travelling to Calais and having fun

Driving to Calais from London to buy wine and food can be a tiring chore almost, but if you view it as travelling in northern france and take a weekend over it, then you avoid booze cruise shopping and get a short holiday in France. I really love this kind of short break, especially if it can be a long weekend, you get travel and eating and photography all combined in one go and an excuse to do some writing too.

It always amazes me that so many people get no further than the end of the tunnel or the local supermarket. I guess it is just down to time and money. However something so nice awaits you just over the road from the supermarket you are avidly shopping for wine in. If you can make a few days of it, then you can explore the Pas de Calais region.

The countryside is wide and the skies are large, but there are patches of forest and canals and lots of farmland. Small villages pepper the landscape. Though it is largely a similar land to the Kent countryside, it feels different, with the edges of frenchness blurred by Flemish and english occupation, yet still identifiable as northern france. On the way here through Kent you can observe on the map French names of villages, here the "inghem" of Flemish dominates in the village names. Happily this also contributes to the nice local beers too.

It feels quite agricultural here, but industry makes its presence known, paper factories on the river Aa leave their steam in the air. It is also more open here, less enclosed and built up than England. Though maybe this is a reaction of a Londoner to the wide open spaces, but the land does feel less hemmed in, the lack of hedges makes the views longer. People seem to value their space more, or maybe it is that there is more space here, after all France is a lot larger that the UK.

Coming to the north of France and visiting the markets and eating good food in the restaurants is an escape, and maybe it is that which I am reacting too, the different cultural influences the novelty and variety. Or maybe De Gaulle was right and the UK is not really part of europe. Listening to This Sceptred Isle - 1960s (buy it) in the car on the way back home makes you think odd thoughts. The parallels with today and the likely coming war are stunning.