Riding into the pretty town of La Roche Posay, touching the gentleness of French provincial life, open air markets and an easy pace among pretty, elegant houses.
Snapshots of embedded memories of France, journeying south in 1988. Avenues of trees slicing the low October sun into wide bars across the road, a gigantic moon in an ultramarine sky an implausible afternoon vision, warm autumnal air pushed aside as I rode, empty roads along which my bike flowed to quiet towns. I rolled into a deserted, damp campsite and unpacked one of the two maps I was carrying, scale 1:2000000 so together they could cover the whole of the continent of Africa. For the thousandth time I thumbed through a Lonely Planet backpackers guide and I opened the whiskey bottle, then set up my camera on timer.
Riding into the pretty town of La Roche Posay, touching the gentleness of French provincial life, open air markets and an easy pace among pretty, elegant houses.
During the day the sky was epically vast, seeming stretched taut and pinned to the desert floor at the horizon, pure from edge to edge. At night it became dizzying with oceanic depths of stars and, standing next to my bike, it felt as if I should be holding onto the ground to save myself from falling, vertigo when looking up; were the galaxies soaring above, or were they swimming below me?
Now I would feel as if I was floating through space, voices of calm and knowledge from across the globe telling me about geopolitical politics, wars, economic matters, natural history and literature. 'From Our Own Correspondent' brought individual voices and opinions, carried through the night sky to a tiny tent in an arid vastness, world events to an insignificant speck. I tried Voice of America, but it was a function of its title and carried an agenda on the airwaves, so I could not trust its impartiality, no matter how knowledgeable the presentation. Sometimes I would tune into other stations, as I carried a book which detailed the frequency and broadcast time of hundreds more, but I would always return to the World Service, welcoming old friends to my canvas world.
One time I camped by some low trees, sand humped around their trunks, and gathered fallen wood, hard as old bone, and made a small fire where I brewed endless saucepans of coffee and rationed my cigarettes deep into the night, my front hot from the fire and my sleeping bag draped around my shoulders to protect against the freezing darkness. I was rooted to that spot, warmed by the flames and captivated by voices from the void.
