June 13: Rumsteaks & Tap Wine
I complain about this rocky road-riding of bikes even when I know I shouldn’t. It’s what I do.
Yet for as romantic as this all sounds, I need you to know that for a long time – and we’re talking decades, years, epochs – pilgrimages such as this were considered a form of corporeal punishment. To wit: remember that Thomas Becket situation?
It seems that King Henry II, who was embroiled in the 1170 murder, caught such significant heat from The People that in 1174, after Becket’s sanctification the previous year, he volunteered to walk barefoot and coatless in the rain to the site of the murder, where he got whipped to shit by monks. And throughout that period and beyond, the Scottish government would punish their baddies by sending them on a similar pilgrimage across England, with one murderer, or so I read, having been forced to do so in a girdle made from the sword with which he killed his victim.
So maybe I’m not such a monster for complaining, OK? Because today, after walking right past the hardcore shrine at the Cathedral which marks the site of Becket’s murder without a clue of what it signified even though an old whitebeard docent was very enthusiastically explaining bloody happenings to a group of scandalized schoolchildren, the bike ride was shit once again. I’m sorry, but it’s true.
Almost immediately after leaving Canterbury, we hit a bit of a climb and Mark, whose hams are impervious to the whims of gravity, disappears into Womenswold and Shepherdswell.
I’m still in Kent, and it’s only 1.5 hours to Dover, otherwise known as the birthplace of multi-platinum award-winning musical icon Joss Stone, and we have 3 hours or so before we need to be on the ship, but me and maps are not friends, and I’m quickly and hopelessly lost.
It sucks, man, because I’m determined to prove to Mark that my open-source map app, OsmAnd, is legitimate, even though it’s already brought us to two (2) separate industrial dead-end dumps in England and now finds me lost here and sweating off me arse as the clock ticks on the ferry’s departure.
On my own for the first time, without Mark to save me, I approach approximately five (5) wrong-ways before finally breaking through on the flatground town of River, whose namesake River Dour sparkles psychedelically under the film of my polarized sunglasses. The still-operational Crabble Corn Mill! The ducks! And the no people! Very pretty.
By the time I make it to Dover, I’m far too verklempt to worry about immigrants touching my stuff and, taking the southeastern approach, find the city quite lovely as a blur! Those white cliffs, that easily bikeable esplanade, and the in-clear-view port to guide me.
Crossing into ferryland by bike is a strange experience, as suddenly everyone is speaking French and stern and we’re expected to know that the red line painting on the ground is what we should follow, and we must flash our passports and we must wait behind the big rigs, and the burly men in fluorescent vests scoff at me with absolute disdain because I choose to walk, not ride, up the megaramp, and after depositing my bike into an alcove amongst the RVs and Peugeots and guzzling two liters of water, I set out to find Mark on the poop deck.
Poop. Nice.
Having already been here for three hours, an expert of the ship’s layout, he says repeatedly I’m on the 7th floor even though I can clearly hear his voice coming from the 8th floor. I say “I don’t think you’re on the 7th floor,” and he says in his characteristically scoff, yes I am, to which I say, “I don’t see you,” to which he responds with, dude, I don’t know what to tell you: I’m on the 7th floor and only after saying “Mark, I can hear clearly your voice coming from the 8th floor,” he says, oh yeah I guess I’m on the 8th floor and by the time I find him there spread out on his goddamned chaise lounge I’m too tired to even remember why I was angry in the first place.
Good paragraph, that one.
Curiously, I spend my remaining pound sterlings on a bag of vinegar crisps and a matcha latte, the latter of which the bartender immediately splatters onto her shirt in a big green glob, and none of the water on the ship is potable, and I don’t feel like a beer or a muffin but I don’t want to spend 15 euro on a frozen pizza and the family sitting next to us I’m not sure that they fully understand our (purely academic) debate over whether or not prostitution is still legal in France but I am sure they do understand that we both smell really bad.
As the long stretch of beach in Dunkerque comes into view through the ship window, Mark tells me about Operation Dumbo, which he learned about in the film Dunkirk wherein Kentish people apparently sailed across this very channel to save the French from the Nazis, which prompts me to say, “maybe our generation needs to be drawn into a virtuous war to feel some level of unifying or communal drive,” which is a stupid thing to say because there is no such thing as a virtuous war and is something I immediately regret. Looking to salvage the conversation, I note that on the other side of Dunkerque, oh hi, that’s the Opal Coast, which is where most of Bruno Dumont’s recent films were made and some of them I even love, like L’il QuinQuin and maybe Ma Loute even though his earlier films are really intimidating!
The ferry docks and I lose Mark again and I’m literally the last thing to disembark. A man in a truck is waiting at the base of the ramp and says, suis-moi or “follow me,” and I do until we get to a rest stop, where I stop to look for the aforementioned Mark, only to get the truck man to turn around and yell at me, what ze fuck you are doing, I say follow me. Sot. so I continue to follow him on my bike until he dumps me on the highway where Mark is waiting. Mark says that guy yelled at me and I say, “me too” and this is the caliber of story you’ll be dealing with henceforth, folks.
It’s another 20 minutes into town into the lovely Hôtel Richelieu, which is under construction but has remarkable period furniture with big ol’ bowls of tiny soap atop them and a tiny and exasperated-but-kind owner who looks a bit like Michel Gondry and says I have to go visit my mozer, she eez 90 years old so we say goodnight to him and go drop about 20 euro on two beers at a shitty bar called La Crypte — slogan “Cafe Punk Rock Metal” — which clearly rips us off and doesn’t even have WiFi but does have a cute girl in a red dress who I’m too afraid to talk to on the patio outside, and despite both of us being hungry and indifferent.
It takes us a fucking hour to decide where to eat dinner before landing on La Route des épices, whose owner proudly tries to sell us a bottle of Lebanese wine which we reject in favor of his cheapest fucking bottle of tap wine and proceed to eat a remarkably delicious meal that includes bell pepper and basil sorbet with shrimp followed by an encrusted salmon and/or a cacao-dusted coeur de rumsteak, both of which are served with squiggles and slashes of various shades of sauce as if the year is 1997 and we are in some bistro in Beverley Hills, California but the man is clearly passionate about what he does and has an impossibly tiny kitchen to work with so back the fuck off.
For dessert I get a boule of vanilla gelato encased in a chocolate shell which the annoyed waitress has to pour warm fudge over for the 1,000th time and Mark gets a salted caramel tarte tatin and I ask if they do digestives in France and the server says non and that’s fine because we’re already dehydrated-drunk and we go back to the hotel and we go to sleep and now this entry is over because I am hungry and want to eat dinner and Mark is spending way too long trying to perfect a video he is about to post on Instagram and enough is enough and dogbless.
I am happy I have permission to complain now goodnight.