Never Far From Rome II
The English Channel
My railway peregrinations from Rome to London earlier this month included an eccentric detour via Calais. I had, it transpired, a yearning to arrive in (sometimes) perfidious Albion by water; the first time I’ve done so since I was a child. I really love a boat ride and one of the determining elements in this curious and impromptu whim was my rereading of my chum Charlotte Higgins’ excellent book Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain, which I cannot recommend highly enough. And so I decided to approach the island of my birth as Julius Caesar and Aulus Plautius once had (in the broadest sense, we are reliably informed by ancient sources that they didn’t take a P&O ferry).
It is, I think we can agree, a curious choice. It was rather cheaper than a last-minute Eurostar but it also took considerably longer. I thought it was wonderful.
From the deep blue skies and chiaroscuro of Avignon I whizzed through sunflower fields of Provence to the Gare de Lyon, took an RER across Paris to the Gare du Nord and then instead of the Eurostar to London St Pancras—in walking distance from my parents’ house which was my ultimate objective—I took another TGV, this time to Calais. The Calais TGV station is an odd, rather bleak, place: a giant carpark in the middle of nowhere beached under the sort of enveloping cloud of Tupperware sky so familiar to Britons and which was (and indeed still is) anathema to Romans. Under Another Sky indeed: gritty and grey, the hinterland of Calais was a world away from the balmy Midi just a few hours earlier.
I found a (the) bus and, in my best (terrible) schoolgirl French, asked if he was going to the port. The not entirely charming driver looked at me in astonishment. Le port? Mais non!, he exclaimed as if a bus to the port—the very raison d’être of the city—were an unfathomably bizarre idea. We established that he did, however, go to the central station from where Google sent me to a little electric shuttle bus provided free by the city with the express purpose of taking people to the port.
Given the ubiquity of plane travel, the existence of the Eurostar passenger train, and the Eurotunnel for cars, crossing the Channel by ferry is far less common than it once was. To do so as a foot passenger in 2024 is, it transpires, a distinctly eccentric enterprise which only warmed me to it further.
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