motor boats in tiny private harbours when you get down to the water's edge.  You could film Swallows and Amazons here.  A German lorry had parked up on the viewpoint carpark to get his tacho-sleep. 

Then we motored on through more winding lanes to Ballina (pron. Bally-nah) further down the river, and queued at the complicated traffic lights to cross the narrow ancient bridge (15? stone arches) to Killaloe on the other side. More walking about - how pretty everything is. Again, it's really very French in feeling…   The river is immediately deep but sparkling clear with reeds and fish dancing about underneath. There's a side-canal - remains of an old mill, maybe, with a separate iron bridge leading up towards Killaloe church. We called into a shop to buy some coffee and came out with a pack of cheap coathangers and some cotton-wool - this place had 25 million items on sale and the proprietor's profile was utterly geological with golden pince-nez perched on the front. However, there's no disguising the recession in Killaloe - so many empty shops. Those that are still trading in so many of these little towns tend to be hippy - Ayervedic treatments, craft supplies, shambolic cafés, art which is difficult to imagine being bought,.  But, it turned out that Killaloe has a great treasure - the church is actually a cathedral, and ancient, partly and unashamedly made up from bits of lots of other churches over the centuries. It is a huge plain nave of varying roof construction, divided by a wonderful glazed screen half-way along, and with the wooden roof at the chancel end held up by a series of strappy corbels, one of which depicts six kilted folk hugging each other, and another supported by a horse!  My diligent readers will know that for me, to find a horse depicted in an ancient church is extraordinary. Apart from Minster Abbey on the Isle of Sheppey, this is the only example I have ever seen.  This did not look particularly pagan or powerful, more like a pack-pony plodding along, but still…….  The acoustics in the west end of the nave are fantastic - with an echo-decay of about ten seconds!

Beside the church is an ancient oratory, dedicated like its neighbour to St Flannan, and now stripped out to reveal a lovely barrel vault roof, with some chunks of stonework stored in what look like French peasant rabbit hutches.

We turned east then,  back to Dundrum - marvelling at the beauty of the land. There was a lot of texting going on, trying to co-ordinate the whereabouts and rendezvous of other parties - eventually we were back at our house, David and Jo arrived for supper (salad niçoise and then summer pudding), and (after another while) Lulu and Matt and Tasha arrived. We installed them in their rooms, and eventually about 10.30 (VERY late for us to be going out!) we 5 set off to follow D&J who had gone to meet up with Jo's family at a musical pub in Thurles 20 miles away.  Another marvel.  Apparently just a little place - O'Gormans (aka 'The Monk') - crammed to the very edges with happy people listening to 15 amateur musicians (banjos, guitars, squeezeboxes, bhorans(sp?),  violins, bass, etc) playing a seemingly flawless sequence of traditional tunes. It was wonderful.  At the very back of the pub in a larger space was the Coffey clan - so many aunts, uncles, brothers and sisters, cousins - all there to meet us and check us out.  I discovered that the older ladies may be wearing hats to the wedding, but the younger ladies probably not. Towards the end of the evening, Jo's sister Becka asked the band to play 'Where do you go to, my lovely?' as a special request for David and Jo - who stepped forward to warm applause and danced for us. I have never seen my son looking so happy.  This is the song Jo's dad Chris has sung there many a time. He is too ill to gallivant at the moment.

Andrew (our heroic driver) brought us safely back to Dundrum and we crashed out. Who knows what will happen today? A trip to the sea? More errands for the wedding?  We have Gillie and James arriving this evening with Joan. She will stay in the hotel (we checked out her room earlier on - ground floor and with super bathroom - quite a long corridor to get there and three beds, but we think she'll be fine there).  Gillie and James are staying in our house - Tasha will move out to a second cottage we've rented. 

Inside your own skin - and what if that is made of glass?

I find it very odd walking into my own house after being away for a while - even just a few days.  However irrational, I think I feel relief - for various reasons - that it's all still there, it hasn't burned down or been ransacked. Then there's a wave of familiarity, recognition, and a silly sense of discovery - remembering what things looks like.  If we've been staying in a small space - camping, perhaps, then the house seems very spacious.  If we've been in an open kind of place then it can seem dark and constricted.  I don't know what this set of sensations amounts to, but I guess it's been written about somewhere, by someone.   

