A Flying in Nancy

The heavy rain stopped as we arrived in Nancy.

We were very impressed with Nancy and have resolved to take a longer visit there, we only saw part of it. Like many French towns it looks a bit dusty and unkempt in its suburbs, but the main square, Place Stanislav, is a fantastic World Heritage Site – quite rightly so. We sat at a bar for a drink in the square and then as it seemed a fair number of people were choosing that place to eat, we thought we might too.

Our waiter was a large man, perhaps in his twenties, with a neatly trimmed beard and a huge belly. I spoke to him in French but then when I struggled a bit with something he asked us he switched to English, which he spoke quite well. He wanted to know where we came from. When we said the north west of England he said, ‘May I ask a stupid question’.

‘Please do’.

‘Does in rain in north-west England as much as people say’.

‘Yes’, we both replied firmly and in unison.

For starter Hilary had a foie gras de canard, liver fat of duck. Foie gras is said by some to be cruel in its production, which may be so, but it is an extraordinary taste, like no other. A kind of delicate meaty, grainy butter. Meanwhile, since we were in the capital city of Lorraine, I had Quiche Lorraine, which is a posh way of saying egg-and-bacon flan.  This one was much moister than many you find in the UK and the bacon pieces were like Italian pancetta, little cubes. Very good.

For main course we had a kind of upmarket version of steak frites – we always eat steak frites in France. In this version the steak was rumpsteak done in pieces on a skewer, fairly raw as we had asked it to be done, served with chips and salad on a black rectangular plate. The waiter came to ask us how the dinner was going and as he did so Hilary yelled, ‘eeegh, oh gawd!’, for a beetle, possibly a cockroach, crawled sleepily from under her pile of chips.

Alexandre the waiter played this very professionally, he immediately took her plate and marched off to the kitchen with it. He returned a few moments later and said in English, ‘It was a flying that had fallen from the ceiling. They say they will re-make your plate’. 

And so it was that we each had near-on one and a half portions of rumpsteak each, since Hilary had nearly finished her meat on the first plate. Thus we could not manage a dessert, just some coffee which after Italy is always a relief, as the cup has a proper drink in it and in France coffee is pretty-much invariably good.

During the interim of the kitchen re-making the plate, we noticed a couple on a table nearby, a couple with nothing to say to each other. Couples in restaurants often have nothing to say to one another but these two were extreme examples, she sat for much of the time with her chin in her hand, her elbow resting on the table, while he jiggled his leg. Occasionally she removed her face from her hand in order to yawn a few times, then she put it back again. At length they decided each to fiddle on their smartphones.

‘Why do they stay together?’, asked Hilary, ‘It’s so painful. If we ever get like that, promise me we’d part’. In saying this, of course, we find that we do have something to say to each other, so this is one of those self-referencing conversations, a bit in the class of ‘This page is blank’. The couple were not very old, perhaps in their forties.

The bill for our dinner came to nearly €110, which is about double what we would expect to pay for a decent meal for two in our part of Italy. A third of that was taken up by a bottle of local red wine, served on ice, which was very nice, though we’re usually equally happy with the local plonk. At the Taverna Santa Vittoria a litre of red wine served in a recycled bottle comes in at €4, and the total bill for dinner for two is around the €25 mark. And is the steak in Nancy classier than what you get in the Taverna? Probably is, but we’re fond of the Taverna, and we’ve never yet discovered a bug in our chips, partly because we don’t buy chips there, but we’ve never discovered a bug in our corata either, though possibly you would be less likely to notice (corata is scrambled egg with chopped lamb’s heart – a Marche speciality).

And then of course you have the location. The World Heritage Site. But even so, still a bit steep, France does tend to be expensive for food.

Lugano

To get to Lugano we decided to drive the pretty route alongside Lake Como and then over the pass to the shores of Lake Lugano and along the side of that too.

The border between Italy and Switzerland on this road was not checked at all, we just drove straight through. With the amount of traffic on that narrow road the absence of border checks was probably the only expedient solution, whatever the Swiss might vote in their referendums.

But this route proved to be a mistake, not because it was not intrinsically pretty, and not because it was raining, it was because it was so busy, busy with tourists, many being herded along in parties. And this is April, what on earth must it be like in August? We asked ourselves rhetorically. We have had some successful holidays in a town on the other side of Lake Como, but we resolved never to go to that area again, but then again we thought, we are tourists too, so really we should not be snooty about this, it’s all our fault, people will be going to Cupra Marittima and San Bonifacio in their hordes soon, and we’ll complain it isn’t what it was and resolve never to go there again either.

A couple nearby to us in the restaurant we chose for dinner had nothing to say to each other. This was in Lugano, the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland, how can Italian speakers ever have nothing to say? With listening we found out how. The couple were both American.

Lugano is a very international city, and rich too, with shops for Gucci and Armani and Vuitton and all that expensive rubbish.

In the bar where we had our pre-dinner drinks, and in the busy and popular pizza restaurant where we ate our dinner, I insisted on speaking to the waiting-on staff in their own natural language, which is Italian. I was one of the very few customers doing that, most people there for eating and drinking were speaking English; my Italian is strong enough now that I can nearly always use it in preference to English and the staff, though surprised, are happy for me to do so. Sadly the same is not true of my French or German.

