Mum: (snatch of conversation through kitchen door, while making tea) Nick’s the one who’s getting Parkhurst…
Me: What’s Parkhurst?
Dad: High security prison on the Isle of Wight.
Me and Nick: Er.

Be advised those with no interest in or comprehension of war-nerding can freely skip the first paragraph. The rest is about food and castles.

The Musee des Blindes in Saumur, the French version of Bovington or Kubinka, was just about as fantastic as I was hoping. They had no evidence of a Char de Rupture 2C (obviously, the real things were all totalled back in 1940, but I was hoping for at least a picture or a model) but that was the only thing lacking. They had otherwise a full quota of Cool French Armour I’d never seen in the metal, including a huge, ominous looking Char B1, a Schneider CA of ‘16, and my favourite military-industrial-corruption failbomination, the Char St. Chamond. There was a Nazi Germany gallery, a general WW2 gallery, a Warsaw Pact gallery, a modern French gallery, a modern everyone-but-French-and-Warsaw-Pact gallery, and a “stuff that doesn’t really go anywhere else” gallery including a broad selection of missiles, fancy cars, fancy cars with missiles, APDS rounds, recoilless guns, spooky murals involving tanks rolling out of rivers, and the mad Vespa TAP (yes, that is a Vespa scooter with a 75mm gun, and yes, you can technically fire it while driving, though it’s not a very good idea.) Highlights of the whole thing included a FT17, a Merkava mk2, a shiny new Leclerc (which proudly considered itself the best tank in the world, just like the Challenger 2 at Bovington, the Leopard 2 in Munster, and I’m sure an Abrams in every American museum that can afford it), the utterly insanely huge AMX-50, and a mobile tactical nuclear missile launcher. A++ would warnerd again.

We visited the underground chateau at Breze, which was unbelievable – a circular artificial canyon a dozen metres deep with hollowed-out dwellings and fortifications positions dug into the soft stone of both sides (and about as much wine-making infrastructure as defensive infrastructure – French priorities). It had been built up and down over the thousand years since people first dug there, so musket casemates became parts of the winery, and now the central oldest part has a traditional fairytale chateau built on top of it with its own set of Renaissance attractions, but the eleventh-century defensive posts and grain stores of the troglodyte castle beneath are the most amazing part.

The other chateau at Saumur-proper is of similarly mixed heritage but far less original, with a pretty pointy-turreted chateau built atop a brutal bastion-and-ravelin-style trace italienne. Parts of the crumbling outerworks (it really is soft stone in those parts) were covered in scaffolding, with the flaking bridges and ramparts being replaced by fresh new stonework, masons rebuilding the same bridge with the same skills as five hundred years before. This we probably do still have somewhere in Britain, but it’s much more poignant and miserable to lament on the lost skills etcetera don’t make anything in this country any more etcetera etcetera, and you honestly don’t see much of that sort of reconstruction around. Then again, just at the foot of one of the crownworks was a stoneworkers’ guild, courtyard littered with half-carved fountains and gargoyles, so it’s entirely possible this is a vanity project of theirs rather than a Civic Reconstruction Project to show us rosbifs that Everything is Better in France. Off in the hazy distance, the white golf ball of a nuclear power plant gleamed.

Lunch that day was had in a sort of greasy spoon version of a French restaurant, which is to say that while the food was relatively cheap and certainly deliciously unhealthy, it was still a five-course meal. The steak was blue, and classically French, and the chips just like Mum’s homemade ones; the starter course(s!) taught me that pickled beetroot was pretty alright stuff, and never to exhale through my nose while my mouth was full of pungent French mustard. There was a fantastic picture of the proprietor, cigar and glass of wine in hand, expression of well-fed smugness on face, above the counter. It looked like it had probably been painted thirty years ago; he and his wife were the dignified side of seventy, and it pleased me to think of all the delicious meals they’d made and sold through their lives.

Then there was a mushroom museum, which was a thousand specimens of strange French-labelled fungi on the way to miles of visitor-accessible caves full of mushroom growing infrastructure. I’m going to leave it at that; it requires no further explanation.

