Up before the larks this morning for a Kerouacian sort of day, driving to Barcelona. It is always a pleasure leaving Paris at five in the morning, without the plague of traffic. On the run down to Orleans, in the dark, I passed a car towing an old racing Bugatti, which was a joy to see and seemed somehow apt in the circumstances, as I an headed for the Spanish GP. No, perhaps today is not as glamorous as the days when drive such cars down to San Sebastian, but each generation must make the most of what we have, and this knocks spots off Easyjet or the dreaded Vueling.
After the aeolian-infested plains south of Paris, it was over the Loire and into the vast forests that stretch to Vierzon. I have stopped for coffee at Salbris, just adjacent to the international karting circuit, where many a young star has cut his teeth. If all goes well I’ll be in Clermont-Ferrand before 10.00 and then it will be up and over the Massif Centrale and lunch in the Mediterranean sunshine.
There are times when the life of an F1 journalist really is grand – early mornings and all.
I’m sure there are a number of F1 journos that would disagree with your statement about being grand, but most of those would also fly EasyJet so can easily be ignored.
Enjoy the remainder of your drive.
please – stop it – I’m lucky enough to live on the Californian coast but the memories of such a drive – might just have to move back to the old home
Sounds rather better than a wet English morning and a run over to Nuneaton!
Drive safely.
Aah that made me jealous Joe! I did a driving tour of Europe in May 2008 through Germany, Switzerland, France and Belgium. Incredible. Certainly beats the bejesus out of our Australian roads.
Joe,
You’ve made quite a few posts over the life of the blog about “leaving early to drive from Paris” , and it always reminds me of that early morning (Claude Lelouch) Ferrari video, and that makes me smile.
Thank you.
Trivia, but kind which made me a car nut forever, it was a 450SEL 6.9, the Ferrari engine dubbed afterwards, the Merc chosen for the air suspension which kept the gimbal mount of the camera level. You can definitely sling that Merc around every bit as nuttily as the film showed, but upshot was those wonderfully smooth pictures which by being stable, simply make you feel like you’re on a rocket. C’était un Rendezvous. Pure delight!
Do you need an apprentice?
Bag carrier?
Tea maker?
I’ll shine your shoes for you if you take me with you
G
My copy of Grand Prix Saboteurs arrived yesterday. Looking forward to reding it but letting my dad go first. Hope you see more Bugattis.
Good idea, I will buy the book too.
I love driving in France. Not only did I pop my cherry driving my dad’s Rover 825 when I was 14 on a quiet French lane, but I have also enjoyed many spirited drives through numerous valleys and coastal routes. My wife was once so determined to stay as close to the sea as possible that she ended up in an Oyster farm somewhere near Roquefort…
That’s just showing off. Couldn’t you use the back seat like everyone else?!
Hey Hippy Nick, yeah, my mom got second go after me, I’m such a rotter!
But it’s amazing how little even my family suss of all the non uniformed personalities who fought in the war, and my Uncle was War Office. Sure he was zip tight on talk, as you are and must be, but he always dropped heavy hints to me as a boy to make me think about things in human ways, not treat it as sterile history, and by so doing made all life brighter
But I am surprised how much an eye opener Saboteurs was for my octogenarian mom. It’s a real up front and personal tour of a different world.
If I have any criticism of the book, it’s the sheer density of characters, but every one picked out so well. I read it in sips, and shall risk a once through gulp sometime soon. It’s just a little too potent for my taste, goes to my head, but I often try to pack so much thought in scribbles here I pervert the language, and Joe most certainly commits no such sins!
Saboteurs could have been three books, or half a dozen novels, or one helluva screenplay.
The only screenplay on a level with that detail I can think of is The Kremlin Letter. I’ll link that below, but for all its awesomeness, it took me several viewings to unravel the plot finally. If you want a copy, sadly you are searching for Laserdisc versions to own a nice clean picture. There are blaggable versions, just messy transfers. Recommended it any way you see it. The cast sells it. The complexity sank it. Except strangely it did best in France. Maybe there is a kind of appreciation that links all this that explains why the French liked that movie, maybe making it relevant here now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kremlin_Letter
blast it, somewhere I have a copy of a really in depth deconstruction of the script, which seems to have disappeared from the internet. Which is what helped me to really unravel it finally.
