2023
In 2023, I made two trips. The first, in February and March, was to Israel/Palestine and Jordan. The main focus, at least for the Israel/Palestine part, was on archaeology. But we were also continually aware of the tensions in relations between Israel and Palestine, two states claiming one territory. I was still trying to meet the challenges of writing about these two, not unrelated, aspects, when Hamas attacked across the Gaza-Israel border on 7 October and Israel started to bomb the people of Gaza.
So I’m putting up the second trip, in October, first. This one took me to parts of England, France, Spain and Malta. Most of it was infused with pleasant nostalgia, as well as the generosity of Gill and Hugh in Birmingham, Sue Russell in Lancaster and Yorkshire, Steph O in London, Line and Jacques in Paris, and my travel companion for the rest of the trip, Sue Farrelly.
Zurich-England-France-Spain-Malta
Zurich
Zurich stopover, Wednesday – Thursday 27-28 October
For some reason, getting to Birmingham from Sydney via Omanair involves a stopover in Zurich, where I’ve never been before. There’s a fast train from the airport to the Old Town, and a 10 minute walk across a network of tram tracks and bridges, up narrow, cobbled Niederdorferstrasse, to my hotel. My room is on 4th floor. I fall asleep to the muffled conviviality in the eateries in the street below, wake to a bright sunny morning, and view from my window high gabled houses, mountains beyond.
I’m too early at the National Museum of Zurich (Landesmuseum). I sit on a bench near a sleeping baby in a stroller. When the mother eventually turns up, I go inside for a quick overview of Switzerland’s transition from Swiss Confederacy in the Late Middle Ages to modern Federal Republic, and the influence thereon of Protestant Reformists, Huldrych Zwingli (1484-1531) and Heinrich Bullinger (1504-1575) .
Up the hill to the Kunsthaus, where, given my time constraint, I spend it on the mystical Chagalls and glimmering Alberto Giacomettis (1901-66).
And down again to Niederdorferstrasse, with a brief stop at the Grossmunster to see the Augusto Giacometti (1877-1947) stained glass.
I collect my bag at Hotel Old Town and proceed to the airport. The plane is stuffed with outsized people stuffing outsized cabin bags into the overhead storage. I have to stuff my little backpack between my feet.
England
Birmingham Airport is grubby, arrangements chaotic, the train station accessed through a litter-filled temporary tunnel. My train from Birmingham New Street stops at Selly Oak, because the previous train is blocking the line, waiting for the police to arrive and deal with a passenger who is trying to kick down the door of the toilet someone has locked him in. I take an Uber the rest of the way to my friends’ flat in Kings Norton.
West Yorkshire, Friday 29/10
One goal of this trip is to revisit West Yorkshire, where I worked as a teacher in a village near Leeds in the early ’70’s. I must go today because a train strike is scheduled for tomorrow. Through the smudged train window I vaguely recognise rural and industrial landscapes, villages and dreary brick estates I once knew well, but notice for the first time the twisted spire on Chesterfield church. Arriving at Leeds Station, I’m struck again by its vast transparent roof and Victorian brick-vaulted arches.
After picking my way through the mess of roadworks surrounding the station, I stop for a sandwich in the beautiful spacious tiled foyer of the Art Gallery, before setting off to walk cross country to Headingley. I get only as far as the University, where squalls of wind and rain persuade me to take the bus. The bus is not much bigger than a Kombi Van and crowded with Uni students and women juggling shopping trolleys, toddlers and prams. A student gives up his seat for me.
I alight at what used to be a shopping mall, which is much smaller than my memory of it. In fact everything, the shops and pubs strung along the narrow Otley Road, and the even narrower residential streets off it, seems smaller. It takes a while to remember which street will get me to the flat I rented in Claremont Road. Back in the day the chief of the Leeds police sideswiped my car as I was turning into Claremont from – that’s it – Shaw Lane. The Chief was driving so fast his car didn’t stop till it had scraped another fifty yards along a stone wall. ‘Hello, John,’ he slurred when the Uniform arrived. Luckily, I had a witness.
25 Claremont Road is in a row of three-storey houses that have seen better days. All that remains of the small conservatory in front of my old ground-floor flat is a broken concrete apron, now used as a parking space. A flight of stairs at the side still gives access to the flat above, where the occupants used to make loud love to Carly Simon singing ‘You’re So Vain’.
Apart from Claremont, the streets and lanes of my old neighbourhood have attractive stone houses with expansive gardens shaded by magnificent old trees.