We ate pizzas. We had not had a pizza this trip in Italy, so decided we should in Italian-speaking Switzerland.  The pizzas were very good, but far, far, too salty, which is typically Italian, and which you don’t really notice until later in the night when you wake up with a pressing desire to run the taps in the bathroom dry.

The Americans ate a lasagne for him with a small glass of ‘lager’, and a spaghetti bolognese for her and a glass of red wine, though she ordered another glass of red wine later. We got the impression that they ordered these dishes as that is what they knew, they were a bit too cautious to be adventurous.

And they sat there, in excruciating silence, and Hilary said: ‘Why do they stay together? It’s so painful. If we ever get like that, promise me we’d part’. In saying this, of course, we find that we do have something to say to each other, so this is one of those self-referencing conversations, a bit in the class of ‘This page is blank’.

Many of the men in the bars and restaurants of Lugano were wearing suits, which makes me think it is a city with a large financial sector, a fair number looked Japanese.

Lugano also has a sizeable Muslim population, we saw many women in headscarves passing by as we were sitting outside having our drinks – for the rain had kindly stopped while we were in Lugano – including one young woman with the full black hide-your-mug works, she was with a boyfriend who was dressed in a western-style shirt and jeans, though with a Middle-Eastern appearance. He came over and said, ‘When I try to kiss my girlfriend, I get a gobfull of grubby black canvas, is this how it is supposed to be?’ No he didn’t, I made that up.

Lost Car Keys

That we were able to get to our hotel in San Bonifacio this evening had some elements of good fortune about it, as at a service station on the motorway between Rimini and Bologna on the way there I accidentally threw the car key into the waste bin.

This came about because we had overstocked on bread at the house. This meant that we decided to buy some cheese and tomatoes to go with it, and eat a picnic lunch on our way north.

As it was raining when we stopped for lunch, which it was pretty-much all day, we made our picnic in the car, and I think that somehow I dropped the car key into the bits of discarded cheese skin and tomato stalk when I was making up the sandwich. At the end of our lunch I threw our debris into the nearby bin, and then got back in the car.

No car key. It kind of dawned on me pretty quickly what I had done, and then we were blessed with two pieces of good fortune; the first was that it was a regular waste bin, not one of those that disappears into an invisible pit sunk deep in the ground. The second fortunate happenstance was that the bin had recently been emptied, this meant that it had a clean plastic liner in it and not very much waste. I was therefore able to pull the liner up and retrieve the key from various bits of rotting vegetable. On Hilary’s insistence I went to the toilets to wash the key and my hands, and then we could be on our way again. A middle-aged Italian couple watched this happening with evident mirth.

Lazy Ken

We converse with Gabriele in Italian. We converse with everyone here in Italian – Saturday 26 April 2014.

Gabriele asks if Hilary and I will join him to visit Ken and Linda. Ken and Linda are a retired couple who originate from the north of England and have lived in this area of Italy for seven years. We wonder why Gabriele is so keen we should accompany him and his wife and son on this visit, for we have only ever met Ken and Linda once before.

There are a few false starts, first it was going to be Wednesday afternoon, but then no, Gabriele had to work Wednesday, maybe Thursday. Thursday passed with no word from Gabriele, then he turned up on the doorstep, could we make Friday? In the end it was Saturday afternoon when Gabriele, Grazia, Simone, Hilary and I squeezed ourselves into Gabriele’s silver Opel Corsa for a trip to visit Ken and Linda.

Wouldn’t they like to go in our car? More room. No, Gabriele will drive.

The Corsa drives down into the valley and turns left past D.U.M. There as usual stands Ricky and I give him a wave, but he does not see us as he does not recognise the car. I explain about Ricky to Gabriele and Grazia. I notice on our return from visiting Ken and Linda, Gabriele takes a more circuitous route, bypassing D.U.M.

We get the reason why we’ve been invited when we get there; Ken and Linda speak only the barest few words of Italian; we are there as translators.

They weren’t expecting us. Gabriele says he’d phoned, he probably had, but Ken will not have understood properly what Gabriele was saying. Gabiele had to shout to gain someone’s attention: ‘Kenna! Kenna!’ Seems we wake Ken and Linda from their afternoon nap.

Ken and Linda’s house is on the sides of a valley, down a rough and rutted steep track from the road that leads up to Falerone. The Corsa got down it with five people in, but we did not risk it getting up so laden. The house is quite remote, not large, they have a swimming pool in the garden, which Linda describes as an expensive luxury and a mistake. Small bright green lizards scuttle about the rockery, Ken and Linda frequently see wild boar and deer in the fields below them, they are kept awake at night by the croaking of the frogs in the stream below, and periodically they have to deal with snakes that they find in annoying places such as wrapped round the pump for their swimming pool.

But despite being in Italy full-time for the past seven years, Neither Ken nor Linda can really hold a conversation in Italian, and in this they are by no means unusual with the Brits who live either full- or part-time roundabouts. We by contrast, after a fashion, can; yet we’re only here for a few weeks each year.

Why is it then, that Hilary and I can speak considerably more and better Italian than nearly every other Brit in the region? We think one reason is that we live in a village; if you live in the countryside as Ken and Linda do you might see no one for days on end. You have to get in your car for your shopping and so will tend to go to a supermarket where you can silently pick things off the shelves. We by contrast walk to the local shops and have to ask for things and talk to people on the way there and back.

