As he boarded the longboat to be rowed ashore to St Helena, Napoleon said (in French ofc) ‘To the water, it is time.’ Which to an English ear sounds like ‘Allo sailor.’
Even though I had found much to amuse me on this little journey, I had missed the English humour.
Napoleon had been born on an island and been desperate to get off it. He had finished up on another in the Atlantic’s Central Channel.
I had never thought of my island home as being imprisoning. I lived close to an airport. I could be in a European city in a matter of hours. But that was before Covid. It had trapped us all and I had tried not to think about it in a claustrophobic way. Of course, getting anywhere during the Napoleonic wars had been a major undertaking too for an English tourist.
But now it did feel strange to me that I would be coming back to my small country. The sceptered isle. Shining like a jewel. Set in a silver sea. Shakespeare must have had a drone.
The dislocation of air travel was what I had been at pains to avoid. With my little donkey I had kept my feet on the ground and experienced distance and time in a realistic way. Instead of being hit by a wall of humidity at the aircraft’s door, it had been a more gradual process. And also one in a changing season…summer to autumn.
People had said. ‘Why not fly out and rent a car when you get there?’ But that was to miss the point. It was the getting there that was the really interesting bit for me.
And then, where exactly was ‘there’ anyway? I suppose you could say that it was the bit where I had stopped going east and started to return home? On a map that would probably be some unmarked sheepfold in Western Anatolia. But again, I had never really thought about it in such terms. I had barely even looked at a map either.
Two months was the longest I had ever travelled. If anything, it was a very short time. For weeks of it I had moved to a new place every day. But had tried to slow it down towards the end and experience some places in greater detail. That had been at the expense of the journey though and I had raced through France as if I knew it backwards. In truth, as I admitted to a friend I didn’t know France that well. I hadn’t even been on these routes in all the years of married life.
And then there were those places where I’d immediately felt at home. That I could have stayed put in for months or even a year or so. Those temptations I had avoided too. I knew that Brendon had felt the same. To stop journeying. To ‘deck down for a bit’ as he’d put it.
All of life is a compromise and every decision a selfish one. I’m not sure if that was a stoical – or even a good – philosophy but it is one that I use all the time to explain to myself why I am here at all.
Most importantly was the perspective it had given me. It really was a wide world out there and full of wonders. But more than that it was the people I had met. The girl who laughed on the supermarket till. Or the traveller I met in the ferry queue.
Anyway, now up the A26 through rain to the Channel Tunnel and back home to dear old Blighty. The land of warm beer and Chapsticks and Brussels sprouts and Wycombe Wanderers.
I had arrived way too early. They put me on an earlier departure but I still had 90 minutes before boarding.
A dreadfully boring passenger terminal building. Full of bad things to eat and buy. Fridge magnets with French flags, Je t’aime Paris etc.
And bizarrely a big rack of Michelin maps for France when everyone here was going to England.
I thought balls to this. So I got in Pedro and we made a break for the border. It was a bit iffy because they’d asked an extra 70 quid to get on this departure. But they just waved us through. It was hardly crowded.
I asked the French woman in the car in front what time we would arrive. ‘It’s supposed to get there at 1020 but in my experience it’s completely random!’ I crossed my fingers at her. ‘Oui monsieur, that’s what I always do too.’
Outside the tunnel England was having a sunny day. The M26 and M25 the usual death by a thousand cut-ups.
I drove in back over the bridge and the Spanish girl had put out balloons…sweet!
We walked and talked over a pint. And then we went back so that I could cook my working wife spag-boll to welcome her home on a Friday night.
I could tell that not a lot of cooking had gone on in my absence. The knives were still sharp.
The new cat had grown big. The leaves were gathering in the garden and I took my shoes off to appreciate the carpet.
East, West, home’s best.