Joe, you should really look at this flick, I reckon, point of view how to keep so many intertwined plots going. Or maybe not how to do it, if you think commercially, about getting your screenplay sold! My father sold novel rights twice, but they stalled too long on the convolutions, and the production plans just fell apart. Working out how to transform stories with authenticity has always fascinated me. I seem to be able to do it, simplify, for my sales pitches, but that’s a whole other thing, trivial stuff in comparison. I can’t condense my own writing hardly at all, as you all know, for example. I keep thinking there’s something more to learn *how* to write that can condense time, make the pages zip off the platten. A nut to crack I haven’t thought quite how. There has to be more to it than just inspiration, though I do hope you take heart you have a expectant audience for your next works!
That sounds like a lovely way to spend a day Joe. The pleasure of just driving somewhere gets lost these days with so much traffic on the roads.
Joe, lovely trip. You remind me of a holiday – oh, 40 years ago now – that my mate Steve and I took, both excruciatingly impecunious, in his Mini, with a borrowed Boy Scouts tent shoved into the back seat. We crossed from Newhaven to Dieppe and made a point of calling in at Andorra en route to the southern Spanish coast where we hoped to encounter crumpet. I recall some time after leaving Andorra we were delighted to coast the Mini for about half an hour with the engine off. Oh, the glorious fuel economy!
On the return trip, somewhere in the Massif Centrale I was bitten by what I thought was a horsefly.My arm came up like Popeye’s arm and was very painful. With the pain becoming more acute by the minute, Steve pulled into a wayside petrol station/café somewhere deep in the countryside. The delightful lady owner was most solicitous about my now gigantic and increasingly red arm and enquired as to the nature of the beastie that had stung me before administering some miracle potion. My schoolboy French was not much chop but I tried to provide an answer. Horsefly, horsefly… I searched my memory and suddenly burst forth triumphantly: “C’etait un chevaux volant!!”
“Oo, la la!” she laughed, flapping her arms as if they were the wings of a flying horse.
Great memories in this thread – having encountered some of those hornets, I can confirm they are about the same size as a small horse!
Joe,
If you met this Bugatti in the south of Paris, on the RN20 not so far from Montlhéry, then there is a big chance that I know very well the driver of the car towing it. If you’re interested I can arrange a visit to a wonderfull old looking garage with superb old cars.
That sounds pretty damned good. One assumes a train journey is out? Stay safe.
Difficult to cross the Pyrenees, because the trains in Spain run mainly on the plain.
I’m so very, very sorry.
You could get a TGV from Gare de Lyon towards Perpignan and change at somewhere like Montpellier onto a Spanish train which looks like it should be pulled by Thomas the Tank Engine – apparently the little carriages are to negotiate some twisty tunnels – and the good news is they are extending the high speed line on from Perpignan so TGVs will go to Barcelona in due course.
I looked at that. It takes about nine hours when you add it all up… and you have no care when you are there.
Sounds fantastic! Greetings from a wet and windy Edinburgh
Sounds wonderful. Find a job you love and you never have to work a day in your life!
Joe, this prose reminds us all why you’re more than just a “blogger”. Beautifully worded and entertaining, and making us all envious.
Cool trip.
My favorite time at any race track is the sunrise before the noise.
If you haven’t seen it, there’s an excellent documentary about Clermont Ferrand during the war, called The Sorrow and the Pity.
#coffeeshopjoe becoming a recurring theme huh?
Very jealous, as ever, Joe.
Your mention of Kerouac reminds me that there is a guy called Kirouac on the road across Canada at the moment. On a horse. Dressed as a knight…
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/story/2012/05/09/ottawa-quebec-knight-rides-across-canada-for-valour.html
Three stops short of Dagenham, he may be, but you still have to tip your tile to him.
