MikePadgett.com

Invasion postponed due to fog

— Folk have fought violently over this strip of coastline for centuries but with such thick fogs, one wonders how.”

With promises and great expectations of widespread sunshine, J and I headed off to the northern coast of France. A withering, cold fog had descended on the region and it was scarcely to lift throughout the weekend.

Memories of the sort of reliably unreliable weather so typical of the British seaside began to seep through our clothes like the damp air.

Boulogne-sur-Mer

Boulogne-sur-Mer was wintry at best when we arrived, hardly the picture of early April.

Boulogne (pronounced “Boo-loin”) was once a firm favourite with British daytrippers, safe enough even for those whose xenomyophobia prevented them from venturing into the French interior.

Not one of these intrepid adventurers seems to have minded that whatever British bombs had erased could never be replaced by brutalist architecture. Of course, everyone was in the same boat: Swindon, Coventry, Berlin, Dresden, Rotterdam, the list (and the horrible architecture) goes ever on.

J once came here on a school trip with fellow pupils: an awkward bundle of rabid, pre-pubescent boys and suddenly self-aware girls, jammed into a rickety old hotel weakened by bomb tremors and rusting from the salty air.

The teachers, ever willing to exert control by threat, got together and decided to have pupils practice their non-existent French. Little J was thrust into a tabac to ask for directions to some hastily pre-defined place or other.

It seemed that only J and the shopkeeper – frozen in a bizarre, cross-channel display of dumbfounded mutual recrimination – could appreciate the incongruity of an 11 year old child in a shop that sold pipes and tobacco.

Ambleteuse

A consensus of opinion suggests that Boulogne was the base of departure for Julius Caesar’s first invasion of Britain in 54BC, a location Caesar called Itius Portus.

Others reckon that the present day village of Ambleteuse might actually have been Itius Portus, or at least the embarkation point for Caesar’s second invasion a year later.

In any event, he didn’t find much on the sceptred isle but a whole bunch of rug-headed kerns. As Cicero relates in his letter to Atticus:

Moreover, it is now known that there isn’t a pennyweight of silver in that island, nor any hope of booty except from slaves, among whom I don’t suppose you can expect any instructed in literature or music. Cicero, Letters to Atticus 4.17

Dunkerque

At the end of May 1940, there were plenty of men in Dunkerque who would have happily swapped places with the crestfallen Caesar.

Trapped on the coast by the German spearhead’s terrifying speed and efficiency, the Allies had nowhere else to retreat but the sea. Amazingly, and in no small part thanks to an unexpected halt called by Hitler, they did just that. Over 338,000 Dutch, Belgian, French and British soldiers were successfully evacuated.

De Panne

Whilst the Victorian grandeur of English seaside resorts like Brighton and Eastbourne erodes slowly like the chalky cliffs on which they stand, De Panne has moved with the times. Sort of.

Just over the border in Belgian Flanders, De (or ‘La’ to francophones) Panne has more in common with the midrise retro of Benidorm than the piers and promenades of Bournemouth.

Indeed, whilst bathing huts are still to be found on the beach, many of the seafront bars have taken to mock-Spanish names and selling sangria with the chips and mayo.