Life in a Postcard. Thursday 30th August - Honfleur to Bruges

We weren’t in such a hurry to get home to Bruges that we couldn’t linger just a little over a simple breakfast by the yacht port in Honfleur, and while lunch, like our breakfast may not have been the most gastronomic of affairs, it was indeed made all the more palatable by the view over the Bay of Somme.  Our life in a postcard.

We almost gasped as we rolled over the hills outside Calais and caught for the first time, that view of Dover.  We have always known it was there of course, but have never seen it and suddenly the lack of distance between that Brexit mob and the rest of the EU became astonishingly clear.  At that precise moment we were much closer to England than we were to any other country.  

A little later we did actually gasp as the informal refugee camps rolled past at one hundred and thirty kilometres per hour.  Hundreds of people living in the open without water, food or money, many without shelter. Surviving on air and a prayer it would seem.  If they are as some would have it, just looking for an easier life, and this is it, then it’s a bit hard to imagine what the one they are running from was like.  We have no solution but it is quite clear that there is nothing right about any of this.  Our postcard world is quite different from the one in which they subsist.  

Circle Work. Wednesday 29th August - Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives to Honfleur

“D” Day had arrived.  That’s “D” for “Details.  Amazingly we’d managed to get some sort of consensus on the concept overnight, although it’s hard not to be a little suspicious that at least in some parts excitement was winning over rational deduction.

By lunch time we had the kitchen mocked up, the bathrooms done, the heating nutted out and the landscaping sorted in concept.  While one of us was thus occupied, the other was photographing every nook and junction within the old structure lest questions arise in the coming weeks regarding details that memory might fail to recall.  

Then came a frantic rush to sketch it all before all too suddenly we all had to leave, they to Paris and we a little further north. One moment we were at a table drawing the last wiggly line and making frantic notes in the hope that a draftsman we had never met would understand it all, the next with brain madly spinning we were heading to the sanity of Honfleur.   It might have been the intensity of the two days which in our confusion we had taken to calling “the weekend” that caused the dizziness, or it may just have been the new garden plan, but for now, it is done.

A fellow has to eat. Tuesday 28th August - Beaumont

We are making astonishing progress with the design thing, although our hosts may well have lost a little sleep last night after realising that all of their work of the last several months had been reduced to a blank sheet of paper.

It’s been more than ten years since the last time I’ve carried such an emotional investment in a project, and it wasn’t without a little trepidation that the hazy outline of a new concept began to take shape over the course of the morning.  It all got a bit intense really, the excitement from both sides, as bubble diagrams and arrows, and solar trajectories morphed into use graphs and traffic paths, and boxes which became the outlines of where, at some future time spaces might be.   

It was all moving a little too fast really, rolling at such a pace that there was a risk of acceptance without question, and that will never do.  It was time to step back a little and perhaps to have lunch, so we drove into Beaumont taking time to breath the clear blue Normandy air.  There is after all, no point in one being in France if one can’t have the afternoon off sitting in a cafe with friends, even if somewhere in the distance the sound of a deadline approaching is building at a rate approaching disconcerting.

Space Jump. Monday 27th August - Bruges to a Little Village in Normandy

After six merciless summers spent relentlessly renovating our house in Australia, we could have been forgiven for thinking that we’d had enough of that game to last for the rest of our lifetimes.

When the invitation came however, the opportunity of getting involved in the design process of another renovation proved to be too much of a temptation. Five hundred kilometres is not that far  to visit the site really, and so what if the sun comes from another direction in the northern hemisphere, there’s an App for that.  If we picked up a hire car at morning tea time, we could be there in time for dinner.

“Close your eyes, hold your breath, and always trust your cape.”

Wastin’ away in Marieke-ville. Sunday 26th August - Bruges

Bruges is a tourist town. The heart of the place seems to be bursting with groups of people listening earnestly to guides speaking in twelve languages while offering snippets of hitherto unheard historic secrets, and boats buzzing below every bridge with happy customers just as earnestly being oblivious to the history that they are passing.   

On the face of it escape seems impossible, but one only has to turn off any of the streets on the tourist path to find oneself in a delightfully quiet, ancient city, or if one chooses, perhaps one bubbling with activity of a different kind.   Today, right beside our mooring the twentieth annual “Marieke Fest”  brought us twelve hours of food, music and rollicking good times. 

Were I the skipper of a tourist boat passing by, I could have told my passengers that there are two hundred and eleven community festivals held annually in Bruges, and how not quite unconnectedly, Jacques Brel famously sang of his love for a local girl, Marieke, who lived “between the towers of Bruges and Ghent”.  In 1988, ten years after his death, a statue of her was erected just over there in the park, (under the mustard trees) celebrating the song,  I could have told them lots of stuff, but these are secrets not for tourists, they are for locals.  People just like us.

Besides,  tourist boats don't come this way.

A Whale of a Time. Saturday 25th August - Bruges

It’s “Triennial” time in Bruges, a time when an exhibition of contemporary art and architecture is set out on a path through the town’s historical centre.   

As is so often the case when the words “contemporary” and “art” are mixed in the same sentence there are some pieces which need no explanation, the thought behind them leaping into one’s consciousness like a broaching whale constructed entirely from plastic objects retrieved from the world’s oceans.

Others are perhaps a tiny bit esoteric for we in the unwashed throngs, requiring actual reading of very big words that fail to convince us that perhaps this thing is more than just another really cool structure in a temporary exhibition for which someone was paid a significant sum of money.  Why does it all have to have meaning anyway?   Let’s toast unbridled, unattached enjoyment without the need for further thought.

Here’s to the bloke who invented whale watch tours in a canal in the middle of a city!

In Bruges (Brugge). Friday 24th August - Beernem to Bruges (Brugge).

Quite possibly the easiest way to travel on the water apart from lounging on a cruise ship, is to follow  someone who has been down the route innumerable times before and can speak to oncoming ships and bridges in their own native tongue.  

Instead of spending the morning poring over charts, then plotting our course as we went to keep tabs on progress towards the next obstacle, we simply followed “the Max”. Before we could say “Liquid City”, which is no doubt a clever marketing person’s way of trying to break free from the inevitable “Venice of Belgium” tag, we were tied up in the centre of Bruges.

Before we could say “this seems nice”, Dave and Ria had us off the boats and into the local area just to assure us, not that we needed assurance,  that indeed it is.