Just 2 weeks after I wrote the post on the ferry heading for Calais, I am writing again on the ferry in the other direction, heading home early due to family illness.
In Switzerland I was hedging my onward options due to the situation – not wanting to travel further east and south – so I took the opportunity in the decision time to join my sister and her husband on a campsite at Le Lavandou on the French Mediterranean coast, where I have stayed twice before. I was able to be an extra person and vehicle on their double-sized expensive pitch – so cheap for being on a 5-star campsite in that location! – and enjoyed 3 lovely days of more Summer.
This area and the medieval town of Bormes Les Mimosas is beautiful.
The past 3 weeks hold the record for the miles/kilometres driven, and having made the decision that I should return to the UK, I have certainly covered territory in 2 days: 9 hours driving from Le Lavandou to Beaune in Burgundy, mid-way up France, and a further 7 hour to the ferry, with cruise control all the way and Monte2 fantastic. More than 300 miles from Dover up to Lancashire.
So it’s a goodbye again as I sit at the rear of the ship and look southwards at Calais receding into the late afternoon, early Autumn sunlight. I wanted to record the really unexpected wave of sadness which swept over me earlier as the town came into view from the motorway heading to the French coast, the realisation hitting that this would probably be the last time for me before the UK leaves the EU.
I am happy to admit to the depth of this feeling – and to explain it as being like a grief for the ending of my own personal relationship with the EU – and France in particular over the years – and all its potential options that I have taken for granted as being part of my life since I started studying French and German at university in the late 70s. All this emotion found its echo coincidentally and most unexpectedly in those moments by the randomly-ordered Stevie Wonder tracks I was listening to. I did choose to ‘go with’ all the emotions and associated reflection.
My hope is that Brexit will sooner or later become in reality only a bad dream, as I thought it was when I woke up the morning after the referendum 3 years ago. I am a citizen of the UK, but will always feel that my valued citizenship of the wider European grouping known as the EU has been taken away from me on spurious grounds and on balance for no real benefit in the complex, interdependent world of now. I have much sympathy for those EU nationals who’ve been resident in countries other than their own for many years, who now feel everything’s up in the air, beyond their control, and ‘no longer wanted’,
Came across this building – see the caption above the door – in a little Swiss hamlet near the Italian border.
