Redhill to Nantes

My week in Redhill flew by.  I worked closely with Sarah, normally a ‘remote collaborator’ but this week in the room next door.  We ploughed our way through a whole journal on the rural left-behind elderly in China, an article about humanitarian aid in South Sudan and a field guide on agro-environmental measures in Alpine Regions.  Seven articles in four working days! I lot of administration got done (I am now testate) and a lot of wine was drunk. We harvested seven different varieties of apples from trees on an abandoned allotment site and a pub car park and had an equinox ritual and sing along on my last night there.  All the time there I felt protected by the ‘guardian lamp-post dragon of Oakdene’. Thanks for a great week Sarah and Bryn. 

Thirty hours later I was in Nantes, half way down to the Pyrenees with a bag full of goodies from northern Europe for my southern European friends: dropjes from the Netherlands, chocolates from Belgium and cheese from England.  ‘You’re taking Cheese from England to France, the home of a thousand cheeses’ asked Sarah.  ‘Yes it’s Cheddar and I am very proud of that part of our culinary heritage’ I replied.  ‘It’s a British food stuff worth waving the flag about.’  Let’s see how it goes down!

On the ferry I met a hitch-hiker heading south, a likeable young hippy type. We talked. Turned out he came from Corfe Castle where I used to sometimes hang out more than thirty years ago.  Turned out he went to school with the son of the friend I used to visit there and went to birthday parties at his house. Oh -  and he just done a permaculture the previous year.   The world seems to be getter ever smaller as I embark on this quest.

Our 400km journey flew by in a whirl of conversation about permaculture, low impact living (yes he’d read Thoreau’s Walden Pool and quoted me stories from it that I’d forgotten) and Buddhism.  I drop him at a service station just before Nantes and wished him luck on his epic hitch to Perpignan.  Nantes, 600km or so south of Redhill, is considerably warmer and is less blustery than Poole. It’s welcome to wear light clothing in the evening.

Its definitely just a stop over though.  This weekend I have a rendez-vous with an old university friend in Bordeaux, a full moon and the autumn bore running up the Dordogne.  I’ve yet to work out if I am brave enough to ride it (as aoposed to just watching) or if I can make the logistics work to hire a canoe and arrange transport back to the starting point.