August: 'Stay-cations'

I was due to travel to England by train on Monday 24^th to visit the family and join 'the girls', but thanks to the idiocy of the British government and its knee-jerk fortnight's quarantine, I had to cancel the trip. Not that I was particularly looking forward to two long train trips and one shorter one with a suffocating mask over my face. Nor the Metro and the London underground, for that matter. My solicitous daughter left me with a bottle of hand gel and instructions for surviving the subterranean part of the trip just before she and her mother took off in the car for the delights of Cumbria.

At the Martel market the Saturday after their departure, I bumped into someone I meet from time to time at either the market or the local supermarket or, it has been known, both on the same day. I recognised her despite the mask. She clearly wanted to embrace, but felt that she couldn't. I didn't force myself upon her. I told her what had happened and suggested that Boritz & Co. were like the playground bullies who want to show the world how tough and decisive they are by means of such an arbitrary and ultimately redundant measure that triggered a stampede of British holidaymakers for the Channel ports. With my Lindsay Kemp hat on, I mimed the gestures of a bullish politician who's more Cro-Magnon than modern man.

My friend laughed as if I'd done something very funny. Oh that famous British sense of humour, she chuckled. It's the only thing that keeps me sane, I replied. This led us into the inevitable conversation about the 'pandemic'. We agreed that the modern intestinal flora is incapable of resisting the virus. She knows a thing or two about the human gut, because – as far as I can gather – she carries out obscure research into homeopathic treatments. From time to time, she presents her findings at her home and she invited me to join the homeopathic dignitaries of the south-west at some such do in mid October. I said I'd make a note on the calendar when I got home, but I'm not sure that either my French or my competence is up to such a challenge. A couple of years ago, she made me a present of a self-produced booklet about some research linking homeopathy to Queen Elizabeth I and the British character. I attempted to read it, but couldn't really make head nor tail of her thesis.

Apart from our agreement about the state of the nation's flora and the lamentable contents of your average Monsieur/dame's shopping trolley, we also came to the conclusion that one good thing has come from the reluctance to travel to foreign parts. The market was packed. Normally, at this time of year, it's packed with Brits and the Dutch, but the overwhelming majority seemed to be French. I noticed the same thing last month when the Good Wife and I left our daughter in charge of the household companions and took our own 'stay-cation' in the Alps. It was just a long weekend with friends, but long enough to observe how packed were the mountains with French cyclists and hikers. Cars were parked on every feasible bit of roadside. Neither of us had seen anything like it, even though we've made the long, tortuous ascent from Grenoble to Briançon on many occasions.

The theme of our own weekend was also outdoor activity. On the Saturday morning, Claude drove us up their valley and deposited us at the foot of a mountain. My old friend Jacqui, Debs and I then walked up the mountain – admittedly not the highest in the Hautes Alpes – and across a grassy intermontane plateau alive with crickets and grasshoppers to meet Claude by a lake (in which the intrepid mountain-bikers who had passed us on the way up were swimming, God love them). Then we wound down the other side, past all the trekkers trudging up, to a trattoria on the Franco-Italian border, where Claude had parked the car, for some authentic rustic polenta. Every step of the way, we passed clusters of French and Italian families and friends. Now that she has become a grandmother, life is doubly precious to Jacqui, who stood to one side on each occasion and held her breath to avoid possible contamination.

Their son Loïs made the journey up from Lyon to join his parents for the weekend. He brought with him his incredibly light and incredibly expensive racing bike with all the gear. The shoes and pedals alone cost a small fortune. His idea of fun is to climb mountains on his bike, which is admirable but very unappealing. On the Sunday, for example, he went off on a round-trip into Italy and back into France of about 150km, which included two Grade A climbs (or however they categorise them). He got back, ostensibly barely puffed. We preferred a leisurely walk along the Alpine river that runs along the foot of their village and past the local campsite, which was packed to the fly-sheets with mainly indigenous holidaymakers.

While we were enjoying cooler temperatures in among the mountains, The Daughter was baking back home with the dog and the cats. The summer has been generally a good one, with plenty of nice overcast days and all that rain in June, but there was a fortnight when the mosquitoes treated me like a self-service buffet and there have been sufficient days of impossible temperatures to make me question our location. Last year, it was so bad that I was reading up on the Isle of Lewis. I think I've got that nonsense out of my system, but am wondering whether we should pack up and move to the coast – or at least find somewhere reasonable for a few weeks that accepts dogs. The trouble is, you can't predict when the excessive heat is going to arrive. In any case, if I make it to Armageddon, the coast will be under water.

We drove home on one of the hottest days of the year. Neither of us likes to use the air conditioning, cursed as we are with a conscience, but we may not have survived the journey without it. We stopped off at an aire de repos for our picnic and sheltered from the sun behind a hedge. The vegetation around us was uniformly scorched and lifeless. Once past Clermont-Ferrand, we stopped again to eat our patisseries. This particular aire is one of the most beautiful you could imagine. You climb up a grassy knoll to be presented on the other side with a breathtaking panoramic view of the vulcans: the long-extinct volcanoes, whose craters were grassed over by the passage of time. These days, they're probably full of hikers rather than cinders.

 

Apart from snapping my favourite pair of sunglasses – and apart from the heat of the return leg – we had ourselves a brief but lovely stay-cation. We even came back with another of Jacqui's paintings for the house that thinks it's a gallery. Living in one of the most beautiful countries in the world, we're the lucky ones: we can choose from rather more than Blackpool, Torquay or a caravan park on the Ards Peninsular. I must have my mother's genes, because the older I get, the less is my desire to travel anywhere far afield. Except perhaps Norway. If anything good emerges from the current awfulness, one positive thing would be an end to cheap air travel and a return to the tradition of the Wakes Weeks, when whole towns decamped to their nearest seaside resort. Well, some kind of sensible modern equivalent. No one in their right mind these days wants to spend a week in Cleethorpes.

I'd like to believe I glimpsed at least one healthy element of the future this summer. But then again... I signed a petition the other day to urge the French government to pass a law to make it obligatory to register your pets in one way or the other. Apparently, some 200,000 dogs, cats and any other species at risk from humans are abandoned every year, most of them at holiday time. It's a bit late now to put myself up as a candidate, but I'd make holidays illegal – even within one's own country – for anyone incurring penalty points for abuse, cruelty, abandonment and the like. Only if they win back the points by exemplary behaviour over a given time would such people be allowed to take another holiday. My new world order. Makes sense, huh? Thus it shall never come to pass.