Places Reversed by Robert Braithwaite
Friday morning came and here he was, on that familiar journey, heading westward on a never-ending piece of straight road in the early hours of what still felt like last night. The journey of what seemed like a thousand miles, that he’d made so often with Penny, on shopping trips, out to catch the ferry at Caen, or sometimes to the races at Saint-Malo. In his memory, even back then it always had a little air of melancholy about it: the empty N175 delivering you into dead and dying villages one after the other; all of them pretty in parts but somehow imparting something sinister in their sombre desolation.
Here an abandoned Cidrerie, there the crumbling edifice of a farmers’ cooperative, all reminders that throughout the region the agri-economy had either got big or disappeared. He climbed up and out of Troarn, and ever onwards, and noticed that sign that he always saw, telling him that an enormous number of kilometres still remained before he’d reach Caen, and so yet more to Saint Lô.
This was always the point where they started to feel the grind of the excursion.