That's because while we were away I snatched bits of reading - a book called 'The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking' - very funny and interesting too, but one thing I've discovered is that psychologists have created truly mind-boggling names for reactions to things, or behaviours, detailed down to the last dot. Nominal realism, substance dualism, the false consensus effect, the mere ownership effect, existence bias, the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, and so on.... Of this little list, the last is the most interesting. Someone shot up the side of a barn and then painted bull's eyes round the bullet holes to make it look as if they were very accurate in their shooting.  Anyway, the book is full of catches - gathering together accounts of superstition and wishful thinking of many kinds, from 'touching wood' to religions.  So coming home I was tuned into the psychology of my own house, or my reactions to coming home - though these are feelings I have each time, I have to say.

Journeys like this one just completed leave little time for reading. We were on the road, or at the conference, or detouring to see something interesting, and if you're half of a couple and the other one isn't reading too, it's a bit lopsided.  So we have the back to reality sensations now - new resolutions, new ideas. I realise that travelling - or even just looking at maps in detail - is tremendously inspiring. Place names are so evocative - we passed Socx and Bra which set me to searching the place-name index. I could not find Knyckers, sadly, or Veste, or Pants, but we did find a Choux.  I find I can't stop myself dreaming up wild romances about the places in the landscape - the bullied child, the too-young wife, the harried farmer, the vicious old lady, etc etc.

Driving along all these new roads, seeing the faded and dusty impasses and tracks of the old roads shows we really are in an age of massive change. The old slow ways of doing things are being ripped away. But we still have our inner worlds.

Our main wonder of yesterday was to get into the new Louvre-Lens Museum - opened last December, free entry for the first year - and I urge you to go there as soon as you can. Lens is the city of slagheaps, and not until now a place for tourists. But they levelled a massive area of slag (behind the football stadium), and after an international competition gave the design contract to SANAA, a Japanese architectural/philosophy team. They have created an astonishing glass single-story space, where the inside and outside merge into wondrous  dissolutions. The huge foyer contains inner glass spaces with designated and flexible purposes - picnic area, salle de receptions, bookshop, cafe, media, etc.  Then the main display rooms are utterly alluring - with very-slightly curving walls, fantastic light, and a treasury of items on display. Breath-taking.  Such beauties, and so brilliantly displayed and explained. A hand-held iPad style guide allows you to see and hear and explore the objects, via an interactive map.  It's all astonishing.  There is a thread of 'time' to the present display - taking you through the ages, showing representations of humans - being, doing, holding - and some of what we were thinking about - the universe, material, power.

We bought a couple of books there. One is about the Art Déco buildings of Lens, full of beautiful photos, and the other is a tacky-looking rather expensive thing published by Princeton University about the SANAA group, showing how they helped some of their students work through the real needs of communities to produce building designs which take us forward. Japan has a rapidly declining and aging population, and 'new' suburbs are already subject to decay and abandonment. At the same time, the young are the new poor, and the old are the new lonely. So communities are creating weekend residential/allotment projects to lure city-dwellers out to nearby towns, or they are deconstructing buildings to create free recycling walls where people can come and take the materials for re-use (and incorporating memory niches inside the walls), or clearing areas and creating secret gardens which contain 'nothing', or making big cubic glass-ended buildings which are for multiple art uses which will remain when the communities around them have shrunk back to nothing. So energising. It makes the architecture in the other book we bought look rather ponderous and out of date, because however beautifully ornamented, the buildings themselves are the same as 'the old days' and not capable of being used in any new ways.

The old ways of doing things were basically local, and are now organised on a really huge scale and liable to strip away the sense of community or even individuality. The conference we went to in Munich was a highly organised grouping of a sense of individual worth and purpose - partly for business, and partly emanating from the ethical origins of its founder. We were there to learn how to help other people get healthy and make money - despite the economy, as it happens.  The Louvre-Lens lesson is that things change but that people are intensely creative. The horrible news I had while I was away - that a friend is very ill in hospital - has been modified to some extent in that she is awake, can sit up, her pneumonia is receding, and writes what she wants though she cannot speak at the moment; modern medicine can work miracles.  My own house is filled, overfilled, with things I have loved or needed - but I do not need them all now. I can let them go.  Outside in the little greenhouse, our seedling were tended by our neighbour and are doing ok.  Even the sun is shining this morning - after so many dark and bitterly cold days in Germany and France, it's wonderful to see it.

In my own skin - I am me. I loved the glass walls of the Louvre. Their curves. The mad garden outside.

The enchantment and disillusion of hotels

Whether it's my 1950s childhood (privations at home, glamour at the cinema, where hotels had white marble stairs, fountains in the foyer, and happy outcomes for the pretty ladies), or entrenched adult neediness, I find my hopes often rise when booking into an hotel. It's totally unreasonable....

