A600AASS Day 1 - Amsterdam to Poitiers
14.10.22
962 Km
It was like being inside a pack of bubblegum. Three stories under ground, the car park had been drenched in a kind of industrial perfume, no doubt to mask the stench of French piss that had been liberally splashed about.
I was in the centre of Rouen, a town in Normandy. I lived here as a 15 year old when on exchange from Sydney. Today was the first time I’d been back in 25 years. Rouen — and France — was my first taste of freedom. Freedom from a suffocating and straight life back home. Freedom to express who I was in the process of becoming.
I visited the high school I went to. Lycée Pierre Corneille. A belle epoque building that, to a young Sydney boy - all shiny and new - seemed both impossibly grand and incredibly decrepit. Hoardings on the facade indicate that they might now be doing something about the mould.
I remember learning about just-in-time production in Economics, smoking Camels and Cafe Crèmes, and buying Kenzo Pour Homme at Sephora, seduced by the way it conjured sweet carrots somewhere at the back of my pallet.
I cried, remembering the liberty of my time here, and the acute loss I felt when I went home.
What goes around comes around.
So, why am I here, writing this email to you from my single bed in the Hotel de l’Europe in Poitiers?
Here’s two reasons (among a few I might expand upon):
For years, I’ve been dabbling with writing and photography and I’ve been too afraid to commit serious energy to either.
I’ve contented myself bashing out rants on the state of design and the automotive industry and kept my damn photos and my damn stories to myself. But people kept telling me to write and shoot and - crucially - share. So here I am: writing, shooting, sharing.
By forcing — forcing? — encouraging! myself to write every day for three weeks, I’m hoping to get the fuck over whatever it is that holds me back from doing what I really want to do.
I also want an enumeration of this experience, likely to be my last great European road trip. But I don’t want “Memories” served up by Apple Photos to a jazzy tune, or vague rememberings shared with Chris over a glass of something in my seventies. In defiance of everything I’ve learned about the impermanence of everything, I’m determined to try and lock something down, if only to prove the Buddhist rule through my ignorance of it.
At the outset, I owe a debt of gratitude to a few folk who have inspired this.
There’s Craig Mod, a superb writer and photographer who introduced me to the idea of pop-up newsletters. He’s a mentor-who-doesn’t-know-it to me.
Claps, too, for Sasha Chapin, whose superb writing and writing course got me back in the groove.
And thanks to Paul Millerd who got me thinking about the pathless path which is now unfolding before me.
And then there’s you.
If you signed up, thank you.
If you made it this far, thank you again.
And if you make it to the end of A 600 and a Scallop Shell and give me some feedback, I’ll buy you a beverage of your choosing, in the place of your choosing.