First world war battlefield trip, Northern France

In the spring of 1985 school boys trying to take in the awe and majesty of the Menin gate and the uinimaginable horror of the Western Front. Visits to the trenches and the war graves in the vast cemetries: Ypres; Passchendaele; the Somme; miles and miles of trench snaking way through the countryside- scenes of mud, shell, barbed wire and bodies now overlain with grassy banks and flowers. The flat country of Northern France and Belgium as the scene of the slaughter.


Subsequent years have brought an apprecication of the art that tried to describe such horror - poetry, songs, the brilliant O What a Lovely War, the books of Sebastian Faulks, the moving TV series on the monuments to the dead all over Britain, presented by Ian Hislop.

Summer thoughts of past adventures

In a memorable edition of the Radio 4 personal essay series 'A Point of View', the writer and critic Clive James recounted his battles to give up smoking and how he eventually learned to 'smoke the memory'. Whenever he feels like a cigarette or small cigar he recalls the sensations, the feelings and associated pleasures of the actual act of lighting up, inhaling and exhaling. This helps him both to remember the pleasure and not to recreate it in actuality.

It feels a little like that as we do not contemplate venturing abroad this Summer. Instead of preparing to head off to foreign clime I shall try and recall past trips - to 'travel the memory'. What does the poet say about "summoning up things past, what do I recall?". The first venture starts in the mid-1980s and a school trip to the First World War battlefields of Northern France and Belgium, the latest a wedding anniversary trip to Paris. The travelogue will follow a haphazard, but one hopes interesting path. These are the wanderings of the Oldest Trainee...