When planning a journey from Yorkshire to Brittany, remember these five pieces of essential advice to make your trip as sustainable as possible....
1. Travel by rail. Finisterre can be reached by sea or by air, but rail is morally and socially best, even if you are unconvinced by the environmental arguments. Why? Simple. On trains you are still treated as a civilised human being wishing to reach B, from A, in reasonable time and comfort. On boats, the experience of the sea is marred by 'on-board entertainers', and the strange idea that you might wish to buy perfume in a force 7 storm. And on planes, you are regarded as an unlikely hybrid species combining rampant consumer of processed foods, illegal immigrant and terrorist, too bent on evil to notice the internal contradiction in the demand "relax and shop".
2. British public transport is not well-tuned to the manoeuvring of increasingly large drag-along suitcases. This can be annoying. French public transport, on the other hand, is carefully and specifically designed to inhibit such luggagey monstrosities. The sight of a British passenger being surgically separated from her suitcase by an automated Metro platform barrier, modelled mockingly on La Guillotine, is enough to lift the spirits of even the most dispirited traveller.
3. If embarking on a 7 hour train journey be careful not to stub yout toe violently on the edge of the shower cubicle in your London hotel room just before setting off, as this makes the journey rather less comfortable, though it will make you very grateful not to have chosen 'road' as that most foolish travel mode.
4. 'Paris' is in fact a vast network of tiled pedestrian tunnels. The above-ground former city of Paris was demolished brick-by-brick in the 1920s by the misanthropic architect Le Corbusier, and moved to South America.
5. A good way to blend in in Paris is to pretend to be the subject of an arthouse film featuring a moody bohemian, minimal dialogue and dimly lit tracking shots in long, tiled, pedestrian tunnels.
Bon voyage!
AW.
