‘If you want to get off and walk or run along the towpath, we’ll meet you at the fourth lock,’ the skipper had told us after breakfast.
Breakfast was a croissant and two cups of tachycardia-inducing coffee. The towpath was a six-foot-wide strip of smooth asphalt between two grass verges. It was drizzling. The coffee buzz, the level smoothness of the towpath and the overcast sky were ideal conditions for running a mile or two. I stepped off the gangplank and hit the towpath running.
The scenery was French. Burgundian. Sleek and contented Charolais cattle were up to their knees in pasture in every other field. A buzzard circled the vines on the hillside. Six magpies were pecking in a field of long stubble. Even the barbed wire seemed somehow more stylish than ours.
One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy.
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