Bayonne, Biarritz

More resting. More recuperation. Bayonne is the French capital of ham. Since eating meat in the gîtes I have totally crumbled. I eat a colossal plate of ham. There was minimal social pressure on me to do this. My friend Jess told me to eat the ham but I wanted to eat the ham anyway.

When I check in to the hostel, the man warns me that a large number of Spanish children would be arriving and occupying the common areas at dinner and breakfast time. How bad can it be, I think.

They’re absolutely fucking feral. Screeching, thundering around, kicking things, fighting, shitting with the door open. My dorm seems to have been sequestered for adults only but the children are making enough noise from the corridor and the neighbouring rooms to more than compensate for their isolation. I’ve no idea who is meant to be in charge of them. I assume they’re in the pub. Pounding drink after drink to find the courage to come back to face them. As I write this one of them is literally attempting to kick down a locked door because another child has locked him out. He’s going at it like a dirty cop breaking down a motel door to catch a murderer.

The next morning I wake to the dawn chorus of shrieking and thundering. I don’t bother going down for breakfast. A man the next bunk over sets about attempting a world record for most bodily emissions produced in a five minute period. Groans, farts, belches, a phlegmy gargling like he’s trying to pass a marble through his sinuses. 

“Biarritz is just Llandudno,” another Jess tells me. The Belle Epoque seafront is interspersed with looming concrete. The Atlantic is cold. I Google “what to do Biarritz” and it tries to send me to a casino. There’s a nice church but I've seen so many old churches in the last two weeks that when I go to sleep I see flying buttresses and narthexes behind my eyelids. I need someone to punch me directly in the face and remind me that six weeks ago I had a job. I sent emails. I had huddles over Teams. Now I sit on a beach writing ungrateful little sentences about beautiful European towns. Perhaps later I'll be forced to sit in the sun drinking white wine. It's like being in prison.

I think I'm just bitter about still not being healed. The walk had given me a sense of purpose. I officially gave up on my planned start of the Camino today, posting on forums to try and sell my booking to the mountaintop hostel I had booked in advance. My ankle is still tender and I know that it would just take a single slip to turn an irritation into something that seriously affected my mobility (and definitely end the chances of walking 800km). So I am sensible and I am bored. It turns out that almost everything enjoyable involves a little walking. I shouldn't even have come to Biarritz but it's a very short hop from bus to beach and I want to see as much as possible.

I've never been able to just relax on holiday. I can't sunbathe for hours at a time. I need to walk, inspect, drink a tiny beer in six different bars, listen to live music and climb a mountain. I hate sitting still for too long. I've never been able to understand people who pay for a holiday and spend it on a sun lounger by a pool. You might as well be in Llandudno! A fate worse than death. 

It would be much more depressing to be immobilised in Stockport though wouldn't it? Punch me in the face again. Give it some seasoning. The message clearly isn't sinking in.

I am probably a little lonely too. This is also something I planned for - once on the route there is a natural travelling community. People you see most evenings as you fall into the same pace and rhythms. People engaged in the same grand undertaking. The trick to travelling alone is to find a community of some sort. My travel so far has been a little too scattered, too transient. I've seen a lot more places than I would have, and a lot fewer people.

I have a snooze on the beach and feel much better for it. I go for a walk along the promenade and up to the Port Vieux, a mix of natural rock and man-made piers. A huddled cluster of brasseries and bars serve seafood from the grill. Something on the headland smells of Jasmine. A lizard regards me with sly interest. Biarritz is not Llandudno. There are far fewer Scousers for a start.

In the aquarium I lock eyes with a sea turtle and greatly enjoy the pipefish. In a dark room, exhibits of jellyfish are tastefully underlit. They luminesce as they drift through in lazy little pulses. A woman with a thick Belfast accent looks over these impossibly delicate creatures, their billowing skirts and trailing tentacles, and says to her husband, “They're all basically the same aren't they?”

The limitations of language are realised again as I see in the translation beside an exquisite set of jellyfish that the English call them “white spotted” and the French “constellée”. They do indeed look like tiny captured nebulae, embodied curls of firmament. Another tank further down contains jellyfish with such an enormous quantity of fine tentacles that it appears impossible for them not to get tangled. I watch for a moment as four of them end up intertwined, forming a jellyfish rat-king. And then they somehow slide past each other again, moving sympathetically, disentangling.

I like Bayonne. I've been in a lot of small towns and whatever the fuck Lourdes is. Bayonne is medium sized. It has young people and shops. It's still beautiful - the cathedral is outstanding and the town is bisected by the Adour as it widens to greet the estuary - but feels lived-in too. My number one travel wanker stipulation is that places feel like they'll persist after tourists are gone. Bayonne meets the criteria. Biarritz, her close neighbour, is very pretty and worth a second visit but has the inescapable sunburned affect of a Destination. Leathery day trippers and ice cream stalls. Bayonne is the place you would come to live.

Hark at me impugning the leathery and sunbaked. This is the ham capital and I am the ham. Run me through the slicer and serve me with caper berries and fig chutney. I am bloated and crimson and half-pissed again. There will be very little indulging on the road so every disgusting decadence is justified, every extra slab of cheese and bread and wine is explained with a helpless shrug. If my ankle doesn't heal enough to walk I'm going to have to water purge in a Basque monastery somewhere. I have begun to imagine myself as the kind of sweaty gourmand who fans himself with a Panama hat and calls people my dear boy. Perhaps I will buy a typewriter and commit to the kind of louche emigré alcoholism that makes you as a writer or breaks you.

Torrential rain at dusk on the banks of the Nive, a tributary of the wide Adour. I’m in a red gazebo, inched a few feet in so that the downpour doesn't splash my legs, I try to remember everything I just ate. The benches look like pews and their sunbleached cushions remind me of summers camped in the gardens of my parents’ insane friends. One of them had a boat submerged in the soil, a mosquito net for a canopy. I drank wine. I ordered the chef’s special which was a mountain of fresh grilled seafood from a mile downriver. Gambas in their shells, charred squid, silky cod in a chorizo crumb, tuna steak, some sort of astonishing crushed potato and herb thing, a single triumphant cherry tomato, a warm basil vinaigrette. A basket of fresh bread, as always. It's really coming down. I inch a little further along the pew. The wine is dry and the fish is sweet. For dessert a chocolate mousse. Bayonne heaves under the weight of a dozen chocolatiers, so I assume it must be good. Of course it is. It’s impaled with two shards of tempered chilli chocolate. I can still feel the warmth on my tongue. Then a coffee and an Armagnac. On the other side of the Nive warm light spills out from a row of café-bars, the sounds of laughter washing across the water.

This might be the most on holiday any person has ever been.

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The twin rivers - smaller Nive and bloated Adour - run thick and fast with Spring rain. They are a muddy brown under the streetlights, rich with silt stolen from the arable farmlands of Nouvelle-Aquitane. I cross Pont Saint-Esprit to get back to the hostel and pause halfway. The Adour runs so furiously that it forms whirlpools. It churns and spins and shapeshifts. It’s hypnotic. Slip over the edge and you wouldn’t have a hope. You’d be spat out into the Atlantic and left to drift with the jellyfish.