The Marathon Snail

Sarah O’Regan volunteers with a UK charity in Dunkirk supporting refugees “You must help them!” The man, drained with cold and exhaustion, gestured at a father holding a baby as he spoke urgently to me. “Why aren’t you helping them?” The clothes of the refugee carrying the baby were wet. The air temperature was close to zero. The inflatable dinghy used in the previous night’s attempt to cross the English Channel had developed a leak and everyone, including the baby, had fallen into the freezing, dark water. This morning, the adults were still in wet clothes – the only ones they owned. The baby, at least, looked dry and warm in its father’s arms. Another man told us that when he removed his trousers to dry them, the salty fabric ripped a layer of skin off. Later, we learned that two lifeless bodies had been found in the sea. It is February, and I am on a patch of scrubland near Dunkirk in northern France, volunteering with a refugee charity, Calais ...

The ghost of Christmas past perfect continuous

Having been treated to several of the best breakfasts in Uzbekistan , I was prepared to eat relatively less well after I left Samarkand, but I wasn’t expecting to struggle on Christmas Day to find a decent meal at all in the land of plenty. I’d had an unsatisfying lunch of chicken keema shashlik which I’d deemed too suspicious to finish, fearing a bout of the Southern Purge; an affliction common to travellers in Central Asia. Haunted by friends’ photos on social media and the ghost of Christmas past perfect continuous, I had been thinking about pigs-in-blankets and chestnutty sprouts all afternoon, and I was hungry. As I was travelling out of season, there were only two evening restaurants open in town. For my Christmas dinner I chose the one I hadn’t already visited. Like on many other nights I was the only guest. I was shown to a table and pointed through the menu; many dishes were unavailable but there were the usual suspects, including fish, which was accompanied by a pleasing...

Via Francigena: Arras to Péronne

I pick up the Via Francigena, the 2000+km pilgrim path from Canterbury to Rome, in Arras, where I left off last year. Once free from the outskirts of Arras, the Via emerged onto the agricultural flatlands of Pas-de-Calais. Vast fields of thick warm-brown soil, meticulously ploughed, alternated with waving green wheat and yellow oilseed. A heavy afternoon thunderstorm led me to shelter under some young trees in the Sunken Road Cemetery, resting place of 213 soldiers from the WWI 1916 Somme offensive, fallen in trench warfare. Thinking they might be scared of the noise, I reassured them. “It’s only thunder”, I said. “Not war”. I told them what the land looked like now - all evened out, and planted with crops, guarded by wind turbines, shepherded by friendly farmers in tractors. I described the Paris-Lille TGV rushing past on the horizon. The flowers, the butterflies and bees around their graves. How brightly green and soft the grass was. One headstone had several small yellow ...