Did you know that our blood renews itself every hour via our kidneys’ filters? I do now thanks to the Good Wife, who is re-reading one of her textbooks on anatomy and physiology. She takes her work seriously. Isn’t the body incredible?
So clearly we need to revive our mind and spirit regularly. Since we’ve both been coughing up phlegm all winter long and since there’s nothing like a bit of sea air, we took a trip to Arcachon for a nice phlegmatic weekend at the end of last month. We’ve been before on occasions: Arcachon, just an hour west of Bordeaux, is our landlocked home’s nearest resort. We could have gone by car, but there’s the Bordeaux ‘Rocade’ to negotiate – admittedly a very tame version of the M25 or the Paris Périphérique – and at our times of life we like to let the train take the strain.
Leaving the cats with their basic but effective water-and-food dispenser, we dropped off Daphne with her godparents and her best friend Holly for a mini 'Hollyday' en route for Brive station on a beautiful Friday morning. The forecast suggested that the weather would deteriorate, so we took raincoats and umbrellas as if off to Blackpool for the weekend. Changing trains at Liborne – which made little sense to me since our connecting train was also stopping at Bordeaux – we both noticed a contemporary ageing couple with cases rather fuller than ours. I liked the man’s walking shoes, but we couldn’t spot the brand. Either they too were bound for Arcachon, we surmised, or they were heading for the airport to fly to Geneva in order to visit their daughter, her Swiss husband and their new baby.
The connecting train was a double-decker, my first time on such a feat of engineering. We ate our packed lunch and settled in for a journey to and then from the most beautiful city in France, stopping at just about every dormitory town all the way to Arcachon. A lot of new pricy-looking apartment blocks seem to have gone up since our last visit. I hope the agents immobiliers at Bigoras will warn clients that the fumes from the belching cheese or chemical works smell quite awful. I assured my wife that it had nothing to do with me.
At Arcachon, we spotted the couple from Liborne and followed them towards the centre of town. They turned off down a side street, bound not for Geneva but, judging by his walking shoes, a hotel more expensive than ours. The Dame had found a good deal at a Best Western near the port, a 15-minute walk down the beach-side boardwalk which is not designed for cases with wheels. The favourable reviews about breakfast had sold the hotel to us, but the receptionist, indeed everyone there, was charming and welcoming. I guess that’s one thing in Airbnb’s favour: hotels must be so anxious for your custom that staff go that extra yard to curry favour.
On the way back into town to check the lie of the land and identify a possible restaurant for that evening, we passed a little place with a promising tout compris lunchtime menu with a delightful sign in the window that made us both chuckle: We try to speak English just for you. How very kind. Perhaps lunch next day. We also laughed later to observe that the insalubriously-named D’Ompe bar publicised ‘Coktails’; presumably spirits with a pinch of white powder. A coktail or two might have intensified the pleasure of browsing among the sale goods lining the streets of the centre, a braderie organised to tempt the crowds for this February holiday weekend. We bought nothing but a string of garlic and a truly delicious chocolate-orange ice cream.
Back at the port with evening falling fast, we found a restaurant at the corner of a street that opened at 6.30 but, for some peculiar reason, didn’t start serving food for another hour. So we sat nursing a beer and chatting to a delightful young waiter about the season and the wonderful weather. He volunteered that he’d gone swimming earlier that day with a friend and, with his thumb and forefinger and an infectious cackle, he suggested that his wiener had shrunk with the cold to the size of a cornichon. We speculated later on his sexual inclination. Rare perhaps to find a heterosexual stranger ready to reveal such an intimate and self-deprecating detail of his anatomy. That evening, we chose Taika Waititi’s first film, Eagle vs Shark, on Mubi in our hotel room. How we laughed to see such quirky fun.
After a breakfast that lived up to all the favourable reviews on Trip Advisor, we headed for the beach without our coats and umbrellas. It had rained in the night, but the morning was a blue limpid miracle. Shedding our footwear to enjoy a cold, sandy pedicure, we walked as far as the point from which you can see across the bay to the lighthouse at the tip of Cap Ferret. Dogs and small children gamboled on the sand and parents tried in vain to stop their charges from getting soaked. We walked to the central market where we bought a picnic supper to eat in our room (so I could watch the Calcutta Cup rugby match) and we walked all the way back to the port to have lunch at a tiny café offering vegetarian food. Our hostess Colette’s haughty tabby cat sat on a chair by the door, as if vetting the clientele.
By the time we’d walked to town past some outlandish architectural confections and back along the sand again (with another chocolate-orange ice cream), the Dame’s phone app suggested that we’d clocked up something like 20,000 steps that day – and without the aid of a ‘coktail’. We slept well after the rugby and a quirky but forgettable Canadian film on Mubi again.
Sunday morning breakfast was every bit as copious and satisfactory as Saturday’s, and outside the day was yet more beautiful. The sea was like the proverbial millpond and the cloudless sky a deep shade of blue. A long walk along the sand and then a stroll along a promenade full of walkers, joggers and cyclists took us to the kind of authentic restaurant where the Good Wife could satisfy her oyster-lust. Being oyster-agnostic, I opted for a very fine fish soup. Afterwards, we went back to our favourite ice-cream parlour for a chocolate-orange dessert. Debs revealed that she had consumed her customary annual ice-cream allocation in one weekend.
SNCF in their habitual maddening SNCF manner had cancelled our train back to Bordeaux, but laid on buses. We decided to pick up an earlier one in case of mayhem on the Rocade. Well, maybe not ‘we’: the truth is that Nervous O’Sampson here persuaded his rather more optimistic and carefree wife that it might be a prudent idea.
In fact, it didn’t take much longer than the train, so we had an even longer wait at Bordeaux’s central station, as insalubrious as big-city stations always tend to be. Our bus driver was a genial chap, but his habit of stroking with one hand his white goatee ‘comfort beard’, as I christened it, while driving with the other alarmed me. He stopped at every little town en route for the regional capital, which involved tight roundabouts and two hands on the steering wheel. Bigoras still stank and I hoped that my fellow passengers wouldn’t think that it was me.
After enjoying the last of the day’s sun outside the station, after dismissing alcoholic beggars with a sad-eyed shake of the head and after polishing off the remains of our pre-rugby supper from the previous evening, we finally boarded our train to Brive on platform 9. It seemed a long journey back, but maybe we were tired out by all those steps. We got home late, but Otis and Mingus seemed fine and a dispenser almost devoid of croquettes told its own tale of an indolent weekend with little or no rodent-hunting.
As for the minds, bodies and spirits of their humans, they felt suitably renewed after a spring-like weekend of sea, sand, sun and superior breakfasts.
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