But perhaps the biggest reason is our motivation for being here. We bought our house in Italy for a very clear reason: it was to learn something of life in a different culture, and by being here to learn about that in some depth. To do that you really have to learn something of the language, for the language and its intonations are part of what makes people think the way they do.

There are many different reasons why British people live for all or part of the year in this part of the world, but very few of these people, or possibly even none at all, share the same motivation as us. Many would say that they like the open space, sunshine, the relatively low-cost booze. Many say, too, that they like the people, they find them kind and helpful and characterful, which indeed they are. Some say they have a kind of love affair with Italy. But that does not mean they see the need to learn much of the language, or, as you often hear them say, they would love to but find learning the language too difficult.

It is difficult. Very difficult. But still needs doing if you are to be able to communicate effectively and learn something new every day.

Gabriele finds Ken amusing and calls him pigro. I say ah, yes, I know that word but cannot just at this moment think of the correct English translation. Pigro, pigro, hmmm it’ll come to me. Probably I’ll wake up in the night saying, ‘Ah yes, that’s it, I remember now. Of course’.

Pigro means lazy. I chicken out. I cannot tell Ken that Gabriele is calling him lazy for in English that is not something you would laughingly and affectionately call someone. Presumably it is OK in Italian. I simply lie that I cannot remember the meaning of the word. Later on in the conversation Gabriele refers to Ken’s pigranza, laziness, but I am on the ball, I say to Gabriele that there’s that word again, the one I don’t know and will have to wake up in the night with a sudden recall. I try to think of a word in English that gets over the idea that Gabriele is trying to put across, but oh dear, I just cannot think of one.

At this meeting Hilary does really well, both of us are doing something approaching simultaneous translation between English and Italian – albeit not with complex technical words. Gabriele and his wife Grazia know that Hilary has Alzheimer’s but possibly do not recognise that that might make remembering Italian words difficult, and in fact this meeting seems to have been very positive for Hilary’s language recall, though she is not sure she could do it again.

On our return home from visiting Ken and Linda, as part of the winding detour, we call in at a garden centre, for Grazia has to get some plants for a do or function they are attending the following day, the Sunday. We travel back up the hill from the shop with blooms perched precariously on our laps. They’re a funny lot, Italians, complex. You can call them all manner of things, though whatever epithets they might attract, never would you ever think of pigro!

A Dusty Stroll On the Lungomare

The promenade at Rimini – Friday 11 April 2014. The wind was blowing up dusty sand from the beach while the hotel staff were beginning to open up their beach chalets for the summer season, newly-painted benches being wheelbarrowed across the road in one direction, and heavy weights – used to hold things down a bit in the winter – wheelbarrowed in the other.

And we pondered on how Rimini was perhaps the first overseas package destination for British tourists in the 1950s or early 60s, and how we are fairly sure it still does feature in some British holiday brochures, and how it is now heavily frequented by Russians; most tourist signs are in Italian, English and Russian, and whether all those hotels can really fill up in summer, maybe they do during August, and how awful it all is really, though the old town of Rimini is actually very attractive.

A Spa and a Immigrant

Hotel delle Rose, Montebello Terme, 11 April 2014. Before breakfast the next morning we tried the ‘wellbeing’ walk in the grounds, that we had seen described on the hotel map, which would have been all of about ten minutes had we been able to march straight round it. Every few dozen yards there was a signpost describing an exercise you should do: bending and touching the toes; or swinging the arms left and right above the head; activities that we obediently tried, but unfortunately this did not last for many attempts as the information posts began to thin out from what showed on the map and then the path itself disappeared, having been dug up by a recently-passing tractor. Pondering for a moment that we are after all in Italy we made our way back to the hotel for breakfast.

Breakfast was superb, with Parma ham, which seeing as how we were near Parma was most appropriate, and a whole Parmesan cheese that you could cut chunks off, which seeing as we were near both Parma and Reggio Emilia seemed equally appropriate, The coffee was very good too. And all this for €89 per night B&B and swimming pools for two – I think this was an over-60s price, seemed a bargain; we’re pondering a return visit with longer stay.

The previous evening when we arrived at the hotel, among the people standing and sitting around outside was a black man. I did not give too much thought to this at the time as why shouldn’t there be? He looked a little overdressed for the occasion but then perhaps he was just a bit cold.

The man was sitting on the bench outside when we went for our morning walk and I was a bit wary of saying buon giorno for fear of being asked for money. This intuition proved to be well-founded, for when we were paying the bill he was sitting inside the reception area, on an armchair opposite the reception desk, or opposite one of the reception desks, for this being Italy there are of course, two.

Seeing me look at the man the receptionist raised her eyes heavenward. ‘He sits here every day?’, I asked. She replied that he did, and it was something of a problem for the hotel. ‘There is no work for him to do?’, I asked. ‘No’, she most firmly replied, ‘It is difficult, very difficult’.

I got the idea that the man is an immigrant, possibly from Somalia by the look of him, and he has found that by sitting around in the hotel reception he can keep warm. Possibly some people give him a euro out of kindness from time to time.

But the hotel management are going to have to throw him out sooner or later, and especially if any other immigrants latch on to the idea – fortunately for him and for the hotel it is quite a remote spot. But, this being Italy, they have sympathy for the poor chap, and being Italians they do not want to be unkind. But it cannot last, they’ll have to bite the bullet sooner or later. Though maybe I’m just looking at this purely from a British perspective.

