We are on the TGV to Paris, station Montparnasse.
I have failed my first job of the journey by being too engrossed in a Facebook post about celebrities who didn’t prepare well enough, or prepared too well, for their most famous roles, to listen to a long announcement that wasn’t then repeated in English. Never mind. Surely if it’s important they’ll repeat it again later?
I was all ready to say in my summary of Saint Malo that I was a little disappointed. After all, I’d been looked forward to an ancient medieval walled city, and that wasn’t the case. Not surprising, because it was 80% destroyed by a fire in 1661, and then again centuries later when the Americans bombed it by mistake in 1944 (well that’s the way the locals tell it). They’ve tried recreating it faithfully, but it’s ended up mostly charmless, with a small area that’s overly filled with shops selling tourist tat and Disneyfied restaurants.
After all, wealthy merchants have been escaping the city walls for years, building mansions in nearby posh suburbs such as the one called “California” (go figure).
However, this morning while I was out taking the final photo in my series “tidal changes as demonstrated by the swimming pool diving board”, I found some more elegant streets, with parks and greenery. So now I am daydreaming of buying a little apartment here, where I can swim in the sea every day and have a little poodle called Fifi that I can take with me everywhere.
