A degree of excitement, tinged with tension, had been rising at Wonderman Towers due to preparations for our first trip to Europe since we were so woefully set adrift from it by the twin disasters of Brexit and Covid 19. Our destination is Catalonia, where our old Manchester friend, Fran, has set herself up to live organically on an off-grid finca. In keeping with the spirit of COP 26, we chose to minimise carbon emissions by taking the train, which meant leaving on Monday at lunch time and arriving on Wednesday in time for supper. But, before we got started, there was the business of PCR testing, which occupied a chunk of Monday morning and was the source of the largest part of the tension.
Day one took us as far as London, where we met mutual Manchester friend and co-traveller Jo who, like Fran, is of the vegan persuasion. We spent the evening together, swapping stories and speculating on how our adventure would pan out. Given that we have the idea of staying with Fran for perhaps a month, the possibility of harmonious relations being unsustainable for so long must be taken into account. But the opposite also applies and we may all get on so well that a mere month will be too short. It is, therefore, opportune that we have not booked return tickets, though the official reason for not doing so is the unpredictability of Covid-imposed travel restrictions.
Day two and, when morning came, it brought with it the good news that our PCR tests were good to go, which made the taxi ride to St. Pancras station relatively enjoyable. The only potential obstacle we now faced was approval by French authorities of our completed “sworn undertaking to comply with rules for entry into metropolitan French territory”, an unconvincingly self-validated form printed off from the French embassy site that looks as if it was compiled by an office junior. In the event, one of the French border officials glanced at mine and the other did not ask for my companions’, though both wore an expression of contempt, which I interpreted as their smouldering resentment at Britain’s departure from the EU. I could imagine them, during their coffee break, saying that De Gaulle was right to have said “Non!” to perfidious Albion becoming a member. Nevertheless, we were allowed to board Eurostar, which whisked us to Lille while I finished reading the recently deceased Clive James’ Brilliant Creatures, a novel published in 1986 and written in the style that characterised his way of speaking at the time. It would have made a good audio-book.
From Lille, we travelled to Nimes, where we spent the night. By the time we left for Barcelona in the morning, I had finished reading Duncan Weldon’s Muddling Through, an account of the often incompetent, sometimes dogmatic ways that Britain’s economy has been managed since industrialisation. Even though the text includes statistics that would normally cause my brain to atrophy, the story is so well told that my attention was held to the last page. You couldn’t make it up, as they say. And on day three, despite being distracted for a while by the sight of flamingos as the Barcelona train sped through the Camargue, I started How Democracies Die (Levitsky & Ziblatt), getting far enough through the section on Donald Trump to be frightened by just how close America has come to transforming itself into a dictatorship, for the time being, at least.
The last leg of the train journey took us down the coast to L’Ametlla de Mar, from where Fran ferried us in her electric car to her isolated, starlit finca and introduced us to Stefano, itinerant Italian and resident ‘workaway’. Over a convivial supper, we began the process of settling into the dynamics of our situation. Solitary reading time is over, for the time being.
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