WHERE HAVE I BEEN?

WHERE HAVE I BEEN? 

I have to apologise for my absence from this blog over recent weeks. I joined a creative writing course which was part of the Oxford Literary Festival in March and that occupied my mind considerably both then and now and for the intervening period. It was held in Corpus Christi college and we, all 27 of us, were housed in that historic place where many notable feet have trodden over the centuries. I was probably the oldest person on the course but because I am ever-youthful in my mind and a joy to all I come across, it made no difference at all to my enjoyment of my younger companions and, no doubt, their enjoyment of me.  Pause while you smile in an understanding sort of way.  As the course ended we, the students, decided that we should set up a Wordpress blog to which all of us could contribute and so keep up the pressure to write (creatively, of course). Somewhat in the manner of holiday friends who exchange email addresses and then never communicate our blog lacks input. The statistics for the site are good – people are reading what is posted – but not enough is being posted. There’s masses of stuff from Keith Diggle but he is now holding back because he thinks that a preponderance of his work, excellent as it may be, might be counter productive. Well … maybe I’ll just pop in another couple of pieces.  

I also took a holiday, a train holiday, down to the Dordogne in April. The term train holidays might make you think that the principal means of transport throughout one’s holiday is the train. No, the train is your means of transport to your destination. When you are there you travel from place to place by coach. The train bit is the journey from St Pancras to the Gare du Nord, Paris. You are then ferried by coach over to the Gare d’Austerlitz and then travel southwards to Brive where a coach continues the journey to the destination, Le Bugue. I found the train part highly resistible. Packed into Eurostar Standard class, sitting at a table of which the support pressed painfully into my knee then crammed into a bog standard French train down to Brive where there is no free luggage space, apart from overhead racks which required of me the strength of Hercules to raise my suitcases above the level of my head so that they may be used. The five days spent touring that delightful area of France were superb; every minute was enjoyed. There were charming people in the group, including two men who, seeing my plight on the train, took the suitcases and lifted them as though they were matchboxes and there was a most charming and efficient tour manager. Now I am saying nothing about the hotel where we stayed. I shall leave that for another time. What I will leave you with, for the moment, is my feeling that such train holidays (run by a company called, wittily, ‘Treyn’, are really for people who cannot bear to fly and I will also leave you with one very interesting fact about French railways: when a train stops at a station only 3 minutes are allowed for all passengers and luggage to disembark and for new passengers and luggage to board – so it was when we arrived at Brive and when we departed via Brive.

 

I shall try to be more attentive to you all, dear readers, in future.