I only want a little bit of butter for my bread (A. A. Milne)
Mishaps occur in threes, don’t they? If so, it is smooth sailing for the next few days.
I set out without breakfast this morning, hoping to have a croissant and a coffee in town. My landlady had promised me bread, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. I think she was a little confused. She had expected me the day before my arrival.
According to Apple Maps, my way to town was clear: continue down Beauregard Road, turn left and then right onto a track through the woods. Le Sever Calvados, it said. A delightful trail down into the woods along the creek, and then the climb to end all climbs, one of those climbs that actually get longer as you climb. Finally, I arrived at what should have been the town, but no, it was a wide forest track, obviously a fire break of some kind, and I continued for a while, quite lost. Then I realized that I was in the forest of Saint Sever Calvados, not the town. My coffee and croissant were far out of reach.
So I sat down and ate a literal crust of bread, three days old, and the exercise in chewing it would have nullified the calories consumed.
The third mishap occurred soon after, but it’s too embarrassing and too boring to recount in detail. In brief, I discovered a marker for the Chemin but after several kilometres I found myself in the middle of the forest without an Internet connection, and thought it safer to return to the village. So I drank my café creme, and as the church bells chimed eleven, and having already walked nine kilometres, I began again.
As I left the café I was encouraged by a local gentleman who was interested in what I was doing. When I told him I was walking for 15 kilometres along the road to Villedieu-les-Poelles, he said it was a very busy road. “Beaucoup de circulation. On roule très mal en Calvados.” A true Norman!
But as I walked out of town, my spirits revived: the sun was shining, and I was walking into a cool breeze. Things could only look up.
I passed in quick succession the remains of three creatures who had tried in vain to cross the road. A bird, a cat and the hedgehog. Busy traffic indeed!
Ode to a Hedgehog
Hale to thee, unhappy Hedgehog,
Cut down before thy time.
Hadst thou but stayed among the sedge, Hog,
I'd not have penned this rhyme.
Thou must have spied a tasty snack
And ventured on the road,
But then there came a mighty whack,
By Fate on thee bestowed.
Hadst thou but crawled into the ditch
To find thyself a bite,
Then life would not be such a bitch,
And things would be all right.
There is a moral to this tale
From which we all can learn:
We well may seek the Holy Grail,
But end up in an Urn. (From a former walk)
I’ve also been passing little piles of black scat. Perhaps the foxes have been eating blackberries.
And apart from the scat, there have been interesting things to see along the way: little tracks leading off into the bocage, avenues of trees, stately oaks, cords of wood neatly stacked for winter, bales of hay, old stone houses, fields of corn already harvested and yet to be harvested, and lots of cows, including the bespectacled vache normande. And I passed a tractor idling by the side of the road with no driver in sight. I could easily have commandeered it and ridden in style to Villedieu.
Finally, I arrived, and am staying at the Hotel Saint-Pierre.
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