The wind and rain having stopped, I ask directions back to the city centre and soon am on the Meanwood Valley Trail. From Headingley, it meanders up through dense green autumn woods, along a ridge with glimpses through the trees of the valley, and past handsome brick terrace houses with steep, luxuriant garden allotments, before descending onto a main road. From there I weave my way up through residential streets back into the city centre and onto the wide promenade of Briggate.
I detour into the airy, light-filled, steel and glass roofed Victorian arcades that radiate off Briggate, before arriving at those standout examples of Victorian architecture, the Corn Exchange and the City Market buildings on Kirkgate.
Many of the Victorian buildings, their original purpose now obsolete, have been converted into hotels or department stores, their elaborate facades, that once signified Britain’s commercial dominance in the world, now defaced with gaudy advertising.
On this Friday evening, Kirkgate is populated with harmless gangs of inebriated football fans and young Goths with tough hair, tough tatts, tough vapes, tough clothes with tough holes in them, tough voices and scatological vocabularies, as well as commuters hurrying to the station because, if they want to go anywhere for the weekend, they must travel tonight.
I have time for a cold lager in the lounge of the Queens Hotel, next to the station entrance. The elegant Art Deco ambiance is spoiled by the duff-duff music coming from the bar, where in 2011 the (closed) coffin of the paedophile Jimmy Savile, as well as his last cigar, was on view for 4000 curious visitors.
My train, which started in Edinburgh and will terminate in Bristol, is crowded. I’m relieved that the young man who gives me his seat gets another when a lot of people alight at Derby.
Bournville Village Trust, Saturday 30 September
My friends Gill and Hugh and I walk to Northfield shopping centre through part of the Bournville Village Trust, which features streets of terrace houses, fields and ponds. The Trust was the legacy of the Cadbury family who made their fortune in chocolate and whose Quaker beliefs prompted them to provide their employees with decent homes in a healthy environment. Hugh’s parents were Cadbury employees, and he grew up in a Trust house.
In the afternoon another friend, John Wells, arrives with Tilly the cocker spaniel and he and I go for another long walk and talk through the fields and meadows and woods of the Trust, which John says isn’t so trustworthy, as, post-Brexit, it started to sell former recreation land to developers.
Birmingham to Lancaster, Sunday 1 October
We take an Uber to Winterbourne House and Garden, once owned by the Nettlefold family. Like the Cadburys, they were philanthropists, but, being Unitarians, they made their fortune in armaments. The house is restored as it was when the Nettlefolds lived there, with Morris wallpaper and period furniture.
The garden, having been neglected for decades, is now maintained by the University of Birmingham. It’s beautiful, with beds of plump brilliantly-coloured dahlias, cosmos, windflowers, a cactus house full of amazing cactuses, apple trees espaliered on stone walls, woodland paths and ponds.
In the afternoon I take the Intercity to Lancaster, where Sue Russell, a fellow adventurer friend, meets me. Sue lives in the village of Halton-on-Lune, a few miles out of Lancaster. She is keen to show me her home patch, so, after a brief tour of the streets of Georgian houses below Castle Hill we head south to Glasson Docks, near what would be the mouth of the River Lune, if the river hadn’t silted up long ago, forever locking in the hydraulic sea gate. Glasson Docks was once a very important port for Britain’s slave trade. From a nearby headland, as evening closes in, we can just make out Heysham where vessels depart for Belfast and the Isle of Man.
We repair for a lager to The Mill at Conder Green, on the Lancaster Canal. Seduced by the evening light reflected on the water, we stay for a Lancashire Hotpot, before driving north to Halton. Sue’s house is opposite the open but empty Grey Hound Pub. Sue says the pub used to be busy at night, but has had to reduce its services because of post-Brexit staff shortages.
Lake District, Monday 2 October
We set out for the Lake District. At a certain point, the crags and fells appear and we turn off on the M6 into narrow, twisting, hedge-lined lanes and head north along Windermere. Just before Ambleside, we take a sharp left over a little bridge to Elterwater. Sue’s car is just small enough to squeeze into a slot between two SUV’s.
Elterwater is a lush valley nestling amid fells and crags covered with red heath. Along with many other walkers and their dogs, we follow the swift little River Brathay, skirting pastures of hardy Herdwick sheep and belted Galloway cattle, to Skelwith waterfall, and an abandoned slate factory which used to produce different coloured slate unique to this region, but has succumbed to Chinese imports. We have lunch at Chesters Bakery and Shop before walking back to Elterwater. On the way back there’s a long delay getting back onto the M6 because one of the many tourist buses that ply these once rural roads has impaled itself on a low wall.
