In his epic, illustrated Bulldust Diaries , about a
road safari across the top of North Australia, taking in our own Bermuda
Triangle in the search for the golden boomerang and very elusive barramundi , our roving correspondent ,
Peter Burleigh, drew the above wondrous map for that unforgettable series .
The dusty account ran to many parts, in the process sticking it up Telstra , awful outback roads, imported staff in wayside inns and incurred the wrath
of Grey Nomads across the nation by
taking the mickey out of them and their all mod cons mobile homes.
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Burleigh's depiction of fearless Grey Nomads pioneering in their portable suburban homes
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In this latest
undiplomatic dispatch from his
gifted roasted duck quill, he tells how the swarms of Grey Nomads of Europe cornered him and wife Judi in a deceptively named
part of France .
On the Canal de Vosges south of Nancy is the town of Charmes. It is
small and ordinary, and like all small towns in France a little run down, but
it displays flowers in window boxes, is clean and has a sprinkling of
vaguely-interesting historical buildings. Is this why it is called ‘Charmes’?
NO INTEREST IN FROGS
My geography studies as a Melbourne schoolboy
barely acknowledged the existence of France, let alone a town named Charmes. As
a responsible journalist I now turn to our source of all things historical: Book 9, ‘La Meuse et son canal, la Sambre
Belge, and Le Canal des Vosges’, published by Fluviacarte at 20
Euros.
This book is an entire University of Life in
paperback, all in only 100 or so pages! OK, it leaves out all the unimportant
stuff about life like birth, death, marriage and the universe and presents
canals and rivers as a blue ribbon running up or down each page depending on
which way you’re travelling (right now we’re going ‘up’).
On several pages there are notes in French, German
and English which list the features of selected canalside towns. Unfortunately
the translations are not reliable, nor are the ‘facts’ presented, making
otherwise interesting towns into something resembling a Martian Baroque
nightmare.
Within these limitations, here is the story of
Charmes:
In the 11th
Century, the Counts of Toul (another town near Nancy) built a castle
and fortifications on the Meuse River. This was their first mistake, as
centuries of misery were about to fall on the unhappy inhabitants, none of whom
are alive today but who are represented by 5500 contemporary citizens, who are
equally unhappy about everything. But I am getting ahead of myself...
MURDER, PLAGUE , LOOTING
In 1301, Charmes was annexed by the Duchy of Lorraine. During the 14th
Century, plague and famine decimated the inhabitants. Clearly the name
‘Charmes’ should have been dropped; ‘Doomville’ would have been more
appropriate. In the 16th Century, the apocalypse continued as plague
and famine ran riot once again.
Surely ill fortune of this magnitude happens
for a reason.In modern times, it’s usually our choices of political leaders
which drop us in the shit. Today we simply open another bottle of good wine and
forget our troubles, but in those far-off days all you could do was pray. Of
course once you were massacred or Black Death’d you couldn’t protest. Not only
that, no one would listen to you. OK, you might have had time to question the
name of your town.
Sure enough, in 1475 Charles the Bold burned and pillaged the town and
massacred most of its population. In 1633,
after a long period of holding its breath, the Charmes population were relieved
when Cardinal Richelieu and Charles IV of Lorraine signed the Treaty of
Charmes. Predictably it wasn’t long before misery again fell like an anvil on a
cartoon rabbit. In 1636 the town was taken by the French and their Swedish
allies and again it was looted and burned.
In 1766 it
stopped complaining about its undersized cemeteries and celebrated its
incorporation into France. Charmes celebrated too soon. The Prussians arrived
uninvited and killed the majority of the population, then burned the town.
Insurance rates, even then at a 250-year high, were increased. The town was
liberated in 1873 and almost immediately devastated by the First World War
forty years later. Nevertheless, the ‘Trouee of Charmes’ battle saved the town
and continued the lives of Charmes’ 200 citizens. It seemed like a week went
by, then the town was destroyed by the retreating Germans in September 1944. As
usual, the inhabitants suffered.
After all
this, you’d expect people would have learned to keep well clear of Charmes, but
the remaining inhabitants rebuilt the town in just five years, reopening for
business in 1952. The inmates running the asylum? The zombies in charge of the
blood bank?
Since the 50’s it’s been hard to contribute further impressive
death and destruction statistics since refrigeration, free medical care and
Pasteurization became common in France, but the Charmelions, shall we call
them, have finally discovered a new plague to put the town back on the map.
LEMMINGS, GREY NOMADS, PAVLOVA
On the July
14 Bastille Day holiday we arrived in Charmes to study the phenomenon that has
finally returned Charmes to lying on its back with its legs in the air :
camper vans. Ever wonder what happens to the lemmings who run over the cliff
edge? That’s right, they end up here in Charmes. There are two huge campervan parks in town.
The first and biggest is strung out along the canal through the centre of town.
Canal boats like ours also moor along the same stretch, but we don’t stay long.
We see ourselves as cultural leaders and disdain the proletariat campervan scum
who….sorry, I’m raving.
Tomorrow
morning we will be among the lucky ones who have escaped. “You can checkout but
you can never leave” was a song written about Charmes, the unreality capital of
Lorraine.
Indeed, as I write I am looking along a long line of vans – at least
40 of them – parked exactly in line, nose to canal, like a line-up of
professional nightclub dancers (minus the nudity). It’s impressive. Each van is
of similar design, sort of lumpy and hippo-like, and each has a satellite dish
on the roof. The dishes are folded flat to avoid being scraped off on the
underside of bridges. Around 8pm, the TVs are switched on, the dishes whirr and
heave themselves erect with a graceful movement that would put Pavlova in her
grave from jealousy if she wasn’t already dead.
ROSE BY ANOTHER NAME, YARRA
In the
morning you notice other fine points of choreography. At 8am the dishes shake
themselves then articulately withdraw back into their shells. Soon after, forty
doors open at exactly the same moment. Women campers – stolid wives with thighs
similar in scale to the camper vans –
emerge with a small garbage bag and three or four empty wine bottles. In
France there are bottle bins everywhere. The women slide their empty Burgundy
Rose bottles through a round slot. They make very loud, sustained smashing
sounds and wake up everybody who is trying to snatch some extra sleep.
After a
short pause the doors open again and the men emerge. In most cases their bellies
emerge first. They carry fishing rods, buckets, nets and comfy folding chairs.
A brave few have open cans of cheap Kronenberg beer in their left hands.
Predictably they catch nothing, not least because the intensity of the
pollution in the canal has killed all the fish the whole way down the food chain,
including single cell amoebae. This doesn’t seem to be the point, especially as
the canal is more opaque than the Yarra and the only thing (apart from Ebola)
you can catch is a bad case of fishermans’ optimism.
What started
out as an optimistic and progressive community a few centuries ago has now
occupied a level of hell that even Dante didn’t dream of: the campervan level.
So the charms of Charmes lie pretty much in the thin puns you can make about it
while you’re there. You soon tire of saying ‘I’m dying to get out of Charmes’.
So many have gone before you, but still they come. Your correspondent, clearly
afflicted with Charmes syndrome, can only warn his readers to avoid it like the
plague.
