Normandy Beaches

Spent a spring day driving around Normandy with a girlfriend a few years back, when we were half-heartedly thinking of moving there. It's a very bland area, a bit like how the West Country would be if months of bombardment had flattened the hedgerows and the farms and the ancient houses. I found it impossible to imagine the ferocious fighting, the stench and the fear that prevailed there 70 years ago.

We drove along the coast and stopped at Arromanches, which was one of the Commonwealth landing points. You can still see the remains of the prefabricated Mulberry harbour which was towed across the Channel in 1944. I looked at the grey water lapping at the beach and tried very hard to assimilate the atmosphere, but quite frankly there wasn't one.

There's a museum at Arromanches, but we didn't feel like going in. There might have been a 25-pounder field gun there as well, but I could be imagining that.

Sorry to be putting a dampener on it, but basically the locals had to rebuild Caen and the surrounding infrastructure, so it's hard to think of it all as a battlefield.

On the plus side, we stopped at a cafe in some tiny village and I managed to persuade Madame behind the bar to knock us up two cups of tea with milk, which is an extraordinary achievement in France.

Mais non! Au lait! Deux tasses de the au lait! THAT was the achievement.