Camping first day (bloody French keyboards)

Wednesday's Times (30^th sept, p 19) said customers in a china shop in lavenham were surprised when a woman (described as being 15 stone) fell through a skylight into the shop, onto a table dispay. She had stepped out of her flat upstairs onto some sort of ledge or balcony for a fag. This kind of thing is less rare than you might think. Last Sunday while we took our daughter Lucie out to supper in Finchley, a similar accident took place at her flat. Some people in the apartment upstairs had been drinking when their guest went out for a pizza. Coming back without a key and unable to wake them from their torpor he decided (of course) that the best thing to do was to climb up the back of the building to get in. It was pitch dark and he was carrying pizza, so he did well to get up above the glass roof covering the groundfloor patio (outside my daughter's room). However he fell through the glass and who knows how badly injured. When we came back from supper the ambulance was there and a crowd of coppers. We had to wait to get our car out while they patched him up for the journey to hospital. My daughter and her flatmate were left with blood, broken glass, smashed patio furniture and shock. So, beware people falling through your ceiling.

Here we are in fine autumn weather east of Arras, at the beginning of a long week's camping holiday heading down to Venice for the Juice Plus conference. Norfolk Line crossings are excellent, business like, calm, etc. First call for me in France was to take some photos in the bizarre chemical/industrial landscape just east of Dunkerque, in a place called la Grande Synthe. You have to keep heading for the back road near the sea, crossing unmanned level crossings, and going through this mad area which has tiny farmhouses and willows and harvested fields on one side, and huge steel furnaces, flares, spheres, retorts, fences, stacks, flues, hoppers, tanks and spoil heaps on the other. To your left is the old history of northern France – land reclaimed from the sea, feudal farms, peasantry, obsessive care of the terroir, then wars and rebuilding. To your right is newer France – chemical industry, huge-scale metal working and aggregates, massive lorry-loads of materials, filthy air, brown smoke, stinks, nausea, and this absolutely fantastic landscape. Then, as you drive away, it all goes back to quaint, pretty, orderly farming again.

One field very amusing... the onion harvest had been made, and all and sundry had arrived to glean the leftovers. We saw cars driving as fast as possible into the field and people scurrying around snatching up the left-over onions.

We camped at Boirry le Notre Dame, on a gently sloping field with distant view and not many people about. Realising we had left quite a few things behind in the frantic haste and full timetable before we left, we headed to a supermarket to make up some deficiencies, then came and cooked foie de veau and pasta for supper, and then went to bed. As I write, Andrew is folding up the tent and we will set off towards Reims or Metz. to a part of France we barely know. Goodbye for now.