The day starts at the boulangerie … there’s no other place to be in Saint-Omer at 7am.
Even at this hour, with daylight creeping up the walls, the queue is out the door and down the cobbled street for all of the barely-awake people looking to load up on croissants and comically long baguettes … and I wonder where the hell they’ve all come from.
I feel silly queuing up for ten minutes just to buy one croissant, so instead I buy four.
The warmth and cosiness of my centre-ville appartement shortly afterwards gives way to the brutalist cold of an abandoned WW2 concrete bunker … La Coupole.
The main structure appears through the trees, like an alien spaceship from a 50s B-movie.
Following the crowd into the inner sanctuary, to spend a sobering few hours wandering around slightly dazed at the pointlessness of the whole endeavour.
To the point where on escaping from one of the many tunnels, a sudden burst of bright Spring sunshine and chirping birds outside is such a lightning-bolt surprise that I need to sit down for several minutes in order to to re-adjust to life itself.
From La Coupole, I drive onwards to Lille over more flat-as-a-pancake scenery, contemplating the history of conflict buried among the fields around me, and the ghosts of war which stalk the featureless landscape.
I can’t understand or comprehend or ever have any way of knowing and for this I feel guilty or at least sorry for having travelled through here, for I’m way less worthy than the souls who travelled here decades ago to meet their enemy and in some cases their ending.
When I arrive in Lille, it’s a relief to be blindly consumed by some kind of routine … park up, check-in, freshen up and head out promptly into the Old Town for a late-afternoon explore.
And Lille is a city with lots of Very Old Buildings, the imposing grandeur of which threatens to overwhelm me after the solemnity of the day so far.
On the other side of the hotel-de-ville, the cathedral is guarded by a kitchen of skateboarders, yet somehow I blag my way past them and inside through the thick solid-oak doors, to be startled by an onslaught of colour.
It’s an unexpected postmodern splash of yellows and oranges and reds of abstact art in an eccesiastical setting, and it’s all I can do to sit down and not for the first time today attempt to re-set my harmony or at least stabilise it and bring it into line with the things I’m seeing with my very own eyes.
Semi-adjusted, I head back out and through the streets to the student quarter for some respite (ie – a glass of beer).
Sitting in the floor-to-ceiling bay window of the old bar, watching groups of teenagers in Cramps t-shirts and arty twenty-somethings with bob cuts and pastel-coloured blazers saunter past … wishing I could be them, in another life.
Cyclists and e-scooterists competing for space in the narrow cycle lanes.
The middle-aged man in the oversized lilac ski jacket with flourescent yellow highlights, smoking a Gitanes in a doorway, waiting for who knows what except for possibly the 1980s to make a comeback.
Heading around the city streets and in and out of bohemian haunts and finally to a franchised resto-bar for a plate of hot food … all of the time wondering how and why I’m here.
An Outside World 