Slow road back from Italy

If I were more organised, I would have alerted visitors to the fact that I was going off-blog for 10 days or so while I accompanied my mother back to her native ground, namely Lago di Como. I fear I get my lack of orgnasation from her as she loves nothing better than jumping in the car and taking off.

We wanted to scoot through England, trickle through France and efficiently cut across Switzerland arriving 3 days later on the shores of the Lake. Which is exactly what we did.

However, I realise that trickling is not something road builders want us to do. Particularly in France where there seems to be a choice of fastness: expensive fastness (on the toll motorways) or efficient fastness on the route nationale roads or everyday fastness on the D roads. Most villages are side-stepped with roundabouts and ring roads. All this is very discouraging for the tricklers and dawdlers who want to trundle through the villages remarking on the lack of life and abundant boulangeries.

When I studied French at University my speical subject was Michel de Montaigne. I loved his Essais and the wonderful Malcolm Smith who taught us. He was the sort of professor who when invited to Rome, just packed his suit in his panniers and started pedalling southward on his bike. He was also the one who suggested to me that I translate into English Montaigne's Journal de Voyage (his diary of travels involving searching for some relief from excrutiatingly painful gallstones). Alas, Malcolm was summoned to the great cycling piste in the sky at a shockingly young age. Maybe it is time to revisit the Journal de Voyage and see how it compares to today.