Another day, another country.

Loooong day yesterday. The drive to Montpellier was OK for a summer Saturday, though we were glad we weren’t heading the other way: from where we joined the motorway near Béziers, the traffic on the other side was at a crawl for miles and miles on end. Then when we saw a warning of ‘ralentissement’ ahead on our side, we took off to pick up what we used to know and love as the N113. That proved to be slow as well, since the villages along the way are a mass of traffic lights, and we weren’t the only ones to decamp from the motorway. Montpellier is a mass of road works and diversions: the city is extending its admirable tram network, and the consequent traffic chaos is a wonder to observe.

The TGV ride to Lille was fine, despite backward-facing seats – there’s something faintly surreal about hurtling backwards at 300 kph, sipping chilled rosé! At one point, Martyn discovered that although our (lower) deck was quite full, there was only one person in the upper deck, so we promoted ourselves, and enjoyed fine views of the countryside, seeing where we were going, rather than where we’d been. I had forgotten how lovely the landscape is for the hour or so north of Lyon – beautiful rolling terrain, well wooded with pretty villages and mixed farming, including a lot of fine charolais beef on the hoof. We were about 10 minutes late into Lille, the same margin as when we left Montpellier five and a bit hours earlier. The train had obviously clawed back a bit of time, but we were held up for a while outside Marne-la-Vallée-Chessy (escaped Bambis and Baloos from the adjacent Disneyland, perhaps?). We had an hour or so to kill in Lille. Fine city, but the area around the railway station of any large city is rarely the most refined, and I fear Lille is no exception. The adjacent shopping mall is somewhere we wanted out of quickly, and the new station itself is grubby, noisy and unwelcoming. Had the UK signed up for the Schengen Accords, the experience would be better. But the need to queue up for two lots of passport checks and baggage security erodes the margin that the train enjoys over the aeroplane. Once on the busy Eurostar, civilisation reigned, however briefly. Friendly, helpful staff and an efficient hurtle to London. The journey home was the worst part – no Northern Line trains at King’s Cross, so we’d to walk miles underground and change trains, arriving just in time to see the Hastings train pull out of Charing Cross. The clickety-clack local train home was a hell of a come-down after high-speed travel, as was the surround of inane chatter and mobile phone conversations from giggly girlies on their drunken way home. So I was firmly in grumpy-old-git mode by the time we got home.

A glance at the garden shows the fruits of a bench colleague’s labour: she has been doing some watering while we’ve been out and about, and it all looks pretty good – except for the long grass, to which I shall apply myself a bit later. Once I’ve worked through the mountain of mail.