Poor horse, thats so wacked there is something strangely admirable about it. Maybe Joe should just borrow his helmet.
I have been reading your blog for about a year now. I am delighted to write that I am truly impressionné with the depth, incisiveness and sheer quality of your inputs. Simply peerless.
On your way back from Barcelona, try to make a stop at Charade and retrace the roads of the historical circuit. I suspect we will love to read your impressions about un circuit d’homme! ( I raced there some… 30 yrs ago )
Many thanks for the energy you put in your blog Joe.
If you’ve got a lifelong “hobby” which also pays the bills and allows you to enjoy and truly appreciate life on journeys like yours, you are indeed a lucky fellow! I’m sure it helps to compensate for the less pleasant parts of the job. Enjoy Barcelona…
Joe, anyone who can get the name Gorden Bennett in one story and “Aeolian” in a compound in the same day is my hero.
Only, having grown up around classicists and musical nuts, I got very confused:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Aeolian_mode
I imagined you were plagued by scales being played and sung, in the fields south of Paris, and for the sheer surreality, I can only love you more!
Aeolians are French windmills, but as they do not mill anything the French decided that they could not be moulins, so they were named as Aeolus, the Greek god of winds. The musical link is because Aeolus was supposed to play the harp by blowing the strings…
Thanks, Joe! I guessed at the wind / music link, but was none the wise to the windmill etymology. I think it still qualifies as a impressively strange view, presuming they are wind turbines. I need to reverse my lengthy urbanization, take some classics to read . .
Ah – you looked it up before me. Etymology. From French moulin, from Late Latin molinum (“mill”)
For what reason I do not know, but I presume covetous fancy, books like the Compact 2 Vol OED (optically condensed) never seem to come back from storage. I guess they just look valuable. Or there are secret geniuses lurking in menial jobs, scratching away at literary masterpieces. Or there has been such poverty in education, people succumb to magpie instincts, like hoarders trying to survive intellectual Armageddon, baked beans tins, check, powdered eggs and milk and Camp coffee, check, OED and a set of obscure historical genealogies, Check!
So Keith, I am currently getting by with internet searching, plus fuzzy intuition, which really is a sub par combination. I had much more of a clue about all this when about 10, when steeped in it! All I have now are vestiges, the remnance which require salving though fresh immersion. I also thought that – not suggested in any etymology I could find online – the Doppler effect of a whooshing turbine blade, might sound like a scale, as the pitch changes as it flies by. Blown, as a flute.
My love of the French comes from how they can find lyricism in simple words, where us Angles seem to point with blunt literal sticks. I don’t mean to demean who can write, but I mean the depth of common speech. Which in turn creates reciprocal arrogances, because of the different places where meaning is embedded, and the accessibility thereto. We went for the Meccano set, they for the oil painting, one so direct and the other evocative, and forcing one to be the other is something of a feat. You have to work hard to construct – to my ears – nice sounding English prose, and just as hard (for me) to write laconic unambiguous French, who love the idiom in daily life. Of course, each is complicated by presumption of the interpreter! Which is the delight I receive even for the simplest of things. Just, with such scant knowledge as I have, I often feel I can wring far more meaning from my non native tongue, so fee I should have a proper proper go.
Oh yes, I do the very same route every year, but starting from Kent.
French roads are far better and the drivers don’t hog the middle or fast lane, and once south of Orleans the traffic is very light.
Regards,
“Martin”
one time F3 driver
Never been to Clermont-Ferrand, but Chabrol’s 1997 flick Rien Ne Va Plus is filmed there for the central act. It’s a light affair, but Michel Serrault and Huppert, lots of double crosses, and self deprecating melodrama make it properly enjoyable. A sufficiently unusual caper / heist story it stood out for me. It barely skirts being shmaltz, but does that so skilfully, all can be forgiven. Not much liked by “serious” Chabrol fans, but give it a crack. If you do watch it, imagine the briefcase is holding Bernie’s flotation plans, when it comes to the climactic scene, backdrop Tosca’s execution scene played loud by gangsters!