les Davey de France

The RER from Paris Charles de Gaulle takes you through Drancy, where those deported during the Second World War were collected from all over France to be transferred to the camps in Poland. I always shudder as I pass through and wonder what it is like to live somewhere with such a dreadful past. I changed at the chaotic and frantic Gare du Nord for the metro to Montparnasse and found a fold-down seat in the crowded carriage. An (even more) elderly man came and folded down the seat next to me and we began to chat. I don't think I asked his age, but I did ask him if he was from Paris.  "Oh, my story is a bit complicated." It turned out that he was born in the early forties to a couple of resistants. His father was captured and shot. His mother was deported. (This means she was sent to the camps, and almost nobody ever came back.) He grew up placed in a family. I talked about how different the UK experience of the war was, and how although my father served overseas, there is...

The annual prayer retreat of the international pastors was to be held in Brno. There are no direct flights from Bordeaux to Brno and the best way to get there is to fly to Vienna and take the short train ride to Brno. There are no direct flights from Bordeaux to Vienna at this time of year, and the best way to get there is to take the train from Bordeaux to Paris, then cross the city to CDG and fly on to Vienna. So the journeys were less straightforward than they could have been. For reasons I won't go into I ended up staying overnight in Vienna on the way to Brno. This gave me the opportunity to meet Froim's parents for a meal - they picked me up from the airport, reminding me of the book "Je voudrais que quelqu'un m'attende quelque part" by Anna Gavalda, which I have never read. I ate a pork Wiener schnitzel. The next day I had a few hours to run amok in Vienna and inspected the Stephansdome and the Peterskirche, where I met George from southern India who ha...