To Carlisle, Tuesday 3 October
To Settle, through the Lune-side villages of Caton, Cloughton and Wray, via the A683 and a back road over the moors, to Settle Junction, where we park the car and wait on the station, with a busload or two of tourists, for the train, which is coming from Leeds. Settle Station, with its red and white painted buildings and hanging flower baskets, is a popular starting point for the scenic train trip across the Yorkshire Dales and through Westmoreland to Carlisle.
At first the landscape presents gentle slopes of green pastures interspersed with clusters of trees and separated by dry stone walls straggling towards distant crags under fat, somnolent clouds in a wide blue sky. Near Ribblehead, just south-east of the Viaduct, the flattish fell of Pen y ghent, the lowest of Yorkshire’s three peaks, comes into view. After we’ve crossed the Viaduct the other two, Ingleborough and Whernside, rise, grim and treeless.
Between Ribblehead and Dent, at 350m above sea level the highest National Rail Station, the landscape is all hills and vales and winding rivers. Walkers, with dogs, hike the paths down beside the railway tracks. All the stations along the line are brightly painted and decked out with vintage lamps and tubs of flowers. Near Appleby, the last station before Carlisle, the landscape softens, with villages, woods and farms nestling beside the winding Eden River.
Carlisle Station, known as the Citadel, is another of those palace-like railway structures the Victorians specialised in. The interior features an impressive slate-topped sandstone wall supporting a glass and steel roof, and its façade combines neo-Gothic and neo-Tudor styles.
The town is hemmed in by busy main roads which we have to negotiate before arriving at the Cathedral, described by an ancient volunteer guide as ‘the second smallest Cathedral in the country’. This was due to the combined ravages of Cromwell’s Puritans, and fires, which resulted in a series of idiosyncratic compromises and adaptations of former structures over the last thousand years or so. Somehow, many beautiful ancient features of the Cathedral have survived, such as the carved misericords, the pulpit, stained glass, medieval frescoes (which under the Puritans were lime-washed, but are now being revived). The ceiling has also been brilliantly repainted with motifs inspired by the Arabic patterns in Granada. Exiting the Cathedral, we wander among ruined walls and through the lovely old Close, where some of the lucky faithful occupy the houses.
On the journey back just before we cross the Viaduct, there is another view of massive Ingleborough, with its distinctive sleeping lion shape. When we reach Settle, not satisfied with the glimpses from the train of the curving Viaduct, we drive back along the road to drink in its stupendous arches against the evening light, beneath wide grey cloud-filled sky.
To Caton, Wednesday 4 October
Early rain. Sue and I have a leisurely breakfast and exchange book recommendations (I already have James Rebanks’ The Shepherd’s Life: A Tale of the Lake District on my reading list, now add Peter Ackroyd’s The History of the British Isles) before setting out, against a strong wind, to walk to the neighbouring village of Caton.
At the edge of Halton we pass a row of co-op (community) houses, which are solar passive and powered through a hydro plant in the river. The hydro plant was an EU project, which fortunately for the community was completed before Brexit. We tramp along the muddy path on the steep banks ofthe Lune, and over the fells. At the crook of the river, we see again in the distance the distinctive outline of Ingleborough.
To York, Thursday 5 October
We set off for York about 10am, first retracing the roads to Settle, between impossibly green, dry-walled fields dotted with sheep and cattle, views of the three peaks in the distance, under big glowing cloudy skies. Past Skipton, we take the A65 and reach Ilkley around midday. We park near a Bettys, one of the chain of cafes that originated in Harrogate and now has branches wherever there are rich rural inhabitants and curious tourists like us. We drink Betty’s Yorkshire tea and eat Betty’s dainty, perfectly triangular egg and mayonnaise brown bread sandwiches with coleslaw on the side.
After our posh lunch we drive around the pretty town nestled in verdant, wooded Wharfdale, and up to the Cow and Calf, huge bare rocks on the edge of the bleak, windswept and rain-spattered moor. Back in the early ‘70’s, when I first arrived in West Yorkshire, for a few weeks I shared a flat in an austere brick terrace house below the Cow and Calf. My flat mate didn’t see why I needed to waste electricity on a daily shower with hot water, so I got a flat of my own at Headingley.