This time, I seem to reckon with my inner childish self, this time the room will be superb. The waiters will - without being asked - bring me what I need or want. The shower will not have a slippery exit and the breakfast will be crumbless. Or, things like that.

Each time, though, I find I am overwhelmed with petty thoughts of dislike - the décor, the arrangement of tables, the plastic flowers, the slight hint of old smoke in the corridors, the long haul from the car park to the bedroom, the lack of space to open suitcases, the horrendous sounds which emanate from the cheap wall-mounted tellies.   If, by some strange chance, we book into a more expensive hotel than usual, or one with more stars, my disgruntlement actually increases. I don't like the expensive curtains, the pile carpet, the unctuousness of the staff. 

No, the way forward is the budget hotel. It may be that things are highly economised, but it's BY DESIGN - and consequently things work rather well. I am not asked to pay for things I don't use or would never have chosen.  The bathing arrangements are stripped down to bare necessities and are a pleasure to use.  My inner protestant is appeased.

There are some basics which I find I need - not to share a bathroom, for instance. And it's great to have black or wholemeal bread in some form at breakfast, and some sort of muesli without sugar.... More hair-shirt stuff, maybe.  Perhaps I am finally overcoming the fantasy-nightmare of my childhood. I do not need that glamour.  It wasn't real, after all.  In a world where I know so many people have so little, I can find my anxieties in guilt about being able to travel like this, rather than disgruntlement at the poor provision of the hotel. 

One weird experience last night was half-watching that film about three little Aboriginal girls who walked across the Australian desert to escape their kidnapping and enslavement by the British who were 'looking after' them.  It was totally overdubbed into perfect precise French, the very sound of which was so totally inappropriate and unconnected.... so that when the children found friendly native female help, that assistance came via a voice with a Parisian certitude - female but precise, and positive.   A dreadful misfit.  As modern DIY tourists wandering round Europe, we are just as badly misfitted - but a whole industry exists to comfort us, reassure us that we are doing ok, that we are safe. We pay for it, but it's not a fair bargain. I still know the reality is different.  So, perhaps I am still trapped in that childhood fantasy. Somewhere, somewhere the white marble and the foyer fountains are waiting for me. 

Wildlife

France is the country of mistletoe. We have seen millions of orbs, I think, in the last 24 hours. Some of them are so densely packed with branches they are almost black.  They favour poplar trees, but also venture out into other species. Parasitic, reputedly spread by birds, but with a magic quality, staying green when their host tree branches are empty and bare (ruined quires, where late the sweet birds sang).

We spent most of today driving back up north, planning to stop for lunch at Reims, but turning off before that into Verdun. What an extraordinary place. It was so central to the horrors of the first World War that in 1920, London decided to 'adopt' the city to help rebuild it. I had not appreciated, until today, how widespread the battlefields were - not just up in Flanders but right through the areas we have passed through today, down into Alsace and Lorraine.  Some of the older buildings still have pockmarks from armaments.  It's clearly still a place of pilgrimage for many different peoples, with lots of tempting cafés and restos, with cheap tarrifs, and worth visiting.

We have seen so many wonderful birds on this drive - especially the red kites between Bitche and Sarreguemines - but also buzzards in great numbers, and lapwings, and kestrels.  We also saw a herd of small deer - munkjack? - who had ventured out into the fields.  The landscape is unbelievably huge here, seemingly endless miles of farmland without hedge or tree... a profitable desert. But just now and then, something catches the eye... a pair of crows, a colony of rooks, and of course those storks or cranes we saw flying along the course of the Rhine.

Now we are at Lens, to see the Lens-Louvre museum tomorrow before we head home. Lens is a place you might just drive past, with its slag heaps and grubby suburbs, and its traffic jams, but here we are in a little 3* place, where the wifi is annoyingly dodgy but seems to be ok for now.

The deaths, the deaths.... we have driven smoothly and calmly over the killing fields.  At Verdun there was a sign which said it had been destroyed in 450, 485, 984, 1047, 1246, 1338, 1562, 1792 and 1870. Almost incredible. It happened again of course in 1916, in ten months.  But being in the middle of the great European continent, that is what happened to small towns...... I think of little Faversham. It's had its troubles, but nothing like that. 

I wonder how we have the nerve to describe the marvellous life of birds and animals as 'wild life'. Who is really wild? Us, or them?

The sources of war

We drove due west out of Germany, heading into France to avoid the German snow-tyre laws. All good, roads dry, everything calm, lots of solar farms along the way - on motorway embankments and the steep slopes of hills. It makes such sense to soak up the sun's free energy wherever possible. Why don't we do it properly like this in England?

