The Passage of Time

18/09/07
Gollinhac, France

Outside now the daylight has just begun its wane, the sun having set behind the hill this town covers. Gollinhac sits high above the surrounding valley floors, a verticle difference of some 1500ft, and the view from this perch stretches into the tens of kilometres. On the surrounding lower valley walls small villages and hamlets cling, each marked by a small stone church spire - visible, like the golden domed gurdwarras of the Punjab, for miles. I'm reminded again of the organisational sentiment of such physical expressions of faith - 'Where the church spire can be seen, there the parish lies.' Here the parish is everywhere, church spires visible in all directions.
France seems quite actively secular in a thoroughly Catholic way. Yet the cultural influence of Christian history is strong. Here in rural France time is a very regulated commodity. The day begins at the civil hour of 7am with the ringing of the church bells, and people begin to eat their breakfast (7:30 is also quite usual). From after breakfast until midday shops tend to be open (apart from Sundays and Mondays) and businesses run. However, come 12pm the nation, or at least these silvan parts of it, stops. For the hungry traveller caught out by the vicissitudes of the march between towns the period between 12 and 2pm can be dispiritingly cuisineless. Best to have procurred a baguette, saussicon, cheese, and an apple beforehand. A chorus of rumbling bellies often the only sound one hears during these hours. After this the towns burst into activity again anew, and the roads into and out of town can often be a danger to the famished pilgrim, senses dulled by starvation.
As such the day continues until 6:30pm when public life again begins to grind to a halt. At ten to six the church bells ring, calling the faithful, penitent, hungry, or bored to attend to their sins before the most strictly regulated of all the daily events - Dinner. 7pm is, without exception or variation, the time one eats, drinks, and talks around the dinning table. Often, despite typically mid-sized meals, this will last until 9:30pm, at which time people wander off to bed. By 10pm the cobbled streets and alleyways are empty. The townsfolk sleeping, readying themselves for the new day tomorrow.
It is, for a foreign walker (and worker) who speaks little of the language and knows less about the cultural vagaries, a maddening, infuriating way to run the world.
The thing is, I love it!! It makes the working life secondary to family life. The day revolves around the table - breakfast, lunch, and dinner - at which every day all the members of the family sit. School, work, fields, all are secondary to the family table. Everyone returns home.
It is a heirarchy I could live with.
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Avec fromage?? Non!

Alain stared absently at the table. It had been a long day even though we had not covered much distance - heat and hills were the culprits for our exhaustion. I tore off a peice of baguette and picked up a slice of saussicon. This caught Alain's vacant eyes, and he watched expressionless as I folded the bread around the saussage. However, his expression changed from blank interest to incomprehension as I, at the last minute, decided to cut a sliver of camembert off and combine it with my two other ingredients. With the squidging together of bread, saussage, and cheese his vissage spoke of incredulity, and he watched, slack mouthed, as I began to chew. A strange mixture of anger and pity played around his features, and he erupted with "Avec fromage?? Non!..." Shaking his head sorrowfully he lamented something incomprehensible in French and then said, "Thees eez verry Eeenglish. Verry bad."
Such was my first gastronomic faux pas for this trip. I knew the French (and especially Lyonais (sp?) like Alain) were fiercely proud of their saussicon, but I had no idea that it meant there was an embargo on it being combined with cheese. Bread was fine, just not cheese.
My second also involved cheese and was again accompanied by the look of pity and the shaking of heads. It was lunch, and six of us were eating by the Lot river, just after Estaing. I had a baguette, saussicon, camembert, apple, chocolate, and dried figs and, as is the custom, offered all I had to the others before taking any for myself. My first bite was a slice of saussage, but with my second - the cheese - the familiar shaking of heads began. I was politely told that the cheese was to be saved for last.
Of course, there are more than just gastronomic faux pas to be commited. I think I've probably offended a number of people with my gesticulations and poor choice of words (always a problem in a foreign language). But my favourite is funny rather than offensive. We were on the Causse, a very sparesly populated area between Cajarc and Cahors, and it was very cold - something like 5 degrees. I had run inside after attemting to find the village phone booth and after shaking myself commented to those gathered waiting for dinner, "C'est foie ce soir, non?". A brief second of blank faces (one chap even craned his head to see if this actually was the case!) greeted me for a second before the laughter erupted.
The translation of that sentence I'll leave up to you. The word I should have used was 'froid' - they sound very similar.
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Not a Valley, Not a Town, Not a Flower-Filled Field...

So here I am on the Chemin de St Jacques de Compostelle. At the moment I am in Conques, a town famous as a resting point for pilgrims on the way to Santiago, for the relics of St Foy that the church holds, and for the fact that the whole town is so well preserved that, in its entirety it is a historic monument. Like many pilgrims before me I am having a rest day here, partly because it is so absurdly beautiful and partly because I have a sore knee. Such is life!