Hotel delle Rose, Monticelli Terme

– 10 April 2014 We stayed that night at Monticelli Terme, south of Parma. Took a bit of finding and when we did we knew at once from the moment we arrived that this hotel was going to be fun.

Among my travel possessions is a Best Western loyalty card, so when we were planning the trip to le Marche this time I looked at the Best Western website and saw this hotel near Parma and it seemed like a good price. I noticed that the hotel had a swimming pool too, which was another positive for us.

We drove in under the arched and ancient-looking wrought-iron hotel sign and were surprised to see that the car park was close-on full. People were sitting around on the benches outside the entrance of the hotel in their dressing gowns and sandals.

Into the spacious marble entrance area – we needed no reminding that we were in Italy and could be nowhere else – and checked in. ‘Is the pool open?’, I asked the man at reception after we had completed our formalities. ‘Yes’, he replied, ‘Would you like me to show you how to reach it?’ Whereupon he produced a map of the hotel complex, showing that there were in fact two pools, each controlled for temperature and water mineral content. And not only that there were Turkish baths and rooms set aside for all manner of therapies, that with our stops in Bellinzona and Lugano on our journey that day we were now too late to make use of, but the pools were open until seven.

The pool we chose was warm, but stinging on the eyes on account of the salts in the water. But you could swim a fair length and there was a separate hydro-massage pool that we sat in for a few minutes, and part of the main pool was geared towards people with disabilities, including being able to get a wheelchair down into the water. Fortunately as well as our swimming towels we had brought our swimming hats, which are obligatory in many pools in Italy, including this one.

Back to our bedroom to try and make the shower work effectively – the room was extremely well appointed with a Jacuzzi bath and all manner of gadgets and a bed that could have slept a clutch of illegal immigrants together with us, but this being Italy the gadgets took a bit of time to find your way to how they work.

At a quarter to eight we went down to dinner and . . . ahah! this is one of those dining rooms that we see in Italian hotels and holiday centres from outside sometimes, a kind of therapy-centre dining room, we have never been in one before.

Many couples already eating, though the restaurant had only opened at 7.30. A small-choice menu, just three choices at each course, the menu changed daily, and a salad bar that was more of a vegetable bar in fact, where you helped yourself to whatever you wanted, all cold. I asked the waiter – who has probably been working there since he was a young man, which he no longer is – whether the vegetables were to be as an antipasto or an accompaniment to the main course. ‘You can do whatever you want'’ he replied with a smile. ‘Have it with both if you want’.

As we have seen many people in the UK do when there is a free salad bar, folk were piling their plates high. These particular folk were most certainly getting their five portions of fruit and vegetables per day: all in one go.

Unlike in Britain, where salad bars tend to include a lot of starch in their choices – potatoes in gunge and pasta and rice with various bits – this vegetable bar was solely vegetables. There were potatoes, but just plain boiled and left to cool, no white milky sludge. And while the Italians, like the Brits, pour all sorts of stuff on their pile after having filled their bowls, in Italy this is predominantly oil and salt; there was vinegar too but that was not being widely taken up. In Britain it is all manner of thick sloppy sauces, mostly white or pink in colour.

Aside from us the hotel guests were all Italian. We spoke only Italian to the staff though I think one of the waiters spoke quite good English as he cheerily said a few words to us. The hotel guests were Italian but in demeanour they could equally have been British hotel guests, consisting predominantly of couples, both young and old, with almost entirely nothing whatsoever to say to each other. Despite popular prejudice, that particular characteristic is not predominantly British, or predominantly anywhere. A big dining room and quite full, all rather quiet and clinical-looking.

From the choices of three options recited by the waiter Hilary and I each chose the same; a starter of caserèccio, I asked the waiter what that was, as caserèccio literally just means ‘homemade’, and he said it was like a maccheroni with tomato and aubergine. Righto, we’ll go for that. If fact it was a type of pasta known as strozzaprete, literally ‘strangled priest’, little twists of pasta; I guess the waiter would have thought we might understand the word maccheroni but not some of the more picturesque pasta shapes. No one else seemed to ask the waiter what caserèccio was, I guess they knew it would be a pasta dish in tomato sauce. The aubergine in the dish was cut into small cubes and dusted in flour and deep-fried – sounds far worse that it is, it was actually very tasty.

For main course we both had fillet of manzo, which is beef and which turned out to be a rather chewy steak, browned throughout and quite exercising on the jaws, but then I suppose this was a health spa. Served as meat invariably is in Italy, accompanied solely with a slice of lemon.

For dessert a good and tasty strawberry tart, a kind of sponge cake with strawberry sauce on top. Then off to our beds. Dinner €25 a head, not too bad at all. No drinks included in that, we bought from the waiter a bottle of sparkling rosé for €15 and a bottle of mineral water for €2.

Stage 4: Luzern to Montecelli Terme

From Luzern we drove through the 16-kilometer Gotthard tunnel at a steady 80kmh and out the other side where something extraordinary happens: no longer are you in German-speaking Switzerland, now everything is in Italian.

We stopped for a brief look at the town of Bellinzona, which is still well into Switzerland but you have to keep kicking yourself to remind yourself that you are not in Italy. Italian is spoken, so far as we could tell, by everyone, the restaurants look Italian; a famously-efficient red and yellow Swiss post van passes, but the driver is wearing dark glasses, is in need of a shave, and is smoking a cigarette – most disconcerting to one’s image of the archetypal Swiss. The driver of the famously efficient red and yellow Swiss Post Bus that waits outside the main railway station is standing at the open door of his bus, flashing his elaborate and colourful designer watch on his wrist while eating a biscuit. No, kick yourself again, this is Switzerland, unbelievable, but it is Switzerland.

