En route to visiting a friend in Spain last week, I first flew to Marseille. No reader, you wouldn’t start from Marseille to get to Spain if you were me. But I’d never been to Marseille before, and it was a cheap flight, and I had time to spare.
There was also the prospect of a side trip into the ochre-red hills of Roussillon, where Samuel Beckett spent time during the war, an experience commemorated in Waiting for Godot.
A member of the Resistance, Beckett was waiting for Germans, mostly. And they didn’t come either. Even so, his connection with the village has spawned an annual theatre festival, later in July.
My plan was to see Marseille and Roussillon, briefly, then take a series of relaxing, picturesque train journeys around the Mediterranean, down to the Costa Brava.
Surreal-Life Experience - Frank McNally on Salvador Dali, cosmogonic ecstasy, and the far-right government of Perpignan
My French trip had no shortage of Beckett-style waiting, with Marseille Airport at 2.30am about as lively as Knock
Never employ a cat. They are ‘unreliable, capricious and liable to absenteeism’
My search for the perfect pain au chocolat is over. It was in the most obvious of places
In the event, I never saw Roussillon. But thanks to that great tradition of holiday season, the French transport strike, my trip had no shortage of Beckett-style waiting anyway.
It started at Dublin Airport, where we learned that our 7.45pm take-off would be at 8.45 due to industrial action by French air traffic controllers. Then we boarded the Ryanair plane to be told we didn’t have clearance to take off for another 2½ hours.
So we sat on the tarmac until 11.15pm, and it was 2.30am local time when we landed in Marseille. On the plus side, this was the airport of France’s second-largest city, so sure to be a hive of activity even then? Au contraire.
Marseille Airport was about as lively at 2.30am as its equivalent in Knock. The arrival of a flight from Dublin seemed to take passport control by surprise: they had to have a short conference before opening kiosks. Then we trooped out, past flight-delayed families sleeping on floors, to find the bus service had long closed.
Taxis were scarce too, although at a nightly average of €90 to the city, they must be a path to riches. A friendly cabman dropping someone off explained his wasn’t an official airport taxi but gave me a lift to the rank. When we found that empty, I hired him anyway, and at the same price as the flight, got a taxi to the hotel for half the night I’d booked.
That experience sapped some of my enthusiasm for a two-bus trip to Roussillon. But it took another kind of French air strike – the 36 degrees C variety that hit me outside the hotel next morning – to sap the rest of it. Seeing Marseille would be enough of a challenge for this visit.
Thirty-six hours later, I caught a train to Perpignan, which was indeed a picturesque journey, if not a relaxing one, because I had to change at Narbonne and feared falling asleep and waking in Bordeaux instead. Also, for reasons explained only in barely audible French, the train became 90 minutes late en route.
But I did eventually reach Perpignan: a place notable for being the first city of its size to elect a far-right mayor. That’s an interesting subject, to which I’ll return later in the week. For the purposes of this narrative, meanwhile, the most striking thing (pun not intended but I’ll leave it there) about Perpignan was my attempt to get out of it.
A train to Barcelona, although the trip is not much more than two hours, would have cost €139. For €100 less than that, I booked a bus, with a company hitherto unknown to me called Blablacar. That’s a fun name for a bus company, although it would not fill you with confidence if you had to call the customer complaints department, as I would.
My experience was not helped by the fact that Ireland seemed to be as unknown to Blablacar as Blablacar had been to me. On the screen where you gave your mobile number, the scroll-down menu of prefixes offered the UK’s +0044. But +353 was nowhere to be seen and I couldn’t enter it automatically.
This meant not receiving updates about the lateness of the 12.05pm service, of which there were several. I was dependent instead on a friendly young Frenchman who, even at 1pm, was worried about his 6.30pm flight from Barcelona. I reassured him he had loads of time. I was wrong.
Our bus turned up at 1.55pm and left just promptly to avoid the possible refunds a two-hour delay might have triggered. Then, when about 20 miles from Barcelona, the driver announced he had to stop for another 45 minutes. Rules, apparently: he’d been on duty for 8 hours.
As we whiled away the time, again, my mind went back to Marseille and the famous anthem it inspired. Maybe that spirit of militancy is still live in the French trade union movement.
But the weary patience with which locals greeted the delays everywhere suggested the line “Attendons, citoyens!” should replace the one that says “Marchons!”. I would have been up for forming battalions myself, as the song instructs. The natives were content to form queues.