Lunch - in the town of Pforzheim at a cool place (part of a chain?) called Dean and David - sandwiches and salads of extra-special quality and hi-tech self-service, and very delicious too.  'We' bombed Pforzheim in 1945 as we thought they were making precision instruments (historically they made watches and jewellery, and they have a good railway line. If it was me, I'd have bombed it too, under the circumstances). This is all part of the Black Forest area, and very pretty.

We weren't sure where to cross the Rhine, and where to head for in France - the borders are not simple, and we were trying to avoid the German side and snow laws, but not taking too big a detour and also avoiding heavy industrial areas.  All our maps and atlases are effing useless for this kind of decision, as the coverage for German maps ends ruthlessly at their border, and the French ones have a similar jingoism - and this crucial crossroads of borders (Germany, France, Belgium, Luxemburg) is covered with a box showing distances between cities - so you cannot easily see what cities are where, what roads lead where, which bits of border could trip you up, or anything useful.  With Andrew driving and me navigating, I ended up wanting to throw the maps and books out of the window and scream.

In the end we crossed at Rastatt on a massive rusty iron bridge, dating back to 19th century, and with railway/tram lines in the middle of the carriageways.  The border lies along the west bank, so even across the river you are still in Germany.  Once you do get into France, the change is immediate - house styles, cafes, signposts....    It was lovely to get into the Vosges - marvellous hills and valleys - so pretty, and restful. Worth coming back for. And here we are at Bitche.  Never heard of it before, sniggered at the silly name when we were heading east last week, but since the map showed a citadel we thought we'd take a look.

OMG! Not only Vauban (a fave) but MASSIVE!!!!!!!  The town itself is sad and down at heel, with a little Aldi replacing a bigger shut-down LeClerc - and lots of closed-down shops. However, we are installed in le Relais des Chateux-Forts and have taken a tour of the bloody great defence works which dominate the whole town.  The thing is colossal.  Utterly amazing looking.  I am ashamed to say I had never heard of it, nor its pivotal role in world history....

Now - Vauban built it for Louis XIV in 1680 - finished in 1697, but because of the Treaty of Rijswijk Louis was forced to leave Lorraine just one year later, so in order to prevent enemies getting such a strong fortress, the place was demolished along with all the other fortresses.  Then in 1738 the French began to rebuild it according to the original plans - and that is what is there today.  In 1870, when Louis Napoleon declared war on the Prussians (at the whim of his Spanish wife Eugenie?) to protect the Spanish succession, this massive fortress became an isolated place of resistance to the Prussian onslaught. The French armies were routed, Paris fell, but Bitche decided to hold out.   Losses were horrific and of course in the end the French commander negotiated an honourable withdrawal - leaving the citadel and the local people to the mercy (!) of the Bavarians....  Lorraine/Alsace passed to the Germans. The overall death-toll in this region was so dreadful that everything festered, and helped to fuel the Great War of 1914-18, and then also the Second World War.

The fortress is so massive, so deep, so powerfully constructed, you can't help wondering whether if in some way it generated war all by itself. Any warlord, or Kaiser, or general, would want to set up in it and resist his enemies.  Any passing King or Prince would want to take it. It encourages lordly feelings - yes, I think we'll have that - and sod the peasants......

The modern experience, on a bitter cold day, and with barely another tourist in sight, is entirely based on extracts from a rather good and very graphic film made in France about the 1870 war, and filmed within the citadel. You wander through the deep corridors wearing earmuff headphones which are supposed to give you the commentary and extracts from the film on transparent screens as you reach each new area - but of course the infra-red triggers don't all work.   Most of the visitors are Germans, not surprisingly, as it was a place of victory for them, and it's not far from home.

We have visited quite a few Vauban castles - all amazing, geometric and powerful, rather beautiful in some ways, and this is the scariest.  It reminded me of the Secret Nuclear Bunker at Kelvedon Hatch in Essex, which we visited by chance for a birthday party just 10 days ago - another utterly paranoid, expensive, deadly, masculine fantasy building, a monument to rage and power, a final refuge and to hell with everyone else - even if that is the whole of the rest of the world.

All I can say is, I am PROFOUNDLY grateful not to have lived through a war myself, personally. 'Our' wars are now fought somewhere else, far away. The people who make the arms and the control systems also make a lot of money, and probably think they make the world go round.   Yet, they are not more powerful than the weather - flinging these blizzards across northern Europe and chasing us into France. Nor are they more powerful than the sun - and the solar farms springing up all over the place here.  Maybe there is some hope.