To Europe and Beyond #7: Boulogne, France, Part I - Boulogne, France

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Well, the one thing that the short and none-too-glorious drive to Boulogne afforded me (as the scenery was about as interesting as a lecture on the drainage systems of Papua New Guinea) was plenty of time to work through what I felt and what I knew, or thought I knew, about France in general.

This entire trip was engineered to shock me out of any preconceptions I had, both on my social self and my introspective thoughts and also on the world around me, so I figured (now that the sleep deprived madness had abated and left my mind somewhat uncluttered) that now was as good a time as any to begin.

So then, just what did I really know about France?

Well, the answer, aside from the usual uninitiated notions of onion salesmen on rusty bikes, the answer was a very plain and very shameful next to nothing.

As I mentioned earlier, I had been to Normandy before but all I could remember from that prepubescent sojourn were crepes, a sketchy memory of a weird place by the name of Mont St Michel, and a slingshot visit to a really big cemetery with lots of white crosses set out in rows which freakily managed to line up, whichever direction you looked in. The poignancy of that vision was obviously lost on a kid whose prime interest at that time was centred on the consumption of as many chocolate bars as possible in as short a space of time as possible (my personal record was 11 Mars Bars in an hour, but that's a gluttonous tale for another day). Oh yeah, and I also remember buying and setting off enough Bastille day bangers (big bastards about the size of a stick of dynamite) to ensure that anyone over the age of 60 became fully convinced that they were once again under the onslaught of another invasion from the might of Hitler's Germany.

Then a couple of years ago I went to Paris, but I was with a girl then so we'd done the usual "young couple in the City of Lovers" thing and foregone the artistic and cultural pleasures of that great Gallic bastion. We had opted instead to make a very determined effort to shag ourselves into early graves by way of a four-day long sexual marathon. I think we only came out of the hotel twice, once to stock up on food and wine, and the other time to buy a vast array of sex toys with which to do yet more damage to ourselves.

So, I think it would be only just to say that I'd not really seen a great deal of France.

Then, back to my original question, just what the hell did France mean to me?

What did I really think it would be like?

What did I expect from our closest continental neighbours?

The first thing that struck me was the fact that France, because of its geographical closeness to the UK, often gets overlooked as a possible destination for the British population.

It's just a little too close to visit as, if you've just slogged your guts out at work for 50 weeks, the trend follows that when you get released from the capitalist prison for your 14 days of freedom then you really want to feel as though you are actually going somewhere, or at least somewhere a considerable distance away from your office or factory entombment. Hence the popularity of places such as the USA, Turkey, the Greek Islands and Egypt.

Most people in the South of my country treat a trip to France like a trip to the local off-licence. They simply put the car on the ferry, go to a French supermarket, buy hideous amounts of booze and cigarettes, drive back on the ferry and then drive back home to get arseholed on Stella Artois, Biere Blonde and crap Cabernet Sauvignon (I have a sneaky suspicion that the French keep the best for themselves) at a barbecue for them and their neighbours. Then they wake up with bad hangovers, bad-temperedly jam the kids and some clothes into a huge suitcase and then fuck off for a fortnight of egg, steak and chips in the essentially English resorts of Marmaris (Turkey) or Malia (Greece) or opt for two weeks in the company of a huge talking rat in Orlando.

Such is the whim of the average UK holidaymaker, unable (as they generally are) to accept that a higher form of culture exists than that to which they are currently tethered.

For your average 2.2 kids, semi-detached house family the idea of setting off to France for a holiday is tantamount to insanity.

Northern France, with its emphasis on industry and war memories (an action I fully endorse) and Southern France, dominated by the act of little else but growing grapes, combine to ensure that France, as a whole, holds little for the family with two surly kids in tow.

Trying to extol the virtues of Impressionism or the heritage of The Revolution to hyperactive bundles of acne-riddled adolescent fury, or explaining the joys of wine-tasting afternoons to a clumsy kid with his chocolate-spattered face buried deep into the screen of a Nintendo Gameboy, are indeed actions of the utmost futility.

