Category Archives: Calais

Self Portrait at the Station Feeling Bad Leaving Calais early but sick – one of those sweating ache-ridden fevers that keeps you one quarter awake all night – I’m struck that 399 years ago today Coryat walked 25 miles to … Continue reading →

In his marvelous – there will be a lot of marvelouses during this journey – Shakespeare and the Origins of English, Professor Neil Rhodes writes: “Watching television has long assumed the role that novel-reading did in the early nineteenth century, … Continue reading →

Gigi is from Cavaillon, a town between Avignon and Aix-en-Provence in the South of France. She is in Calais for three days working in the tourist office, researching tourists’ responses to the town in order to improve facilities back home, … Continue reading →

Not so far from the Richlieu park, right into a side street – on the corner of Rue Jean de Verne and the Rue Francais, is a plaque commemorating the death place of Emma Hamilton in 1815. “That” Hamilton woman: … Continue reading →

Last night in Calais I heard my first mysterious tale. The Art Museum close to the Richlieu park has a daily visitor. He is old, perhaps as much as eighty; tall with a shock of white hair and long beard, … Continue reading →

Coryat gets Going My Observations of France I was imbarked at Dover, about tenne of the clocke in the morning, the fourteenth of may, being Saturday and Whitsun-Eve, Anno 1608, and arrived in Calais (which Caesar calleth Ictius portus, a … Continue reading →

On the waterfrontWhitstable last night for Oysters and swanky fish and chips. No sign of the many YBA artists who live here; perhaps they are all walking to Venice as well: for this summer’s Biennale. Dover saw a little sun … Continue reading →

Passports tell stories, don’t they? The old one I have swapped to enable this trip was a litany of new lives I’ve lived over the last decade in London, New York, Cairo, Budapest and Ljubljana. These seem to be key … Continue reading →