Journey back by car ferry (so even if we’d tarried long enough, we wouldn’t have been cut off by this volcanic Second Sign of the Apocalypse – how boring), and a long drive home through the swishing darkness. Have reams of pictures but still looking out for good gallery software. Facebook, alarmingly, is looking like the best option here.

By the way, it turned out to be a mug with Parkhurst on it.

They still use firewood a lot in this country. Where in England the woods (the few we have left; something about building a bitchin’ fleet a few hundred years ago?) are mostly tangled, unkempt wilderness, set aside from proper human cultivation and only in certain places grown for furniture or carbon credits, here they actually use their wood, and so use their land to grow it. Fields of evenly spaced poplars just blend in with the other crops; every part of the land is put to right and proper use, which I find wonderful.

There’s… I’m trying to avoid saying there’s a better relationship with nature, because that’s missing the point and is stupid hippie shit, but… there’s no wilderness there, everything is cultivated, flourishing and under control. The woods are beautiful but they’re going to be cut down for furniture and winters, and replanted; there will always be woods here, because that’s the way they do things here and they’ve been doing it for centuries. There’s no wilderness here, no sense of nature gone wild or conflicting with humanity; but humanity isn’t conflicting with nature, the farmhouses are unobtrusive and widely scattered, and don’t seem to be eating up the countryside with ugly motorways and urban sprawl. Every part of the land has its own clearly delineated purpose, the roads and fields are well maintained, and they burn locally grown trees for warmth. Which is probably going to see them in good stead in the future.

So a Frenchman in a truck unloaded a huge pile of logs in the garden and we spent a while passing them in a bucket chain to the firewood store and stacking them up neatly; and we got on our bikes and rode down lanes bounded by glittering streams through carefully planned woodland. The weather couldn’t have been better for cycling, sun high but not too bright, air cool and breezy but no headwind, and the land had enough ups and downs to keep from being monotonous but not enough to make it hard work. It felt like spring.

We went to a restaurant recommended by Jez & Sue about a dozen miles away, and had a ten-euro “workman’s lunch”. Apparently it is law in this country to give working men an hour lunch break and ten euros to spend on a Proper Restaurant Lunch, which struck me as deliciously French. Speaking of which, three courses centred around steak frites had us all happily stuffed. (Despite constant gibing from Dad, my opposition has never been to French food, it’s to shitty English approximations of a picnic using cheap crusty bread and goat’s cheese, or super-cheap creperies making wobbly egg things that hadn’t been cooked so much as walked through a warm room. Also horrible weather and being constantly browbeaten by parents. I love French food. I hated certain French holidays in the past.) Tried the wine that came parcelled with the lunch, just to see if I like the taste, but no.

Getting back was considerably less fun due to poor navigation across millions of identical Maine-et-Loire country roads, the yowling, snapping-at-your-ankles farm dogs everyone seems to keep here, a puncture and a few sterilisingly painful unsurfaced roads. Also the navigator taking off backwards to look at a farm without telling anyone and making us go back and look for her. But still, it was a grand day out.

The long crossing wasn’t bad, all things considered – “all things” being five people in a cabin for four, a cramped, rather smelly affair the size of a portaloo. We woke and went up on deck, watching a spring sun dawn over St. Malo, its fortifications standing out among the rocks at low tide.

While the cruel, twisted Continental custom of driving on the right I can comprehend if not understand, French signing conventions truly befuddle me. “All directions,” to start with. But we were off the main roads soon enough, with their dextrous traffic and strange French existential limbo, and drove west along the polder coast. On the way we encountered a yard lined with a few dozen large, flat-bottomed wheeled ships. Ships with wheels, not entirely unlike the ones I’ve been writing weird far-future science fiction about. Wha? I think they’re for oyster farming, which would make sense in the huge tidal mud flats thereabouts. Got out and took pictures (still need to find something decent to host them), and already we could see Mont-St-Michel looming on the horizon, a sculpted grey mountain in the coastal haze.