A shortish journey today so we stopped again, still in Switzerland, for our lunch, at Lugano, which like Bellinzona looks and feels exactly like Italy. A prosperous-looking town, men in dark suits and ties were walking on the promenade of the lake, speaking Italian. Bankers or financiers.

Anyone who believes that the landscape makes the people needs to visit the Ticino region of Switzerland. It’s the people what make the landscape, not the other way round, Harry.

And Then Into Italy.

With the increased border controls between Switzerland and EU countries, voted for by the Swiss people, or some of them at least, the Italian border guards find it appropriate to place a check on the cars passing through from Switzerland into their country. This check mainly seems to consist of the officials standing about smoking a cigarette and believing they look hard and mean and cool, while the drivers of the cars that they have held in a queue that makes its way slowly through the filter, think, oh no! Here we are again, it’sn Italy!

I don’t know what it is; perhaps it is just the only true religion: the perversity of life, that means that whenever someone thinks they look hard, or mean, or cool, everyone who looks at them thinks they look flabby, stupid and ridiculous.

This observation, that those who think they look cool look instead to everyone who observes them from without as everything but, seems intrinsically basic to human life; yet so far as I can ascertain there has been no academic study as to the science of this, which seems surprising, seeing how fundamental it is. The condition seems especially to afflict Italians, who have the concept of la bella figura, a difficult phrase to translate precisely into English, the best I can come up with, that I think is pretty close to accurate, is: ‘ you dunnarf look a tit’.

But we put up with it. Driving in Italy is stressful because Italian men are brought up by their mothers to believe that they are big boys, big little piggies, and so feel the need to treat the motorway as a racetrack. Mostly I stay well clear of this and let them exercise their egos as they see fit, but occasionally I need to make use of the power of my motor car, which does not look much but has a reasonable gun about it, mainly I use this power to leave potential trouble behind; quite often this pending trouble can be attributed to someone who is texting and either separately or simultaneously reading the newspaper while driving. Piggies can do that quite invincibly, for they are their mother’s favourite little piggy and have the dark glasses to prove it. Periodically I get the car reaching a bit over 100mph to avoid what could be a dangerous situation.

Italian women are not brought up to be invincible piggies like their menfolk, though they are no better on the motorways, for an Italian woman might have read somewhere that paying attention to the road is important, but that must always and as a matter of common knowledge take second place to the infinitely more important concern of texting or talking on the mobile to her friends, or perhaps more accurately, to her mother.

Cruise control, in Italy, is nearly always impossible to use. No sooner have you switched it on than you have to switch it off again because of someone slowing down unpredictably, trying to race you to overtake, or you catch them up when they are travelling in the middle lane and you are in il filo di vergogna – the lane of shame, known in most other countries of Europe rather prosaically as ‘the inside lane’. Only in the hours between about 1pm and 2.30 can I make a little use of cruise control, while many of the piggies are at their trough and their womenfolk talking to their friends on their telefonino at the same time, mouthful by mouthful, as eating their lunch.

Hilary does find it stressful being a car passenger in Italy at the best of times. Perhaps for someone with Alzheimer’s, where unpredictable situations are best avoided, Italy is not the best country to travel in a car in.

Stage 3: Niederbronn-les-Bains to Luzern

And so on to Switzerland, crossing the border at Basel (or Bâle if you speak French) – Wednesday 9 April 2014

Crossing the border from France into Switzerland, immediately everything is in German and there is an air of efficiency, and the big wide French sky turns into fluffy clouds over the mountains. Although Switzerland has four official languages (German, French, Italian and Romansh) the regions in which a particular language is spoken are for the most part specific to that language; it’s not multi-lingual in the true sense. From Basel to Luzern, where we stayed for the night, we saw and spoke only German – Switzerland is 62% or thereabouts German-speaking.

There are checks at the border of Switzerland, you can’t drive straight through as you can between EU countries in the Schengen area, Switzerland has narrowly voted to restrict free passage of EU citizens, thus giving its law-makers something of a puzzle in how to deal with this in a way that does not prove seriously detrimental to the economic future of the country. The checks seemed very cursory however, the main thing they wanted to make sure of with us was that we bought a motorway toll ticket, which this being Switzerland you do from a woman standing by the customs hut, who sells you your vignette without you even needing to get out of the car, she even sticks it on the windscreen for you. All very efficient. All very German-Swiss.

We stayed in Luzern which Sam says is his favourite city in Europe. He texted his mum to ask how she was liking it. A difficult one to answer, for while we were not disliking it, we were not especially gripped by it either, as so often in Switzerland we have nothing to complain about, but nothing either to get much excited about. We find Switzerland in general rather dull. The scenery is spectacular, but scenery is passive, and especially for someone with Alzheimer’s, it’s important to have more than passive – passive doesn’t exercise the brain much.

It was a warm sunny afternoon in Luzern so after a stroll round town to see the foreign tourists we sat at a café by the lake for a beer. I thought a walk along the lakeside path would be pleasant but Hilary wanted to sit and read, so she ordered another Swiss weizen, while I went off for a stroll, with a predetermined time to meet back at the bar. The woman in charge of the bar was intrigued, who were these strange German-speaking foreigners? So she engaged Hilary in conversation, which Hilary managed well in parts, kind of losing the German from time to time, but she feels she managed OK.

