Gambsheim to Germersheim

Morgen. On the German side, I've been going into shops and doing my best to communicate. I feel that the whole European project that Marcus and I talked about is at stake. Often my best is no more than 'Ich... er... oo... and then I'm reduced to pointing. On the French side je peux exprimer mes sentiments plus profonds si j'en ai envie. I can say 'Je n'ai pas de cuillere' if I need to, for example, if I've not been given a spoon to eat my ice cream with, which really happened in Gambsheim on Wednesday (German name, French village - a politically charged). In short, it was good to be on the French side of the river (for a change) on Friday morning, flitting (what is flitting exactly?) between the villages of the Rhine valley. These seemed like ghost towns on a weekday morning, especially as there was no wind at all and the sky was overcast, so the world seemed sort of inanimate as it can do on such days. This is not to say that the villagers sit at home wringing their hands all day. No, there appears to be a fierce battle going on between them. At the edge of each village a large sign shows the points it has won in the French equivalent of Britain in Bloom competition, the beautifully titled Fleurissement de France. We can't have too much fleurissement, whether it's of a village or... pretty much anything else except hives. Unfortunately, it seems like you can have too little of it. If your village is a virtuoso at the trowel (a garden trowel, not a builders' one), you might get a five-flower rating. Every village I passed through was full of flowers - it was like living between the pages of the Bakker catalogue. Flowers were pinging out of the ground and hanging off every lamppost and railing. Offendorf - beautiful gardens, flower power, go down to San Fran with a piece of this place in your hair - a mere three-flower town, even though there's plainly no room for any more flora. Herlissheim - just as pretty (all the same flowers as the other village - hmm, a fleurissement company may be at work playing one village off against another) gets just one measly flower out of five for its prolific efforts at fleurissement. It's pathetic. And it can't hide its shame because there at the entrance to the village its disgrace is there for all to see:

Herlissheim. Fleurissement de France: one flower.


Anyway what has this to do with anything. You'll see a picture of a tree trunk under what looks like a bus shelter. I took this because this is part of an oak tree 2,100 year old, found well preserved during quarrying works nearby. I can't explain why it hasn't rotted - seems a bit fishy - but I thought you'd want to see it, if you're there at all, that is. Note the flowers around it - every little helps with the fleurissement.
Back to the journey again. I didn't see much of the river at all. The route on the French side follows the main dike, which was built to protect the huge flat valley with its hundreds of villages and farms from flooding. The dike, which is matched by one one the German side, is maybe 8 metres higher than the river and runs for about 150 miles until mountains rise on either side and it's no longer needed. The cycle route mostly runs either on top of the dike or, more usually, it's dug into it about half-way down on the non-river side. Because the dike has to be perfectly level, the cycle route is completely level too (racers use it to test themselves on the flat) and it's uniform: it's possible to ride for four or five miles in a perfectly straight line, or for 10 miles without seeing any dwellings except for occasional fleeting views of villages bypassed by the dike. For nearly two days of the journey, the dike leaves the river entirely, moving 'inland', as it were, and the cycle route moves with it. Between the dike and river is flood plain, which is covered in woods and largely left to do its own thing. On the other side there are sometimes fields, mostly of sweetcorn, and views across the valley plain that stretch for many miles, broken only by the spires of distant village churches, and sometimes more forest, giving a closed-in feeling to the cycle route. Occasionally the route swings back to the river, which is now more like a river in that it has a strong current and the landscape of a living waterway rather than the trussed-up, industrial feel of a canal, but the route soon leaves the river behind again, leaving me curious about how it's evolving. So for most of Friday and Saturday I was on a tiny cycle route that, being away from the river, seemed to be in the middle of nowhere. I saw almost no-one and because the route was winding through woods a lot of the time, I had little sense of where I was. Both days were eerily still, accentuating the feeling of dislocation. I got to thinking about solitude and whether I had anything worth saying about it, and I didn't, not really. But I did wonder what the compelling attraction of solitude is - by solitude I don't mean just being alone but a state of being in which everything has been left behind, all the accretions of life have been, or appear to have been, shed, for a while, and there is only being left, the glorious emptiness of being that is possibility. Part of this experience is the feeling in my body from working it for so long each day on the bike. It's very easy cycling on the flat but there's still that tingling feeling of semi-exhaustion that is highly sensual and allows that visceral feeling of living in a physical body that is just not there when I'm in cerebral overdrive in some office in London. No, actually it's not so much about living in a body but being a body, a thinking and feeling body that is me. So I guess that's something of the attraction of solitude, although there are times when there is something wonderful - the evening light on the river or racing a heron maybe, and the most important thing then is to be able to share it with someone. I can't have it both ways.
I wasn't long on the French side of the river on Friday before France ran out and became Germany, not that the river noticed. For quite a while, nor did I. I'm liking Germany. I like the bakerei shops that do such tasty, calorific cakes, and the beer gardens, which are really just pubs where everyone has migrated outdoors. It was one of these that fed me dindins on Friday. You may know that I'm a strict vegetarian. I make allowances in that I eat fish, and I'll eat meat if otherwise it'll be thrown away, and if you want to fry my falafel in lard then just go ahead and notch it up on your conscience notchstick, not mine, and how was I to know that the tarte flambee gratinee I ordered in Gambsheim was going to have bits of bacon on it? Anyway, apart from those minor issues I do make one exception to my vegetarianism, and it's that I eat a Bratwurst sausage once every year. Last year, the deed was done in August, the year before that, December. This year, it was done this Thursday. I have included a picture because I know you want to see it. I didn't know I was getting two sausages, not one. Honest mistake.