I don't like the end of year celebrations
Following this mishap, things went better, to the point of being able to travel again (with a cane, however), including a trip to Périgueux with endless train journeys, like Paris to Bordeaux in 2 hours 30 minutes followed by Bordeaux to Périgueux in 2 hours 45 minutes, during the first strikes against the pensions reform. I find out during the TGV journey that my return train is canceled, so I spend an hour in Bordeaux at the ticket office to change my ticket... In short, Paris-Périgueux: more than six hours...
We also gave a concert in mid-December, which was a return to normality.
Noirmoutiers
After that, we went to spend Christmas in Noirmoutier with Marie's daughters, Mathilde and Anna. I'm not usually a fan of the end of year celebrations because I'm often feeling under the weather at this time of year, endless meals aren't my thing, neither are gift-giving ceremonies that go on forever, fixed date celebrations even less so, plus I'm on the move so much the rest of the year that I like to stay at home and relax the rest of the time. In a nutshell, Christmas with children is great, but when there are only adults, I'm more into a minimalist approach... Marie's daughters and their partners had organized everything, rented a house, etc., so it would have been rude of me not to accept to go, despite the fact that I wasn't feeling up to it at all. And sure enough: the day after our arrival on the island, I started to snort, had moments of extreme fatigue and spent the afternoon in bed sleeping/coughing. The second day was the same, the third day was the worst of the worst, and so on. Basically, on New Year's Eve, I ate soup and salad and went back to bed. In short, I spent four or five days in bed with a record 20 hours of sleep in a row and about two kilograms of used tissues. Great!
After those few days, I was back in shape, enough to be able to go home and... sleep!
The car too
The icing on the cake: one of the car's steering ball joints blew in the last days of the year. We replaced both, but a tripod, a part between the cardan and the gearbox, was damaged and, to top it all off, it is no longer manufactured by Mercedes. The car is 33 years old, this version was not mass-produced and it seems that Mercedes contrived to change this part every 3 months with different specifications for each version. As a result, even today, I am still looking for this part because I can only use the car at a maximum of 50 km/h. It's sick too.
Travel, travel
January 2023, trip to Caen (Normandy), rather cool, for 3 days, at the beginning of the month, the opportunity to explore a little this bizarre city, which, completely destroyed during the war, opted to rebuild itself identically, without even taking the opportunity of trying to improve anything. It's pretty but a bit strange all the same.
A fortnight later, I set off for Lyon, a city where, for no particular reason, I have never really managed to feel at home. I ended up in an Air Bn'B next to the Fourvière tunnel, which is not the most exciting part of the city either. This means I have to walk a lot, as the buses and subways (especially) are not nearby or don't really go where I need them to go. I still have a cane and train strikes are announced, which means I have to bring my return ticket forward by one day. But that's not the end of it: on the last day, a Thursday, even though I am scheduled to take a train at around 5pm and the strike is not due to start until the following day, I receive an alert telling me my train has been canceled. So I leave an hour earlier than planned, heading for the Perrache station, and there I experience a moment beyond competition, almost psychedelic.
The day before, however, I had visited a guitar maker I hadn't seen for a long time and who, as luck would have it, had opened a workshop just down the street from where I was staying. We had a pleasant time evoking the past and catching up on each other's lives.
I leave him after he has recommended a good pizzeria. For the first time, I feel a state of fatigue that I will experience several times in the following months, growing worse, a semi-automatic state in which your body moves robotically and slowly. I say robotic because it doesn't need you to know it has to put one foot in front of the other, turn left or right, etc. It's slow because it's too tired to be in full auto. It needs to be watched over and monitored, and that's what you do. You find yourself a bit like the little alien in I don't know which Hollywood movie, lodged in the skull of a creature 10 times bigger than him, except that your cockpit is useless, you have no controls, no direct action, just a microphone to shout out instructions. Watch out for the right, go down the sidewalk, don't cross right away, etc. Under these conditions, goodbye pizzeria, let me buy some frozen crap and go home. It took me ages to walk along the Saône or the Rhône (I never know which one I'm dealing with), moving along like an old man. Back at the Air BnB, I ate quickly and slept until the next morning. So here comes this last day...
Abracadabrantesque return
First of all, I would like to point out that I am generally in favor of people fighting for their rights and that, consequently, I am willing to accept the inconveniences that this may cause. But you can't just push granny down the stairs, as they say... For those who don't know, Lyon has two stations: Perrache and La Part-Dieu. My canceled train was leaving from Perrache, so that's where I went. I came across two “agents” whose ticket office was about to be completely invaded. The person I am speaking to seems to be finding out about the cancellations, she makes a phone call, asks me to wait and disappears. After 10 minutes I see her in a corner of the outdoor courtyard, talking to four or five SNCF agents not really in uniform, a kind of early strike picket line since the strike doesn't start until midnight, in 6 or 7 hours' time. She comes back and explains that a TER will be arriving in 5 minutes, which will also stop at La Part-Dieu, and hands me a crumpled sheet of A4 paper on which someone has handwritten a kind of “voucher” to take any TGV to Paris from La Part-Dieu.
When I arrived at La Part-Dieu, I saw that only one train to Paris was listed, at 16:34, replacing three others that had been canceled. I waited in the station hall with many other travelers, our eyes glued to the screens. An agent, vaguely mocking, announces over the intercom that the Lyon-Marseille train has been canceled. The people waiting for this train grumble a little and start to disperse, some leaving the station. Two minutes later, another voice announces that, no, the train is running after all, but that an abandoned piece of luggage is delaying the departure for who knows how long. This is followed by strange exchanges in which we understand that agents in the control room are trying to understand how the station's announcement system works. This results in amplified comments throughout the station such as: “Is it working there? ...”, “If I press here, can they hear me?”, “When do the others arrive?” and even a girl who tries to make an announcement and gets cut off in the middle. During this episode, we, the “Lyon-Paris”, are waiting to find out the departure track. It is displayed at 4.30pm, 4 minutes before departure. We already know that we will be leaving late. Everyone goes to the platform to learn that it is forbidden to board the train because... suspicious package, once again! This, in a train that they have put together at the station with pieces of train sets coming out of the maintenance workshops... Well, let's admit it...
We stay there, parked on the platform, then one of the agents, a little too excited to be honest, realizes that, in these cases, “YOU MUST NOT STAY ON THE PLATFORM!!!” In a chaotic improvisational atmosphere, everyone goes back down to the hall where we wait. At 5:00 p.m. (while the departure was scheduled for 4:34 p.m., just to remind you) we are allowed to board the carriages and then we have to elbow our way in because there are too many passengers for the number of seats available. Luckily, I find the last free seat in the coach I'm in and I travel sitting down while others squat on the floor of the restaurant car or sit on the railings between two pieces of luggage. Nice, isn't it?
Once again, I understand the people who are on strike, because I don't consider them to be defending “privileges” but rather that they benefit from conditions that everyone should benefit from. I also think that those who defend and preserve their privileges are found more in the gilded Parisian districts and the large mansions in the countryside. But here, we've dealt with a bunch of morons, it can happen.
Low battery
Looking back, I realize that I lived through fall 2022 with my batteries at 10% or less. I also realize, as the doctors only gave me an estimate afterwards (it started a few months ago), that Mr. Cancer probably went into action during the month of August, as the fall of 2022 was a kind of floating period for me, one of those times when nothing really moves forward, when everything is blurry or up in the air. So when fatigue, cancer and SNCF get involved... 😉
