Homeward Bound and It All Goes Wrong

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Unfortunately I didn’t make it was far as Bordeaux. I woke up in the morning to discover that my backpack had been searched and my camera, Walkman and sleeping bag had gone walkabout. For the second time I wanted to sort out the seedy looking characters in the corridor. I had a faint memory of being woken up by someone coming into the room and he had left straight away when he realised I was awake. He had obviously come back again later. Bastard!

I decided to get off at the next station and report what had happened. As I was packing the bag I relalised that the films containing all my Nice, Monte Carlo and Venice photographs had been in the camera case and had gone as well. I think that I was more gutted about that than the camera. As I was leaving the train, I got snide looks from the characters in the corridor. I wanted to punch their lights out.

I found the police station and tried to explain what had happened. Unfortunately there was no one there who could speak English and I was told to come back a couple of hours later when someone who could had returned. Bayonne was quite a nice place, but I haven’t got any photographs to remind me of it and I had lost all my motivation to do anything anyway.

Two hours later, I went through the routine and then I thought I would head to that Spanish border crossing that I was so pleased to see a couple of weeks previously to catch the train to Paris. I met an Australian and an English guy there and I told them all about my unfortunate turn of events over a couple of beers. Got pissed for the first time in ages. What the hell!

To round off a fine day, I bought a packet of cards just to discover that they were some weird kind of French pack that only contained 32 cards. I’m sorry, but when you buy a packet of cards, you don’t think to check whether they contain 52 or not. They just do! Right!!

I didn’t think of it at the time, but because of that little event, the financial pressures on me when I got back to England were substantially reduced. The insurance company paid up almost instantly and the money came in very handy before I received my first pay packet at the end of September.

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