Week 2 - In Which One Names One's Rucksack and then Addresses it in French.

This is Day 13 and we are in Bapaume. Spread across this part of France are numerous World War One battlefields, cemetries and memorials. But there is strength in contrast and so I am enclosing a gratuitous picture of a blonde woman standing on a plane's wing.

Gratuitous totty.

So nearing the end of the second week on the road has thrown up many lessons. Principally about exhaustion and the place from which determination to continue hails. Also about how the mind teeters on the brink between coherence and randomness. 

By the beginning of week two I had named my new rucksack Monkey and in the moments when he needed to be reslung on my shoulders after a break or in the morning when he had gained a few kilos from the morning's dew, I found it quite normal to speak to him in French with a mixture of threats and imprecations. Come on, monkey, get up there. Monkey, any more rocking and you end up in a hedge etc.

There are also times at the beginning of the day - the rare days - when after a sound sleep and a decent supper the monkey seems to hop on voluntarily and wraps himself optimistically around my shoulders looking forward to scanning the day's scenery. 

The scenery in northern France is, for the most part, dull. It is largely flat, predominantly agricultural and smells vile. The path is mostly tarmac.

The greatest challenge (feet a cote) has been the weather. The walk to Dover from London was bathed is sunshine and gentle cooling breezes. France by contrast has been relentlessly wet and at some points almost unwalkable. Walking along various Routes Nationales and B roads when passing lorries engulf you in muddy spray and your clothes end up sticking to you like a wet shower curtain leaves a doubt in the mind as to the purpose of it all. 

However, in a town whose name I have forgotten, we encountered a pilgrim friendly gite where there were beds, an equipped kitchen and joy of joys a washing machine and dryer. It cannot even be described the intense pleasure of dry clothes and real sheets and pillows after sodden tents and wet feet. 

The picture above is a curious one. We finally managed to regain the Via Francigena after numerous digressions and poor map reading and headed off down a grassy tunnel only to encounter this. A 30 foot heap of soil and rock deliberately placed on the path to block passage. Climbing it might have been an option but the farmer was up there with an earth mover shifting more soil so we took a mind-bendingly long diversion across Somme inspired fields of mud to arrive in a wealthy village which against all codes of humanity and surely against French law did not have a cafe. Straw, camel, back. We hitched the last few miles into Bapaume and found shelter and rather a good meal in a small hotel next to a largely derelict set of factories. 

In fairness to northern France, they do make pretty darned good beer and despite the rain, a thirst still prevails.

Tomorrow, if the rain relents, I am going to try to find the grave marker of my great great Uncle Harold Sinclair who was in the London Scottish Regiment and is buried at the cemetery at Thiepval.

                                                                 PEACE

And lastly a gigantic thanks to everyone who has made a donation to Global Angels. I am £200 away now from being able to provide an entire village with clean drinking water for life! Anyone, who stills feels able to spare a few quid will make a very big difference. James.