Pilgrim's Progress – Long Distance Walks in Europe and the UK

The French, it seems to me, strike a happy balance between intimacy and reserve.

Peter Mayle – Encore Provence

I’d be lying if I tried to claim that this was the most interesting day’s walk or that Manosque was a fitting finale to this section of my walk across France.

I reached Manosque by midday. Much of the walk from Saint Martin de Brômes to Manosque hugged the side of a departmental highway. Menacing black clouds hovered in the distance and when I eventually reached Manosque, a temperature gauge at a pharmacy in the centre of towm divulged that the temperature was only 13C! Hardly the stuff of dreams.

I read somewhere that Manosque is a charming town in Provence. It isn’t. Like many towns in France, the historic centre has been hollowed out by vast shopping estates on the periphery of town. Such was sadly the case with Manosque.

The old town and the central plaza was pretty deserted when I esconced myself in a café in the central square and ordered a prawn risotto.

The gite where I was staying turned out to be on the edge of town and was in fact an equestrian centre. The lady who ran the place and showed me to my room had been working there for 50 years! She told me that she’d love to retire but couldn’t find anybody to take over from her! At €21 a night with a room to myself, I couldn’t really complain!

At supper in the Gite des Naïsses I was joined by the daughter of the owner, two Frenchmen who were on a walking holiday in the area and their Ukranian friend, Yuri.

Yuri’s story was a tragic one. He had run a successful jewelry business in Kharkiv with his wife who had run a restaurant next door. Everything had been destroyed by a Russian rocket attack which had destroyed his apartment and his jewelry shop.

After he had fled Ukraine with his wife to France, his wife had subsequently decided to leave him. Yuri didn’t speak any French or English so everything was communicated by Google translate. But I could feel his pain, the human destruction caused by war that you can only really understand when you  meet individuals who have suffered the fall out. It was difficult to find words to console him. I just felt his pain and suffering.

A little time later a friend of Sylvester’s appeared with a fresh bottle of wine and some terrine and the debate really kicked off. It started off with the question of whether the chicken preceeded the egg or vice versa. We then got on to the physics of the Big Bang Theory and followed that up with the best James Bond actors and who had killed Little Gregory as well as other damous French murder cases and whether Coluche had been bumped off by the French secret service. As a bottle of white wine was produced together with an entire cooked chicken I glanced at my watch.

It was nearing midnight and I thought it wise to beat a tactical retreat to ensure I could get up in time to catch my train from Manosque back home at 8.46am the next morning. There was just enough time for a slice of Ukranian cake Yuri had baked and another bottle of white which had materialised from somewhere. The Big Bang Theory could wait for another day!

One of the girls whom I met at the gite at Vénascle asked me what I thought about when I walked. It was a very good question!

Of course it depends on the situation. No two days are ever the same when walking. So it’s impossible to give a hard and fast answer. But today my thoughts dwelt on Peter Mayle.

If there is one author who popularised Provence more than any other then it has to be Peter Mayle. His novels popularised the south of France in the 20th century for the British middle classes in the same way as Tobias Smollett had done for the British aristocracy in the 18th century. If you were being cynical you could claim that both were classic cases of well targetted product placement.

I was reminded of this salient fact in the gite L’Escargot in Quinson when I saw on the bookshelf a copy of ‘Searching for Cézanne’. It’s one of his later works, not the one that made his name and was a bestseller in the UK – A Year in Provence, as well as the follow up bestsellers Toujours Provence and Encore Provence.

I feel a certain affinity with Peter Mayle. Like me his father worked for the British Foreign Office. Much of his childhood, like mine, was spent overseas in warmer climes than the UK. Peter did his O levels in Barbados, I spent much of my childhood in Ceylon. He, like me, hated his time at boarding school and having carved out a successful career in advertising with Ogilvy Mather (he came up with the slogan ‘Go to work on an Egg’) he, like me, quit the rat race in his 40’s and went to live in Devon.

He began a second career as a writer, famous for the ‘Wicked Willie’ sex education books that I remember somewhat hazily from the 1970s.

In his late 40s he decided to quit the UK and move to sunnier climes in the south of France (Ménèrbes in the Lubéron) and try his hand as a writer. I made the same move in my 50s and still harbour notions of writing a best seller, although it’s doubtful if hordes of people are going to lap up my incoherent ramblings about walking around France in the same way that Peter Mayle tapped into a middle class zeitgeist in the UK in the late 80s for something more than Elizabeth David and holidays on the Côte d’Azur! In many ways he was the heir to Marcel Pagnol.

Ok I admit there were quite a few key differences between his life and mine – Peter Mayle had three wives (I’m still on my first), became a multi million copy best selling author (my blog has about 20 regular followers!) and was awarded one of France’s highest prizes (Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur) for his contribution to literature and the arts. (I’m still struggling to get my titre de sejour renewed for another year!)

Is there any connection between Peter Mayle, my last 12 days in Provence and this evening’s riotous meal in an equestrian centre in Manosque with a Ukranian refugee, a Frenchman from Foix suffering from fybromalgia and another Frenchman who had lived and worked all over the world including some time in Busan, South Korea? Maybe Provence throws up these unlikely coincidences more than other parts of France. Who knows. Either way these unworldly and unexpected encounters always add to the enjoyment of the walk.

One final guilty admission – I’ve never read any of Peter Mayle’s books. Something I intend to remedy over the summer months before I recommence my walk across France from Manosque in late August. Until then, à bientot as they say in France! Now I just need to find a cobbler to mend my battered boots!