Fifty-four.

Dijon to Auxerre to Rouen to Dieppe to walk to monastery Saint Marie is a slow way to face the UK, but it's also extremely tiring. BlaBlaCar is truly useful for getting about, and really makes hanging around hitching less necessary, but it brought me back to another reality I'd clearly forgotten since I'd left Geneva on the 26th March: there are so many vehicles going everywhere carry cargo and people at crazy speeds great distances. Distance which it's taken me days to cover is a blink of the eye: you miss the details in the world by being shuttled too and fro, if you are driving, for the passenger the world recedes much too rapidly to take it in without a bad neck, headache or a feeling of fatigue.

Two aspects of yesterday's trip from Auxerre to Dieppe brought me back into the modern world with a bump. Firstly, travelling into the western suburbs of Paris, and collecting another BlaBlaCar passenger at Versailles Gare, the traffic lights, cars bumper to bumper and, seen from the long grand boulevard, the distant face of usury, arrogance, vanity, slavery and death stood meanly waiting for those transfixed, with feet shuffling towards it, in the guilt edged Palace of Versailles. The irony of it: still sucking greedily at individuals who only assign beauty to "prettiness" and still pay their masters to walk around a landscape and construction which is a façade and a barrier to us as a community of people sharing the same essential needs: don't walk on the grass. The hall of mirrors says it all: what you see is an illusion of reality: a human conceit, whimsy and fraud where the rich stupendously hide behind 'finery' which has literally no actual value to anyone because it's not made of gingerbread.

Secondly, Rouen station. Getting to the station was a succession of roadworks, temporary surfaces, traffic lights and diversions. Once I arrived at the station, passed more money pumped into projects to keep these people toiling forever, a mad man was screaming at the top of his voice: a creature who seemed possessed. Why do the modern crazy folks centre in on the very centre of the insanity and why does the system careless to help them? Are they no longer financially viable, except to strong lager manufacturers? Here, where all vibrations lead inwards to the cruel beating heart at the centre of humanity where none can escape for ever and like a yo-yo is strung out and in in ever more exaggerated loops. We've all got to pass through this hell regularly: for some it's less likely, but even the wealthy are eventually brought from their country estates to their centres were the monster is yet more insidious. Here I was at another challenge to my stability. So very tired! Truly exhausted: my face felt twitchy and my eyes tickled with fatigue.

And now the trains and the station became a barrier in my path back across the channel. They charge eighty cents to use the toilet and I had not a brass button. Once I found the information point to see if there was any way round it I was forced back the way I'd come and beg .60¢. The only toilet was blocked with a huge deposit so I was stuck in no man's land. The cleaner: obviously fraught with hatred for my very presence, eventually let me into the disabled toilet where I discovered, to my dismay, I only needed a slash after all! When I came back through the door a black lady shouted at me because I bumped into her opening the door, but I could not see her beyond this heavy weight: I was effectively blind behind a solid fire-door!

Now it was the turn of the train to fail, or at least the tracks, or in fact a cable which had become loosened, so two trains where retarded then cancelled. My destination seemed further and further away. But again I was reminded I have no control of anything at all so suddenly I let go the tension and laughed at this web we're all caught in.

Robert, from Geneva, who has been a great support all along my route (and I would love to spend time with him again),  helped me once more. This time he'd called ahead to make sure I would not be sleeping on the beach in Dieppe. Although the time was running out, my phone was dying and my body was switching off, I had a bed at the guesthouse in the monastery of Saint Marie. There was a destination to reach to retreat for a day and forget the concentrated jam of modernity for a couple of days more. With all battery gone, and no clear sense of how far and in which direction the monastery stood, I walked northwards above the town, back into the countryside and the silence within and knew I was safe again.