We descend again to the town where a bad-looking accident forces us to detour through semi-rural roads until we can re-join the A59 to Harrogate. We spend an hour or so exploring this handsome spa town with its beautiful Georgian terraces, gardens, Pump Room, Turkish Baths and many upmarket shops. We would love to indulge in a massage in one of the Georgian Buildings which has been converted into a health spa, but time is marching on and, besides, they are booked up for weeks.
We arrive in York late in the afternoon. Our accommodation is in the York Wheatlands Lodge, a stately mansion converted by the owners’ husband and father, who died just before Covid struck. It’s thoughtfully furnished and appointed and the family who runs it and their employees are sincerely friendly and hospitable. As we are tired after a long day of driving and (for me, nostalgia inflected) sightseeing, we have dinner at a nearby Italian Restaurant, Valentinos. We are almost the only people there, but the food is very good.
York, Friday 6 October
A 15 minute walk down Blossom Street takes us past the Art Deco Odeon theatre, and to Mickelgate in the ancient walls, and to the centre of town and York Minster.
In the Minster there is a lot to see and admire: the stained glass of the Great East Window, the Rose Window, the Quire with its carved Misericords, the exquisite Chapter House, the Crypt, which contains the tomb of Saint William of York, and the Undercroft Museum.
There are a lot of statues and long-winded memorials recounting the exploits of past worthies of York, while The Museum contains a timeline of the two millennia of York’s history from pre-Roman times, as well as descriptions and displays of the succession of buildings on this spot (including a Roman fort) and the engineering that has been employed to support the current building.
Taking a break from the wonders of the Minster, we explore the labyrinthine streets and alleys and shopping opportunities. Like Leeds a week ago, the town is filling with gangs of young and not-so-young things, loud footy fans, raucous dress-up hen parties, with tats, shorts and skirts barely clearing bum-cracks, bare midriffs, nose, ear, lip and belly button piercings, eyelash extensions, heavy brows or none, huge, collagened lips, stiff hair.
We return to the Minster for Evensong and when we get back to the now crowded restaurant, it’s dominated by a party of raucous Geordie lads, settled in for the night with a lot of beer lined up on their table. We slip out and return to Valentinos.
York, Saturday 7 October
We walk down to Miklegate, up the steps and onto the walls, which we go around clockwise, taking numerous photos of changing views of the many church spires and ancient defensive towers. We descend to cross the Ouse River by Lendel Bridge and head back to the Minster to complete our tour of the Undercroft display.
When we finally emerge, we lose our bearings again in the labyrinthine lanes among huge crowds of people, some well into their Anglo-Saxon weekend binge. At Miklegate we bid goodbye and Sue returns to the Wheatlands to get her car and drive back to Halton. I walk part of the walls, anti-clockwise, along the residential part of town, then back along the riverside to the centre. I return to the Wheatlands for my luggage and proceed to the station for the London train.
London and Streatham, Sunday 8 October
Today I’ve planned to go to Streatham, in south-west London, where for a few months in early 1971 I flatted with a friend, before moving to West Yorkshire. I take the Underground from where I’m staying at Lancaster Gate to Oxford Circus, where in the past I would catch the 159 bus to Streatham. The 159 isn’t running this morning, however, owing (I learn from the drivers of other buses) to the London Marathon, road works in Picadilly Circus, and various other post-Brexit contingencies.
So I walk down Regent Street to Piccadilly Circus, which is being chopped up with jackhammers, and continue to The Mall, which is blocked to traffic for the changing of the guards at 11am. Unlike the multilingual tour groups and loose spectators climbing the lampposts and statuary for a better view, I bypass the Palace and continue to Victoria Station, where I take a train to Hearne Hill.
Outside Hearne Hill Station there’s a bustling Sunday morning market, where I buy a bread roll and a banana. I resist the temptation to join the people and dogs disporting on the sunny green slopes of nearby Brockwell Park, and instead catch the 201 bus to Streatham. The whole expedition has taken longer than the train trip from York.
7 Farnan Road looks exactly as it did in 1971, and probably not very different from when this part of Streatham, with its semi-detached three-level terrace houses, was developed in the late 1900’s to house newly minted upper middle class families who could afford servants. The house has the same portico and front door, path along the side to the back garden, side entrance, mezzanine and attic room for the maid. My friend Sue and I occupied the mezzanine and attic, and there was a makeshift plastic shower cubicle on a little landing between the two.
