Arzacq-Arraziguet - Mont-de-Marsan. Ankle injuries. Steve-O.

 Arzacq-Arraziguet

It rains again all night and is bright by the time I wake up. A black cat comes to my window but I recognise the Devil for what he is and I do not let him in. I have strayed too far from the path and I need the protection of St Jacques once more. I do give the Devil a scratch behind the ears. 


I regain the path and then almost immediately feel the urge to leave it, as it turns into a dripping patch of woodland, the earth already churned up by the morning’s walkers. But I have learned my lesson, so into the wood I go. It’s easy with hindsight to say this was the wrong decision, but we don’t know how much worse the road could have been. I could be dead. Instead I am very, very muddy. The track is not just narrow and waterlogged, winding under curling hawthorn and hazel boughs, rich mud invading the top of walking shoes, but it is alternately a steep slide down and a punishing crawl up. Everywhere are traces of disaster. Long skid marks through the mud, moss torn off a tree, a full handprint. 


There is at least a little solidarity here, on the path proper, the Pilgrim’s Way. A woman ahead of me turns a corner and sees a patch of mud which is so extravagantly swampy that she simply bursts out laughing. “Apres vous,” she says, inviting me into the morass. “Non non madame,” I say, affecting the air of a gentleman. “Apres vous.”


Well it’s just mud isn’t it. 





Arzacq-Arraziguet is “only” 10km away but they are fairly punishing kilometres, and I tweak my achilles walking to the Carrefour in flip-flops. Never turn thirty if you can at all avoid it. I walk up and down the cheese aisles (there is so much cheese that they need multiple aisles to accommodate it all) several times, but they don’t sell anything in small enough quantities for me - travelling and cooking alone I have to buy no more and no less than I can cook in exactly a meal for two (tonight plus lunch). So for the second night in a row it’s three-tomatoes-one-onion-one-packet-of-pasta plus a wild card, in this case some reduced prawns and a packet of basil, plus some red chilli flakes in the hostel kitchen. I also have a bottle of fizzy Normandy cider. It turns out cider is actually good as long as you drink it in France. I imagine a red-nosed French farmer shedding a single tear at the sight of one of those disgusting salted caramel Lilley’s they sell to children and people who drink like them. 


My heel injury is worse than it first appears. I am limping all evening. I’ve been unfortunate enough to injure myself somewhere small enough to not have a single bus, and I’m not going to risk walking. I spend the evening looking over various permutations. Rural taxis are sickeningly expensive and I’m not doing that again, never mind my capacity to order over the phone in French. I am left with only one real option: Mont-de-Marsan.


Mont-de-Marsan


Mont-de-Marsan is very pleasant. I worry that I’ve become too accustomed to picturesque French towns in the sun. Oh, another coffee, another pastry, another medieval church. Yes, that is a beautiful statue. The human mind is endlessly elastic. It’s taken about four days for these sights to start approaching normality. I am awful and ungrateful. It’s all very nice and once I have a beer and a book I tune it all out and I could be anywhere. I’m sure the environment is having an ambiently positive effect on me. It had better be. I still feel very baggy, sweaty, ill-at-ease, but that might just be the exquisite human curse of embodiment. 





Here’s a thing: ordering “a half” is emasculating, shameful, unreasonably ascetic. Off to a job interview are you mate? Need to operate some heavy machinery? Afternoon shift on the neurosurgery ward? Grow up and have a proper drink. “Un demi”, however - stylish, louche, a delicious ice cold beer in a small glass. No warm dregs or drinking too fast. This might be the key. The French will start drinking beer at 11am but, crucially, only in tiny glasses. I think the introduction of the demi would save British drinking culture. They just need to make half glasses which don’t just look like pint glasses being held by a giant.


I meet a bald, bearded, barrelling Frenchman whose name is Steve-O. You’ve met him before too. He wears a black band tee, gym shorts, Vans. He has a lot of tattoos. “I should be dead,” he tells me. You know the guy. He should be dead. He’s called Steve-O because, like me, he watched Jackass on VHS when he was young and decided to try it all at home. He must have missed the disclaimer. His family did something in Vichy France but he doesn’t know what. “They could be ‘eroes…they could be villains,” he says ominously. Nobody in his family would tell him. I tell him he is not responsible for the crimes of his ancestors. He tells me he learned English from playing Counter Strike. 


I order a beer described as vert, which I assume is just branding. The waitress raises an eyebrow. “C’est très vert…” she warns me. How vert can it possibly be? The answer is very fucking vert indeed. It looks like a novelty St Patrick’s Day beverage. It tastes awful. They can’t do that! The logo had a mountain on it! 



Before I left England, several friends made the same joke: “You’re not going to find religion are you?”. I am on a pilgrimage, after all. But the joke’s on them really.


I’m going to Lourdes to get healed.


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