Stopped at a car park out on the causeway, lined with Frenchmen and signs assuring us that our car would not become another wheeled boat, and found a gatehouse and, beyond it, a place to breakfast. The food was both expensive and delicious, a taste (har) of things to come; the prices would have been barely reasonable it if the euro had been 60p, and with near parity with the pathetic pound felt something like being skinned alive. But I wasn’t paying for it, so no worries.

We ate our murderously expensive baguettes and pastries and watched the forklifts trundle up and down the narrow cobbled street. The lower level of Mont-St-Michel curls around like the shell of an ammonite, hemmed in by ancient stone shopfronts, and at the water-gate is already too narrow for most vehicles; supplies are brought in by little forklift trucks, whose forks scrape against the cobbles in a most distracting fashion. Then we hunted, and the thing I thought was an incline plain was an incline plain; the whole abbey, built up over centuries, recalls that same ammonite metaphor, new chambers built on as the creature within grew. The tourist path winds confusingly back and forth through the abbey to show you everything, giving an impression of a place somehow sprawling and compact at the same time.

The views were amazing.

Then a day driving south, through neat French farmland scattered with neat French farms, to a little house on an asparagus field and dinner with friends.

(backdated a bit)

Back home, bros have broken up, and it is time to FRANCE! But first, to Portsmouth, and Fort Nelson on the cliffs above. One of “Palmerston’s Follies” (so named because it and its sister forts never saw action, due to the French, er, not invading) it is an utter tricksy bastard of a nineteenth century fortification, a squat damn-near-artillery-proof polygon fort defended by massive earthworks, sneaky invisible mortar batteries and caponiers (killzone ditches, think moats except instead of water there’s bullets). This, along with three identical mates, was intended to protect Portsmouth from land attack. And it is now the southern branch of the Royal Armouries.

So we rolled in at lunchtime, and it turned out that there was an Easter weekend wargeek event, hence the place was clogged with enthusiastic blokes dressed in WW2 gear with authentic weapons, and a hell of a lot of people I’d politely term “punters”; generally either right-wing patriotic /k/ommando types who muttered “shoot ‘em anyway” when the German reenactors surrendered, or just annoying fat old blokes trying to impress their grandchildren, getting their war story on and rambling about how the Lee-Enfield is the greatest weapon ever created. I’m an academic-type war nerd, and while it’s entirely the fault of my own elitist distaste for other kinds of war nerd, shit is lonesome.

So the cafe was ridiculously full of beefy people wearing khaki and feldgrau, and among them we nommed overpriced pastries and shortcake before exploring an exhibition of artillery down the ages, featuring foundry reconstructions, giant bronze culverin, an iron vase that fired arrows, and some truly beautiful dragon-shaped guns. We watched an actor type fellow in Soviet uniform talk about having fun as a sniper in Stalingrad (sounding fairly authentic in a rambling, mildly insane way, not sure about the tin can suppressor on his moist nugget though.) Great exhibition, with a truly huge range of artillery – highlights included Gerald Bull’s supergun and one of the bombards that downed Constantinople. Took tonnes of pictures but am unsure what to do with them, as most image sharing sites seem to be complete wank. Recommendations welcome.

Finally, all the reenactors (forty or so) loaded up with blanks and acted out a WW2 battle over the fort to an enthusiastic commentary and a hell of a lot of squibs going off.
“So did the Germans have any heavier calibre machine guns for vehicles and aircraft during WW2, or was it just the 8mm MG42?”
“Just? Son that’s all they needed, have you ever heard the sound an MG42 makes?”
And now I have.

Following the extreme wargeekery, a trip to another Portsmouth castle similar in function but completely different in form, and satisfactory if costly (a taste of things to come) fish and chips on the harbourfront by the RNLI station. Then to the ferry, through miles of flat tarmac staging areas crammed with heavy machinery and odd French lorries, and once the new car (same as the old car) was secured below decks in an echoey canyon of iron walls we found our berth (tiny, uncomfortable) and, er, abandoned it pretty quick as soon as we got under way. Later in the evening we saw Sherlock Holmes in the ship’s tiny cinema, replete with all the trappings of an over-the-top landlubber cinema except for a decent-sized screen, while the ship pitched and rolled around us, driving slowly south through the Channel to St. Malo.