Derby - Museums and Cathedral

A video of a visit to Derby's Museums and Art Gallery.
Derby - the Museums and the Cathedral - YouTube

The Garonne

 

GARONNE

Chris Amies

When I was twenty I went to Bordeaux, during the third year of my Bachelor of Arts course at the Polytechnic of Central London, which today is cthe University of Westminster.

Had it been more recently I wouldn't have been able to go to Bordeaux– back then students could choose any university for their six months in France, but nowadays you have (if I'm not mistaken) the choice between Paris and Aix-en-Provence. Which could have been better because I would have had friends from the Polytechnic, but I always had a loner tendency.

So I spent a month in Caen, doing a preparatory course, and after that five months in Bordeaux, but I stayed on the other side of the Garonne, in a suburb called Lormont – when people wrote to me they sometimes put “Lormont, near Bordeaux” in the address. The experience made me swear that if I was going to live in a city, I would live near the centre. It remains to be seen if I succeeded with my current accommodation, now it takes me twenty-five minutes on foot to reach the centre of town…

I was staying with a woman who I established a good rapport with – after my return to London she and I kept in touch until ten years ago. I met her daughter and son-in-law, and other family members.

But apart from that, I don't remember much about my stay in Bordeaux. Connected to the city by bus, especially the 4 in Gradignan-Beausoleil - there was no tramway in Bordeaux at the time - I felt very isolated. I thought, later, of L'Emploi du Temps (1956) by Michel Butor, where the city itself becomes a sort of puzzle or a labyrinth from which one cannot escape. (Like Butor, I was a teacher in Thessaloniki. We may have been influenced in the same way.) Although the buses were reliable, the names of the destinations, like “La Buttinière” or “Cenon-La Marègue”, fill me with dread to this day.

I remember some of the teachers, for example PierreTucoo-Chala (1924-2015), professor of literature, but also a historian of the Pyrenees. His last name, if I remember it, means 'bald hill' in the Béarnaise language. Others have been harder to find at this distance of decades.

But I must also note that return visits in the following years, back to Bordeaux and the Gironde region, pleased me much more, including visits to the vineyards, and a lunch on a boat in the middle of the Garonne, looking at the tourist premises with my former landlady’s grandson, who was at the time - the year 2002 – a tall young man of twenty. I also visited the Citadel of Vauban in Blaye –that there are several citadels of Vauban dotted around France, fortifications built in the 1680s. I visited that of Blaye twice, and also that of Mont-Louis, in the Pyrénées Orientales, much less maintained even in 2018.

Of course I also visited Bordeaux, that 'Little Paris' with its 18th Century buildings, the Esplanade des Quinconces – 25.6 hectares, three times larger than the Place de la Concorde – and its Monument to the Girondins, the Rue Sainte-Catherine which traces the line of a Gallo-Roman street, the Palais Gallien also built by the Romans, the enormous Grand-Théâtre, and so on.

It was the Garonne that separated me from the city of Bordeaux. As is my habit, I went on long hikes, like a flâneur – a concept I touched on recently, when I read the account of Lauren Elkin, an American living in Paris (at the time she wrote), No. 91/92: notes on a daily trip to Paris (2021). As with Butor in L’Emploi du Temps, buses are important here; not the buses themselves, but where they go, and how people behave there. (It should be noted that the action of The Timetable takes place in Manchester, another city which did not have a tram at the time, but which has one now.)

When I briefly met Lauren Elkin the year after last, we talked about buses... anyway, the concept of the flâneur (Elkin calls herself a 'flâneuse,' noting that the female experience of traveling the streets is not exactly the same as for men; one of her works is called "Flâneuse") has remained close to my heart. The idea is to extract immediate feelings from your experience, no matter how subjective and against the majority opinion. And, it seems, you don't necessarily have to go on foot to be a flaneur. I believe it's impossible by car, but being part of the crowd on the bus would have sufficed.

Elkin is also interested in the OULIPO, the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle of the 60s – and of which Butor was not a part, unfortunately, or we could have linked everything up very neatly. And there's something surreal about the notes she enters on her cell phone as she takes the bus in the morning; of André Breton commenting on the squares and monuments of Paris of his time, for example “The very beautiful and very useless Porte St-Denis” (Nadja, 1928).

It may be that when I arrived in Bordeaux for my stay in France, I was at the time too young or inexperienced to appreciate it, possibly like that young American woman who went to Florence to continue her studies, and who was ridiculed for her subjective impressions of a city she perhaps did not love enough to appease public opinion. 

But travel writing should be subjective. If it is not the story of your personal experience, it becomes an advertisement for the tourist agency; and if bad impressions (or good ones) are received, they should be noted. 

It is also true that I had loved Barcelona when I arrived there the following February, but that it also took a period of adjustment, and that I ended that particular adventure homeless, having lost my home all of a sudden. But otherwise, it was a good experience.

Derby - City of Making

Derby - City of Making 

This is the first of a series of videos from and around the English city of Derby. 

Derby is a city and unitary authority area in Derbyshire, England, on the River Derwent in south Derbyshire, in the East Midlands. The population was 261,400 in 2021. It has a long history beginning with the Romans, and since the 18th century has been a place of manufacture and industry.