We ate in the Rathaus Brauerei in Luzern, a rather strange dinner of a white-coloured sausage for Hilary that was described as veal, though tasted of little, with chips, and fleischkäse for me, literally meat-cheese, which was a kind of luncheon meat, with what was described on the menu as bratkartoffeln. Bratkartoffeln in north Germany, if produced from good quality ingredients, can be a worthwhile meal in themselves being potatoes fried with onions and bacon fat. These in Luzern were kind of refried new potatoes. Interesting; more odd than special.

Tourists were in evidence in Luzern, lots of Chinese taking photographs of each other on their smartphones in front of the lake (which is known in English and French as Lake Lucerne, but in German, the language they speak there, as the VierwaldStätterSee). There are a lot of Chinese tourists in Germany and Switzerland these days, less so in Britain as the visa entry requirements for the UK are much more onerous; David Cameron said he was going to do something about that as Chinese tourists tend to be big spenders, but that can be tricky for him, he’ll let the money go to Switzerland instead for a quiet life at home. Who voted for him anyway?

Chinese tourists can generally be distinguished from Japanese tourists by their cameras, the Chinese not carrying elaborate ones in contrast to the Japanese who do, and by their hats. Japanese women have a tendency to upturned flowerpot hats or something equally bizarre-looking. Chinese women tourists mostly don’t wear hats.

Stage 2: Zeebrugge to Niederbronn-les-Bains

Tuesday 8th April. Slow unloading on the boat the following morning too. It could be that this boat, The Pride of Bruges is getting rather too old for modern levels of service, it’s second-hand, it was a Norwegian ship, a small cruise ship, called Norsun, when built; and it may be that P&O are waiting before replacing it until the docks at Hull are upgraded so that the Zeebrugge ferry no longer has to pass through a sea-lock, which it does now, slowing the journey time quite a bit and meaning that any replacement boat cannot be any longer or wider than the existing one, which just fits in the lock. The Rotterdam ferry, by contrast, berths on the sea side of the lock and is a notably bigger and more modern-looking boat altogether.

The unsmiling car-deck staff on the ferry are not Filipino, they are either British or Belgian, and the captain was Belgian, though the boat is essentially British, in addition to serving beer in pints it charges for everything in pounds sterling and has British-style electric sockets.

Quite what those who shout from their bar stools about British jobs for British people would make of all this charming Filipino coupled with stroppy indigenous staff I don’t know; perhaps such people never travel from Hull to Zeebrugge, so they don’t need to make anything of it. Or no, possibly they do but do not see the irony of the situation, I rather got the impression that few if any other passengers on the boat were pondering on irony, or even noticing.

We pondered such things while waiting for the direction to drive off the boat. Alzheimer’s does not appear to affect the ability to ponder, or not yet anyway thank goodness.

And so into Belgium where the roads are less busy, less frenetic, than those in the UK. People from overseas who stayed with us when we were at Oakdene often remarked how fast and aggressive the driving seemed to be in the UK. It isn't particularly fast, and it is relatively aggressive, but the main point about it is that it's much busier. This will be a little bit to do with population density, though not especially, as Flanders and the Netherlands are if anything more densely populated. My guess is that the main cause is that the number of roads in the UK is relatively fewer, though we have never read anything about this.

Belgium has good food and chaotic organisation. A bit like Italy.

We missed a signpost and took a wrong turn and ended up driving through Brussels, which we discovered has practically nothing by way of signposts to get you out again. Interesting place though, very multicultural and quite French-looking in many ways. French is spoken in Brussels, whereas all round especially on the east, north and west sides, the people speak Flemish, and mostly profess not to understand French, as the people in Brussels refuse to understand Flemish. A strange country, Belgium.

Eventually we found our way out of the city, missing a fair few turns on the way. Hilary had the map, but the difficulty in leaving Brussels was nothing to do with Alzheimer’s, it was to do with lack of signposts.

There is a book called 'How England Made the English' by Harry Mount in which he puts the idea that parachuting yourself into England you know you could not be anywhere else, which is true enough, but he says that doesn’t apply to other European countries and in that he is just manifestly wrong.

One country that disproves my every-country-distinctive theory, however, might be Luxembourg, I would find it very hard to know when I was in Luxembourg, as indeed we were on our drive south from Zeebrugge and only really knew so from the map.

As I drive the car through Europe, Hilary keeps the map on her lap and follows where we are, also giving directions when there’s a choice of ways to go. No problem there as regards the Alzheimer’s, no problem at all.

By contrast to Luxembourg, you know immediately when you have crossed the border into France. On this drive we did that from Germany, just a few miles south of the town of Zweibrucken, which looks like many a German town, with industry and heavy-faced architecture, we were parachuted (metaphorically) into Zweibrucken and knew immediately that we could be nowhere but Germany; we then drove uphill past neat houses and woodland for about five or ten miles and suddenly you know you are in France, it just could not be anywhere else, it is so immediately striking, the country opens out, with big skies and endless fields growing, seemingly, not very much, though cultivated so they probably will be growing something. And roads with no hedges, and an open winding road across the undulating countryside and the inevitable school bus bouncing along in the distance. Could only be France.

