Fifty-five.

Collecting Lotus biscuits for desperate times counting the waves and lonely gulls. Lavazza coffee on the dockside in Dieppe around ten. It's all good. Will be in London by 11pm and Thameside YHA by midnight. There are times I miss that place, but never the fire alarms which startled me awake at 2/3am when some git decided to have a shower or smoke a fag. Life goes on. Jean-Claude, Arunas, Raffa and Beverley are ever present. Life has moved on from them times and I wonder what became of all those good folks and the crazy lady who didn't know where she was or where she was going ended up. Andy, Craig, Marcin, Susannah, Nick, Pedro, Karis and so many names I forgot: Boomi, how could I forget Boomi... And Mo! Oh Mo, I know you went where you had to go?

A Marché. The French do proper markets. True they still sell garbage, but they sell all the best AOC and AOP fodder you can stuff in a volumious 1980s Karrimor Jaguar. I've to return to there later for rillettes, cider, avocado and tomato. Bread and cheese are in the bag.

Do only I see Disneyland as a demonic fantasy without any happiness? Where all motives are driven by greed or beauty and never reality. It's a Grimm place for me. I'd prefer to feed my testicules to piranha than go through these concrete towers!

For a Galette I do go: Galette Noir avec Cidre Brut. My liver loves these extremes of behaviour I am quite sure? Well anyway I've a number of hours to suffer nonsensical British persons returning to Sussex. I intend to collapse under the stairwell - where I know it is lacking Camberwell's finest?

Oh how I wish adverts reflected the truth of the world. Instead of brand-new Iveco vans you see a murky, dirty, rusting van carrying a dozen French Life "couriers", without any seatbelt or any physical security hidden in the back of this highsided Citroen can, circa April 2000, to a possible death at the hands of over-the-limit managers who should know better than drinking to death on a ferry from Southampton to Cherbourg - I had to shake the driver awake as we swayed into the central reservation and as he slept at the wheel - some how I did not object, etc, because I too was caught in the illusion I was heading to another promised land, when truly this was my cattletruck experience!

Here I am with a sack full of rillettes, cider, wine and cheese. Tomatoes and avocados. It's a long journey home.