A rebel without a clue.

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 ...

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...