This particular part of France, though it looks archetypically French, is Alsace, which was part of Germany from 1870 until 1919; the French were particularly aggrieved to have lost Alsace and Lorraine in the Franco-Prussian war and were determined to get them back again. But though this area is now part of France, the poorer people - presumably the more authentically indigenous people, speak German. You hear the poorly-dressed and overweight people who are sitting stirring a coffee at the tables outside the patisserie, speaking German, and the cleaning staff in the hotel were speaking German to each other.

Had Alsace not reverted to France after 1918 it might have stayed German, and it is intriguing to wonder whether, that had that been so, it would now look German, not French. And if that is right then that would contradict Harry Mount's contention, it would say that it is not the landscape that makes the people, so much as the people that make the landscape. That second theory seems infinitely more plausible, based on what we see around us.

There we go again, wondering about things. And wondering, whether all this wondering is a good thing or a bad thing, vis-à-vis the Alzheimer’s.

Possibly the language remnant of German in Alsace will be dying out as the young people who live in Alsace speak only French at school. The Saar region of Germany, though, which includes the town of Zweibrucken, has recently introduced a policy of becoming bilingual in German and French, since it borders France this seems a sensible idea; in Alsace by contrast I doubt there would be such a policy, rather the French hope that German will determinedly die out there. It is nigh-on inconceivable that this attitude will lead to the spread of the French language however; more that the Germans will do the selling, and the French the farming. As usual.

We stayed in the town of Niederbronn-les-Bains. Most of the towns in this region of Alsace have German-sounding names and they look a kind of mix, many Germanic-looking buildings but the people and the street layouts and the shops and bars and restaurants lead you to know without doubt that you are in France. We did not know it before going there, but Niederbronn is the 18th-century equivalent in France (where it was located in the 18th century) of Telford and Ironbridge in England; the place where the country's industrial revolution is deemed to have started. In Niederbronn, like Ironbridge, this was essentially due to iron foundries.

Niederbronn now has a large convent, plus tourism, which specifically includes the thermal baths and the casino.

The Mercure hotel, where we were staying in Niederbronn, turned out to be owned by the casino, so we were invited to eat in the casino restaurant and to make use of the bars there. We thought to give this a try and walked into the glitzy casino entrance, to be told by a slim woman in a purple silk trouser suit and with dyed hair that we could not go in unless we produced our passports or id cards, which we had mistakenly left in the hotel bedroom. I asked to see the restaurant menu, and she kindly obliged, and we looked at it and thought, no, not unless there isn't anywhere else. Too artificial. Too casino.

The bars in town looked a bit rough, but I opened the heavy door of the Bar Centrale and it looked fine inside, families were sitting having a drink, so we went in there. Spoke French, and the barman-manager after some obvious initial concern that he might struggle with these foreigners, finding that I could hold a brief conversation in French, became extremely friendly and smiling. A good choice. A pox on these glitzy glorified betting shops.

On our brief walk round town before trying the door of the Bar Centrale we had seen a hotel with what looked like it might be an OK restaurant, and not wanting to get there too early and so be rattling around inside we made our way towards it at about ten past seven, to find the place full, we were lucky to get a table. Obviously this is the place to eat.

And so it was. Hilary saw that there was a Menu Vegétérian - unusual for France - so she had to try that. €19. I went for the Menu Terroir with a main course of choucroûte de poissons. €30. Hilary's starter was good, based upon some tasty large tomatoes with a pungent goat's cheese; her main course disappointing, all it was really was a plate of vegetables. I started with a plate of smoked salmon nicely presented and my fish course was good in parts - some tasteless salmon, salmon is often tasteless, but a flavourful kind of fish paté and a couple of pieces of white fish that were OK. Desserts were good and we were in the restaurant for well over two hours, as this being France the service was slow, very slow, slower even than trying to board a P&O North Sea ferry - slow service in restaurants is a French characteristic, just one young woman was doing nearly all the waiting on, she was slim on top with enormously fat legs. But the food was good and there were all manner of people to watch - never forgetting the waitress' fat legs - so we did not get bored or irritated or anything negative really. We felt that our noses had led us to the right place, as we prided ourselves they so often do.

We quite took to Niederbronn, it kind of grew on us. Though we wondered, as we do about so many places, whether its economy can be sustainable, but then again it's in driving distance of Strasbourg, though that is an attractive town itself, with a sizeable tourist industry, so why go to Niederbronn?

Stage 1: P&O Ferry Hull-Zeebrugge

Hilary likes to – or liked to, she is finding it more difficult now – participate in the decision about our route. In this way she can, or could, try and assure herself that days would not be too long or too indirect and overnight stops not too hard to locate – we book in advance but would rather not get lost in a city at the end of a day trying to find our hotel.

On the map, south from Zeebrugge looks shorter than south from Rotterdam. In fact there’s not a lot in it, and Hull-Rotterdam has advantages over Hull-Zeebrugge because the ferry is bigger, newer, and does not have to spend what seems like an age negotiating a sea lock in order to get in and out of the harbour.

But Hull-Zeebrugge it was, overnight on Monday 7th April 2014.

We are kept waiting for over an hour in the queue to board. In the pouring rain. Annoying, for it seemed that the dock staff were putting their own convenience in front of that of the waiting passengers. But we are philosophical, they’ll be fired soon.