The kids want Kids Clubs, beaches where they can utilise their buckets and spades to their full potential, and days full of hijinks, and their suffering parents just want a little bit of gentle peace so the 'all inclusive' beach holiday in one of the Costas is the ideal arrangement. And thus the cultural delights are ignored.

The kind of people who do actually head for France from the UK tend to be 30-something, happy-camper couples, bonk-obsessed early 20-something pairs who would be equally as happy in a radioactive rubbish tip in the Ukraine as long as it held enough locations in which they could shaft each other senseless (such as a bed, a shower, a microwave oven or an old woman's handbag) or retired old ladies and gentlemen whose idea of high-octane excitement is opting for choco-sprinkles on top of their cappuccinos, choosing Lapsang Souchong instead of Earl Grey tea or, god smite them dead for their blasphemous indulgences, having both cream and jam in their morning scone.

Not that I'm saying that this is a bad thing, as it ensures that most of the fellow British countrymen you come across in France are comfortably cultured, genteel and almost always pleasant, as virtually all the '20 pints and 15 hallucinogenic pills brigade' are busy working their way towards a self-directed lobotomy in the 'ever so peaceful' resorts of Ayia Napa (Cyprus) and Faliraki (Greece).

Coming across bead-and-kaftan-wearing 'new age' art and nature loving couples (usually named Clarissa and Nigel) who wax lyrical for hours about Sartre, de Beauvoir and Descartes or meeting white socks and sandals, shirt and tie, two piece dress suit retired geriatrics (or Arthur and Edith) is fine by me as they are well behaved, quiet and don't leave a trail of vomit-laden destruction behind them.

But alas, I'm off on one again, lost in the midst of another condemnation of my country's younger generation (we're not really all like that though) so I'll attempt to get back to my original question (and I hope you forgive me that last tangential ramble) of just what France means to me.

Firstly, ashamedly, I must admit that a great many of my preconceptions on France have been formed through paying too much attention to the media and such 'perfect' renditions of France as Hollywood representations of all things French.

I closed my eyes for a moment (a pretty stupid thing to do when driving at high speed on what I naturally consider to be the wrong side of the road) and let the images of what I took France to be wash over my senses.

Parisian architecture and pointy-spired chateaus amidst sun kissed grape fields, farmers in white shirts and braces following a large horse and a plough, Stella Artois and Chardonnay, dramatic statue guarded cemeteries full to overflowing with philosophers and artists, baroque cathedrals dripping with gargoyles, Pink Panther movies with Inspector Clouseau and Kato karate chopping their way through bedroom walls and pounding each other with kendo sticks and frying pans, chalk faced mime artists in black and white striped jumpers coming up against invisible walls, onion salesman, expensive restaurants serving frogs legs and snails, funny accents, the River Seine and finally a total disdain, bordering on the fanatical, of everything even remotely relating to the English in any way.

This was a fairly exhaustive list of everything I had ever seen on the TV or read in a book or a newspaper, but so far I had seen nothing to uphold any single one of these notions.

I had naively expected all the countryside to be of the green and rolling variety.

But what I instead saw was the aforementioned green and pleasant land rudely interrupted by tracts of gross industrial scenery.

Sure, I understand that every nation on this mental orb of ours requires its industry and its commerce, but it somehow went against everything that I had expected from France.

What I wanted and needed was nature to forever banish the tainted memories of my youth spent in a fairly heavily industrialised part of England.

In a way I was lucky enough to grow up in a very rural area, surrounded by rivers, meadows and waterfalls, but not far from my little County Durham haven were the lurking steel monsters of the cities of Newcastle, Sunderland and the hideously rotting Middlesborough. This was what I so wanted to get away from.

So driving past pictures of industry and poverty was not the ideal way to put me in a sightseeing frame of mind, but I wasn't far from Boulogne and things would certainly be different there.


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