The house is only a few streets away from Streatham Common, originally part of an extensive network of open heathland and woodland known as the Great North Wood where local residents could graze their livestock. Over time large areas were enclosed and sold off for development, but part of it was saved and designated a Metropolitan Common in 1884.
I ramble through woodland and over grassland and meadow. I sit on a bench at the top of the long, languid slope of the Common, taking in the expansive views of South London, eating my banana bun. Then I wander along the paths of The Rookery, a historic formal garden within the Common, which is intersected with rippling streams and alive with birdsong.
Returning to Streatham High Road, I spot a 159. I climb the stairs to the upper deck and sit right at the front trying to reclaim memories of this route, from Streatham Station through Streatham Hill, Brixton, Kennington, Whitehall, Trafalgar Square, and Piccadilly Circus, to Oxford Circus. Brixton and Kennington, then dilapidated and occupied by disaffected squatters, have been spruced up and now appear to be respectably middle class.
Voting at Australia House, Monday 9 October
I’ve arranged to meet my friend Steph at the Australian High Commission at 11am, when voting on the Referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament will be open. It’s another lovely, sunny day, lots of ducks, swans, squirrels in Hyde Park. I walk along the Longwater and the Lido where people are bathing in the Serpentine. From Hyde Park Corner, I continue on The Mall, against the crowds heading for Buckingham Palace to see today’s changing of the guard. Around Piccadilly Circus there are streams of unhelmeted cyclists and scootists dodging through the traffic and narrowly missing pedestrians.
Queue barriers outside Australia House are adorned with Vote Yes! placards and there are several volunteers handing out how to vote leaflets, but nobody needs them as everyone here, it seems, intends to vote Yes. The queue is long, so we walk along the embankment, for views of the amazing architecture on the other side of the Thames. We cross the Millennium Bridge for lunch in a cafe that serves a great fish stew, then return to Oz House. I vote Yes, and we continue to Trafalgar Square for the Hans Holbein exhibition at the National Gallery.
Back at Lancaster Gate, the traffic stops and starts with the traffic lights along Bayswater Road, except for the suicidal cyclists and scootists.
London to Paris, Tuesday 10 October
My last morning in London. The television news is all about the Hamas attack on Israel, Israel bombing Gaza. I cross the road and join all the other people who can still enjoy a beautiful morning in a peaceful park, the squirrels, ducks, swans and songbirds.
I take the Tube to Oxford Circus, then St Pancras, where unlike the old, pre-Brexit days, there are long queues for passport scans and border checks, organised chaos. Then across the Brie, the flat fields of Normandy. From the Gare du Nord, I take the RER B through the inner suburbs of Paris to the terminus at St Remy les Chevreuse.
France
My friends Line and Jacques meet me at the station and we drive through villages and ploughed, recently fertilised farmland, to Jacques’s house in Le Mesnil Sevin, one of three hamlets of the Commune of St Forget. The attractive old village houses and walls in this feature the very hard reddish-biege-yellow local stone called meuliere (not to be confused with the local Chateau de Mauviers, set in woods carpeted with mauve cyclamens).
As always, Line has planned fascinating excursions for the next three days.
Fountainebleau, Wednesday 11 October
An hour’s drive brings us to Fontainebleau, established as a chateau in 1528 by Francois 1 (reigned 1515-47), enlarged by Henri IV (1594-1610), renovated by Louis VX (1722-74 and redecorated by Napoleon III (Emperor 1852-70). When he wasn’t campaigning, it was home to Napoleon I (Emperor 1804-14 and March-June 1815), who was deposed in a room here. Napoleon detained Pope Pius VII in an apartment at Fontainbleau for a couple of years until he agreed to crown him in Notre Dame de Paris.
The royal apartments are sumptuous and reflect the periods in which they were established. There are many paintings, parquetry ceilings and floors, period furniture and rococo plaster sculptures and trompes l’oeil symbolising the greatness of the kings who commissioned them, or just for fun.
St Gilles and Auteuil, Thursday 12 October
In the morning, Line shows me the frescoes in the local village church of St Gilles. The 16th century frescoes were damaged during the French Revolution, and they, and remains of a medieval church and wall paintings, were only rediscovered during renovations. To distinguish them from the originals, the reproduced parts are covered with fine striations. In one of the frescoes, Francois 1 is depicted as Solomon and Francois’s mother, Louise de Savoie, is by his side, under a depiction of God the Almighty, who evidently endorses their earthly importance.