Arrogance disappears, however, the moment you have left your car and walked up the stairs to the decks, for there all the staff are smiling, helpful, and keen to sell you things. These staff are all Filipinos in yellow shirts and blue ties. A choice of three bars to go to for a drink, we chose the bar with no music, with armchairs, and light and bright as opposed to dark and moody, and ordered a beer each, which in this bar was served at your table.

Does Alzheimer’s dull the curiosity? We don’t know, but it hasn’t yet to a degree for Hilary like me wants to know why all the staff are Filipinos. We ask the barman.

Today the boat is relatively quiet, just 300 people of a capacity of 800, so the barman is happy to talk. All the crew, he said, are from the Philippines, by which he meant all the customer-facing crew apart from the information desk and the croupiers at the gaming table. They live on the boat, and work for six months, after which they return home and are replaced with a different set of crew. They then have to apply again. Their base while they are working, officially, is Rotterdam.

I don’t know the total number of crew, but clearly quite a lot, perhaps fifty. Evidently all men. Presumably this arrangement means that P&O get willing and helpful staff at low cost, possibly verging on the cheap labour. These jobs are thus denied to British or Belgian people, which perhaps might be seen by some in those countries as an outrage, though equally many others will understand that it may not be so easy for P&O to actually find enough people in Hull who have the right approach to customer service and are prepared to work permanent nights.

I also wondered whether P&O were treating this from a staffing perspective bundled in with their cruise ships. They obviously like to sell it as a kind of mini-cruise, at the same time as it being a ferry. We have never been on a cruise but are of the impression that many of the customer-facing staff are from countries where the sending home of remittances by people spending long periods from home is pretty widespread. Though we don't know. It all guesswork, keeps the brain cells moving though.

In the bar we get talking to an Irishman and his wife, they are travelling to Belgium to visit their son. The man talks about himself, doesn’t leave room for much curiosity.

In the self-service restaurant we could have made choices through from hamburger and baked beans to slices of roast beef with something vaguely resembling roast potatoes. We chose curry, we thought the Filipino cooks might possibly have some feeling for curry, and so it proved to be, the curry was quite good.

At the adjoining table to us was a man with a P&O name lanyard, and we chatted to him a little, but he said that though he did indeed work for P&O, it was on the ‘freight side’, he knew nothing about passenger ferries, so I judged that there was no point asking him about the economics of immigrant staffing.

After dinner we wandered through the bars, to see what the world was doing with itself on this overnight ferry ploughing through the waves in the dark. The bar of our our Filipino friend from earlier was completely empty, he gave us a cheery wave, standing there with nothing to do; the other two bars had a fair number in, especially the bar with the stage and &lqsuo;entertainment’. We had heard about this entertainment from an announcement while we were having our pre-dinner drinks. At some point in the evening D&J (or was it J&D?) would be on stage to entertain us with songs old and modern, until about 2am.

When after dinner we walked through the bar where D and J were on stage in front of the tinselled backdrop. D, or J, was dressed in black tights and high heels with a flouncy well-above-the-knee skirt. Her legs were apart to steady her voice and the black furry microphone held phallicly in her hand, she was singing Cry Me A River; meanwhile J, or D, was making a chunk-ding, chunk-ding noise on his electric guitar. Cry Me a River is not a chunk-ding song, it should be a moody song.

From the accent of J, or D, as she sang we guessed she was Flemish or Dutch.

The roulette table at one edge of the chunk-ding bar had people chancing their fortunes.

The third bar, where a pianist entertains or so we were told, though he was not on duty at that moment, was quieter, and somehow grubbier, still with a fair number of people sitting round drinking and a group of Filipinos in yellow shirts at the bar to serve them their pints – for this is a British ship where the beer is served in pints – and there was a cinema in a room at one end, showing three films that evening; one of the films was due to start but the Filipino man in charge of the door seemed to be having no success in attracting any customers for it.

We went for a walk on deck. An advantage of the older boats is that it is straightforward to get out on deck, newer boats tend to make this more of a challenge. We looked at the lights of the Lincolnshire coast to our right, and the numerous lights on the North Sea that we assumed must be ships and rigs to our left, but the problem with the deck was the air – the North Sea breezes were fighting a losing battle with the cigarette smoke wafting around, so we went back to our cabin for our night’s sleep.

So far so good. Hilary just got a little lost when she went back to the cabin from the pre-dinner bar to get something, not so much in finding the cabin, as finding her way out of the maze and back to the bar afterwards. But she managed it, with only a minor moment of worry.

Second trip with my can: by car to Italy.

We had this trip planned before Hilary’s diagnosis, for our house in Italy has, during the ten years that we’ve owned it and it has been habitable, had no handrails on the stairs between its five floors. We only let friends stay there – we don’t let it commercially – but a friend can soon become less of a friend, if they break their neck and think you might have had something to do with it.

We’d had a quote for handrails from an Italian company. They would have done a good job, but it would have been an Italian job. That is to say all bells and whistles. Fancy twirdles. We are northern Europeans. We like plain.

So for roughly half the cost of the Italian quote I ordered some American hemlock mopstick rails and brackets from a company in Welshpool, cut the wood to size so it would just fit in the car, and we drove the lot to Italy for a DIY fitting session.

This was the first long trip since Hilary’s dementia had been diagnosed. How would she cope with it? I think the answer was that we had absolutely no idea. While the going seems good, let’s try and carry on and do all we can. It was early days, and maybe we were being a bit too blasé, though somehow or other we managed not to overdo things.