The days spent walking here from my starting point in Le Puy (on the 11th of September) have been spectacular. The weather, always a matter of discussion and observation for the walker, has been fabulous, with only a day and a half of showers so far. The majority of my footfalls have been under a warm sun amid a spotless azure sky - an Indian summer, as they say.
The country through which the Chemin (path, way, track) passes up to this point has been tough, with many steep valleys into which one must descend (hard on the knees) and then climb out of (hard on the thighs). This is the high plateau of central France, the centre of which, for the Cemin, is Aubrac. This is the land of high-country beef, lentils, and aligot (a form of mashed potato so crammed with cheese that it can often be stretched like string). The Way itself makes its way through this land, passing by little towns (never more than 4000 ppl), that often have local gastronomic delicacies. I can now see why the French guide to the Chemin is Called Miam Miam, Do Do - loosely translated as Eat eat, Sleep sleep. For many of the natives this is more than a religio-cultural exercise, it is a gastronimic Tour de France!
However, the thoughtful quiet of the magnificent landscape that it is a part of more than make up for the small pains to one's legs. Even in just nine days of walking the occassions upon which I have stopped to look in amazement and chuckle, disbelieveing that this is my work-life, have been too numerous to count. But in the scheme of the project it makes quite some sense, at least in a post-Romanticism world.

Spending these days walking along side green pastures, the lazy ringing of the cow's bells and the crunch of foot and staff often the only sounds in my ears, I am reminded of the words of poet Thomas Gray who, after a day's walk in the Swiss Alps, wrote: "I do not remember to have gone ten paces without an exclamation that there was no restraining. Not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff, but is pregnant with religion and poetry." Gray was in search of the sublime in nature, places that stir the emotions beyond the adequacy of single words to describe. How do you put into words the emotion evoked by a valley, a town on a facing hillside, a field? A loose jumble of them, our usual response, is typically only partially adequate. These are places we call sublime.
But cows and aligot aside, I can confidantly say that this is a wonderful experience. Not a valley, not a town, not a flower-filled field goes by without my registering their sublime beauty, and my luck and privilege at being able to pass them by as a pélerin (pilgrim), an ethnographer (of sorts), and a lover of the world. In this event-space I am at home.
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In the Garden of England

I wrote this first paragraph sitting in the car from Heathrow:

24/08/07

My word I love this England!! The depressed grey skies, steadfast and determined; the trees decked in their summer finery, crowded with rich green leaves that each clamber for a touch of the slivers of sunlight that march across the countryside from time to time; the rows of town houses, a coverlet of moss on each roof and many windowed so that the occupants (like the trees) can catch whatever sunlight beams; and the flat, low-rise city of London, without need for brash skyscraper developments (though they are growing in number), whose legend and majesty comes from the long trodden earth.

Back to the future:

That little passage doesn't really have a point, but I like the way it manifests my thoughts about England as I 'hit the ground', so to speak. I always get that feeling when I arrive here. It's like coming home, even the first time I arrived here I felt that strange skipping of the heart, the keen intake of breath, the instinctive deep love of the land. But I can't really discover why without retreating to some anachronistic notion of 'mother country', at least for that first instance.

Now, however, I feel like there is a relationship. I have inhabited this land, and now it inhabits me. And maybe that's how it is for many of the places we visit, or at least those we fall in love with. There is a bond, an almost physical bond with the heart. When we do feel a love for a place we never leave, and it never leaves us. I remember sitting in the aircraft climbing out of Delhi and having the same sense of physical loss or sadness - I felt I was leaving a part of myself behind. But it was also a pain of distance, of absence. I suppose that's why the destruction of a place (through war, economy, drought, or tourism) can be so traumatic for those who have only visited, as well as for the inhabitants. Their's is the pain of a small heartstring riven.

So when I come back here I am, in quite an emotional sense, coming home - at least to a part of me. It is an emotional home because I get it, I understand it in ways that I can't describe (and that I don't really understand, if that makes any sense). But also, because England inhabits me, the relationship is two way. It is a home because it gets me. In some small, incomprehensible way England understands me.

Of course, you can't really escape the fact that this is simply a beautiful country. Cobbled roadways winding through a monopoly board of street names and emerging onto green fields filled with natives out to catch the fleeting rays. The many armed tube, double-decker busses, and 'the knowledge'. Jellied eels, cheshire cheese, and beer served without extraneous carbon dioxide... oh I love this England.

But I think I might defer to Kipling to close (from The Glory of the Garden):

Our England is a garden that is full of stately views,

Of borders, beds and shrubberies and lawns and avenues,

With statues on the terraces and peacocks strutting by,

But the Glory of the Garden lies in more than meets the eye.

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