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September 2014
Off the plane we are welcomed by a warm Autumn day in the south of France. Fragrant and green.
Lyon is the first step on our short stay in Southern France, touring in leisurely hops by car, down the Rhône valley from Lyon to Avignon and then to Aix and Nice with various stops along the way.
Months earlier I’d booked a car from Lyon Airport to be dropped off at Nice Airport. I’d tried booking town centre to town centre but there was nothing available.
This meant I got to drive an unfamiliar car, with no gearstick or ignition switch and various other novel idiosyncrasies, ‘straight off the plane’. But I managed to work it out and we got to see the countryside between the airport and the city and quite a bit of the outer suburbs at our own pace. Fortunately we had ‘Madam Butterfly’ with us (more of her later) else we could never have reached our hotel through the maze of one way streets.
Gabriel García Márquez's novel Love in the Time of Cholera lies abandoned on my bookshelf. I lost patience with his mysticism - or maybe it was One Hundred Years of Solitude that drove me bananas? Yet like Albert Camus' The Plague it's a title that seems fit for the times. In some ways writing anything just now feels like a similar undertaking.
My next travel diary on this website was to have been about the wonders of Cruising - expanding on my photo diary of our recent trip to Papua New Guinea.
Cruising to PNG - click on the image to see more
Somehow that project now seems a little like advocating passing time with that entertaining game: Russian Roulette. A trip on Corona Cruise Lines perhaps?
In the meantime I've been drawn into several Facebook discussions about the 1918-20 Spanish Influenza pandemic.
After a little consideration I've concluded that it's a bad time to be a National or State leader as they will soon be forced to make the unenviable choice between the Scylla and Charybdis that I end this essay with.
On a brighter note, I've discovered that the economy can be expected to bounce back invigorated. We have all heard of the Roaring Twenties.
So the cruise industry, can take heart, because the most remarkable thing about Spanish Influenza pandemic was just how quickly people got over it after it passed.
2011 marks 300 years since the birth of the great David Hume. He was perhaps the greatest philosopher ever to write in the English language and on these grounds the ABC recently devoted four programs of The Philosopher’s Zone to his life and work. You will find several references to him if you search for his name on this website.