“Vous êtes macabre!” the proprietress of the French campsite burst out at me, accompanied with overacted dismay and silent movie eye roll. For the past week, she had come up to me for many conversations about the wisdom she had gathered in her lifetime. To which, I was eager to listen, having little more to do than walk around the village and look at my poorly failed paintings. She had entertained me with tales of her youth in Portugal and her theories of the magnificent, multi-coloured, radiating, broad-shouldered Aliens that would soon come to Earth from different galaxies through portals (which in her drawings closely resembled automatic garage) in Egyptian pyramids, to found a New World Order under the leadership of a Jewish Messiah, eradicating all pork eaters, sinners and all the ‘despicable and loathsome’ Jews… an event that was, confusingly enough, supposed to be set off by ‘Le Pape Juif”, or the Jewish Pope, by which she meant the German Joseph Ratzinger, better known as Benedict XVI. She stopped a while after this statement to examine my nose, glasses and curly hair, and asked if I weren’t a Jew myself. She was readily satisfied however by my inconclusive answers and took her stories to new levels of fantastic amplitude: abductions, visions and descriptions of our extra-terrestrial betters, accompanied by waves of her arms and examples of how they walked and flew. They were magnificent. It was as if she wanted to go up just this minute.
However, today, I was macabre one, showing her a two Franc coin I had found on a path in the little cemetery at the edge of town and explaining the provenance to her. I had visited the cemetery for the fifth time that week. It was not only because my favourite painter and his brother were buried there that I visited it so often, nor because there was little more to do in the village, but after having visited many museums of that beloved painter, and reconstructed bedrooms and venues bordering on theme parks complete with gift shops, guides and signs, I felt completely in personal awe with this authentic place, where a pilgrim could be alone and free with his thoughts and feelings.
This was all many years ago. But today, I was thinking about my stay in that little French village when I looked at air photography of Ypres, a city shot to dust one hundred years ago and rebuild into the epicentre of World War I pilgrimage. I noticed they had a campsite in the city and fantasized about a stay, and moving about Flanders and Northern France, to wander around the dismal little villages in silence and sollitude, to visit the cemeteries, the memorial monuments, perhaps to feel something real and uncooked. Ypres, Lens, Arras, the Somme, Verdun… And the first thing I thought was that this sort of trip was bound to be fantastic whatever the weather. In fact: this sort of thing gets only better in a doleful drizzle, with blankets of grey skies hanging over the barren fields, walking around under an umbrella with no particular place to go, drinking instant coffee, eating a soggy sandwitch, or pickled eggs in the local inn… Will 2014 see me in Flanders fields? The thought made my heart flare up in excitement and anticipation. Perhaps I’ll meet some great friends and interesting characters on the road. We’ll see who’s macabre!