In the afternoon, we take the RER B from St Remy to Denfert-Rochereau and then Metro Line 6 To Trocadero and Line 9 to Exelmans, to begin a walk in Auteuil, in the 16th Arrondisement. It’s a living museum of Art Deco buildings, many of them designed by Hector Guimard, and features villas – private lanes of handsome old houses – , and iconic Guimard-designed entrances to the Metro. The architecture and urban decoration are so absorbing that we are only able to cover half of the walk Line has planned, so will have to do the rest next time I’m in Paris.
We call it a day at l’Eglise Auteuil, take the Metro to Javel, then RER C to St Michel Notre Dame, then RER B back to St Remy, where Jacques meets us around 9pm.
To Orleans, Friday 13 October
To Orleans, through flat countryside, in the vast agricultural area of northern France called the Bourse. Very breezy day and a lot of dust in the air from the recently ploughed and fertilised fields.
We lunch in the Place de la Pucelle, dominated by a statue of Saint Joan, the maid of Orleans, on a horse. Line and Jacques go to meet a possible project manager for the renovation of the apartment she has bought in a nearby street, and I stroll through the commercial centre, a broad boulevard lined with tall apartment buildings and upmarket shops, and the ancient quarter with its Roman road, and half-timbered houses, and the Cathedral Saint-Croix with its magnificent stained glass depicting incidents in the life of Saint Joan.
On our way out of town, we stop to explore a suburb in which the buildings feature decorative multi-coloured brick work, and which is criss-crossed by little lanes, called venelles, overgrown with escapees from the potagers and flower gardens of the houses that back onto them.
Paris to Narbonne, Saturday 14 October
Line and Jacques drive me to St Remy for the RER B into Paris. At Chatelet les Halles I change to RER A for Gare de Lyon where Sue F and I have arranged to meet outside the concierge. We deposit our luggage before walking to Bercy for lunch at one of the many popular restaurants. The Parc du Bercy is the site of former docks along the Seine for wine warehouses, and the extensive gardens include grapevines to commemorate this former function.
Returning to Gare de Lyon, we discover that the main station for the Grandes Lignes has been evacuated by Security and all the trains are delayed. We share a chicken wrap on the train and arrive at Narbonne around 9.45pm. There are no taxis and we get hopelessly lost trying to find our AirBnB on foot. We ask directions from some women walking back to their car after dinner, who very kindly drive us to rue des 3 Nourrices.
Narbonne, Sunday 15 October
Rue des 3 Nourrices is named after the caryatids decorating a maison particulier on our street. It is one of many narrow streets between tall buildings with Renaissance facades, blue-shuttered windows, colourful doors, and balconies with iron balustrades. Les Halles, the big covered market which in 2022 was voted the most beautiful market in France, is close by.
We spend the day wandering around the town, frequently getting lost in the winding streets that surround the Canal de Robine. Like the Seine at Bercy in Paris, the Canal de Robine was once a dock for winegrowers, and Narbonne is one of the sites of the bloody conflict that came to a head in 1907 between the the French Government and the winegrowers of Languedoc protesting against taxes and the oversupply of adulterated, imported wine. Today parkland flanks each side of the canal and there is a Sunday morning flea market on the broad promenade. The walls of the canal sprout flowering plants and one of the bridges spans a lock and weir. One reason we lost our way last night is that the Pont des Marchands, part of a long street of shops (like the Rialto in Venice) is closed for renovations, and Sue’s GPS wasn’t informed.
The old town includes vestiges of Narbonne’s Roman origins and subsequent occuptions by Visigoths and Saracens. The present population includes families of former refugees from Spain and pieds noirs who arrived following the Algerian war. The public places are very spacious and handsome, and there is a colossal Cathedral which was started in the 11th century to rival that of Notre Dame and Armiens, but which has never been finished. Part it is used for religious services, but I can’t imagine that funding might be available to restore the part that’s accessible, let alone finish the rest.
Passing by our local church, the Basilique Saint Paul-Serge, we see a poster for a performance this afternoon of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and Gloria by the choir and soloists of the Prague Opera and the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, so we buy tickets. The performance is superb, as is the gothic interior of the basilica.
As evening descends we enjoy an aperol spritz at a bar on the promenade, before to the AirBnB for a supper of supplies we bought earlier at Les Halles, baguette, prawns, tomatoes, a lettuce, fennel and clementine salad, strawberries, grapes and cheese. And wine.
To be continued . . .