The Chronicler reflects on holiday time on the Normandy coast in May.
For the whole length of the Normandy coast, through the Pays de Calais, on to Dieppe and the Franco Belgian border the architecture is small seaside home sitting in their own garden space. The villages and towns of two-storied houses laced by narrow cobbled streets. Rusting tractors coupled to empty boat trailers awaiting a fishing crews’ return. Remnants of war. Toppling observation towers turned dovecotes; dune-shrouded pill boxes turned graffiti artist canvases; defensive bunkers turned visitor attractions. The old thatched houses, their roof ridges capped with clay, growing Van Gogh purple irises.
Winding through silent back ways, along gravel shores with the beach huts newly installed and freshly painted, to suddenly arrive upon another visitor destination. Crowded with wandering pedestrians, a vintage merry-go-round playing organ-grinder melodies, a slowly gyrating Ferris wheel, pavement cafés spilling onto the cobbles. The crenellation of old houses that watch down on the patient queue of traffic awaiting the lifting bridge’s return as a fishing boat makes its way up river. It’s all images of low impact tourism.
It takes high octane navigation to find these silent slow-ways.
Cross that border with its chocolate retail opportunity, to return down to a very different shore line. The physical geography hasn’t changed, but the social structure has. We’ve arrived in Belgium.
It’s early Sunday morning; the dog walkers finishing the ablution duty, the road runners pounding the pavement, the cafés slowly waking up. These are constants everywhere on any shore, the difference is in the built environment. A cliff line of ‘crete,mortar and glass, nine storeys high, crowds over a shining esplanade of wet glazed tiles. The quadro-cycle vendors are capturing their first sales: two little girls on pink mini ice-cream carts, sans gelato but with tinkling bells take off down the way, whilst the boys opt for the more macho aggressive dino-cars and moon-trucks. So unlike those contraptions that flash lights, sound sirens and rock back and forth. Generally observed neglected, or with an expectant toddler awaiting a doting grandparent to insert a suitably sized coin, outside a supermarket. These contraptions have no fancy plastic mouldings, fibreglass fascias or branded Disney decals, these are the constructs from a competent blacksmith’s forge. We’ve found them in many an Andean plaza, it’s just a surprise to find them here and in such quantity.
By around the fourth sales stance we’ve been induced inadvertently into playing dodgems and exit, taking a sharp swerve away from the shoreline, to join the clans of cycling families out on the roadside paths.
Inevitably the trail pulls us back down to the sea, only now the esplanades have given way to a restricted path, wicket gates and drifting sand. And passive-aggressive pensioners on electric bicycles.
When we get to chatting with e-cyclists we often get the embarrassed comment: ‘oh but we’re on electrics’ as if they are are some form of inferior transportation. To which we always reply that it doesn’t matter, that it’s all about the number, it’s ’Critical Mass’. Only now I’m wondering if there’s a place beyond critical mass and how might it be termed. ‘MultitudinalCM’, where numbers increase beyond a certain amorphous point, where nobody will acknowledge another. You don’t wave at the oncoming driver on your local morning motorway commute… it’s the same here.
Coming towards me are couple of a certain age. Tall, slim, erect and very proper, two abreast with body language that screams “we do not single-down”, “ this is how we always ride”, “you will take to the dune of soft sand”. Being the visiting acquiescing foreigner, we do. Oddly, we seem to behave in a similar manner on the narrow pavements at home; but there, The Navigator has rebelled and developed a severe case of that well documented condition: dropped shoulder with sharpened elbow. They pass in total silence, gaze rigidly to front, no recognition, pedal cadence in perfect harmony. Cycling synchronicity. At least they weren’t wearing matching ‘his and hers’ shell suits. I, on the other hand, am now left feeling small, slovenly, and very plebeian. Intimidated. Extricating 34kgs of un-electrified bicycle from my now stationary predicament, I noticed a phalanx of similar superior beings bearing down, only now from both directions.
If that was ‘magnitudinalCM’, then the next incremental increase is ‘ProfusionalCM’ which is Brugge at 07.45 on a Monday morning outside the mainline railway station.