This context of contrivance, in terms of both stimulus and response, affects the public, but too our leaders, politicians. The harm in mistaken thought and feeling, in misjudgement, following the provision of false information, in a misleading atmosphere, increases with the degree of power. It is easy to provide false information when transparency and public scrutiny are limited, and such limits often exist in areas of great impact.
As well as hierarchy, the vertical dimension, we should consider the breadth of this issue, or its extent, remembering that this is an age built upon information, in which science and statistics are considered sacrosanct in the determination of policy. The results of scientific testing and other statistical measurement rely on a context of physical integrity, for the indications counted are often the output of circuitry, the number of ones and zeros potentially a reflection of factors other than the variable researched.
What use then is philosophy?
With our faith in fact so shaken, our approach should change - right or wrong is less a question of knowledge, but is once again more a question of ethics. Certainly, there is no rationale for violence when we are unsure of who or what we are aiming at. There can be no justification for war when our standards for decision-making are so poor. If we only act for the benefit of others, peacefully, we avoid the negative potential of ignorance and delusion, of being misled and manipulated by other selfish parties.
The Christian ethic 'Do as you would be done by' seems to preclude most bad situations. Who can say why governments have forsaken this useful guide? The idea that redemption atones for sin is another ethic that works.
In the mid nineteenth century, an inhabitant of Lourdes, then a simple village in the foothills of the Pyrenees, had several visions of the Virgin Mary. After investigation, her visions were confirmed as genuine by the church. Millions of people have since made a pilgrimage to the site, several of whom have experienced miraculous cures to their maladies. It is just an example, but it serves to illustrate the power of the word, and the trust of the public for people in positions of responsibility.
Sadly Lourdes, when I arrive there from Spain, is no tonic for my soul. The town consists of a touristic gauntlet that leads through to a grotto. Illuminated Virgin Mary statues beam brightly from souvenir shop fronts; the restaurants and bars trade off their proximity to holiness. I decide I am better off with nature and so buy a bottle of Jurançon, then wandering off through miles of suburbs to find some country-road lay-by to sit in and drink. French rural types drive past and stare, fairly wondering why on this evening their route home is my host.
Leaving Lourdes, I strike forth by rail-replacement-bus, to Toulouse, where I plan to spend one night before heading into Gascony and onto Bordeaux.
In the beginning, we are led to believe, mankind existed in a state of innocent bliss, where, with only the garden to tend, our needs and therefore wants were met in the upkeep of nature. The Original Sin is the moment when, in imagining improvements to our natural state, our wants exceeded our needs. The thought occurred that incremental happiness would be available to those who could get more out of nature, and so the inclination to delve below the surface, beyond the cycle of spring and fall, suddenly appeared. Thus, we understood the potential of a short-term glut in consumption. Still, we are left with the question, where to draw the line?
The inevitable pressure of the many looking for as much as possible has inspired much if not most of national history; society might then be our solution, the synthesis of our efforts to make the best of it. Today, we stand on the brink of an age in which we know precisely how much we can get from our resources. Understanding the total output, and projecting the likely share per person, adjusted for one's position in relation to the location and ownership of said resources, is one of the main reasons for the widespread hostility that has come to define the third millennium so far. It is perhaps thought that the game has changed, from seeing no end to our potential, to knowing that we cannot all live as the West expects to. In the future, we face the challenge of optimising the quality of our shared existence across two dimensions: how to get the best out of life using as little as possible and how to get as much as possible out of the little resources we have, and therefore use.
Defining the limits of the value that can be added to our earth is a theme that touches much of France. We might imagine the evolution of mankind's concerns since that first lonely walk towards the horizon, Adam and Eve's exile and subsequent inspection of their options - henceforth, where to choose our place of rest - their initial priorities I assume food and water, warmth, safety. From whether mountain or valley, river or sea, between soil type and rock, to here, wherever you are, and with whatever the best your town has to offer. Make of it what you will. For me then, in France, I find fun in trying to trace the lines forwards from raw to refined.
I stay at a Campanile on the edge of town, a grey block beyond a carpark, its insides decorated according to the latest modern concept, as conceived of some decades in the past. I pull out my Michelin Guide to France, a book I have carried around Europe with me for some months unused, and which I had bought to stoke my dreaming fires in the flurried weeks before my flight from London. I select a bistro, the middle class waymarker between the largesse of terroir and the finesse of haut cuisine, where for thirty euros I can choose three courses from a hand-chalked blackboard. After pastis, I am brought my complimentary shot of pea purée and subsequently asparagus gratin. For my main course fish, filleted, panfried and then plated amongst various vegetable smears, seasoned lightly with powdered root. Finally, four chunks of cheese and a pot of chutney.
You might think it funny to know that I think this is about as good as it gets, and that more elaborate attempts to eek out extra added value are normally not worth the effort. The weeks following pass by in exploring this plane of existence. The fields of Gascony flow on to bottles of Bordeaux, the dusty red stone of L'Occitanie to the grand whites of L'Aquitaine. Reaching Chancelade, the bistro does salade de hareng or omelette aux cèpes with a bottle of Margaux; the chateau kitchen round the corner, according to the fashion of this summer, serves cauliflower as a cream.
Further into the countryside, the land ripples upwards towards the Massif Central; the houses - hidden amongst thicket and vine - turn honeycomb. From the city to the town and then to the country, one begins to see the perspectives taken: a geography and its history carrying a specific identity - somewhere between regional roughness and rarity; the attempts of a centrifugal culture to classify, rank and standardise, and therein share, forming a symbiosis of region and nation. Classical France is a series of structures formed to optimise across what is natural, local and diverse - the tension between a veneration of the organic and a love of articulating order is one of the funny things about the French that I can't quite put my finger on.
The strike over, I take the train to Nimes. The utility of the square flutters through the ages; the windows of apartment blocks, square, shuttered, tell their tale in the degree of decoration.
On to Marseille, a "no go" zone according to Donald Trump, but no do, do go, ignore the do-nut, and wait for the big o, the last cry of the dodo - doomed as it is - all the more obvious for being the last of its kind.
Immigration sits neatly alongside terrorism (security) and regional devolution as the forces majeures invoked to tear up the European social contract. The link between the three, or the tactical cycle, is clear if one reads between the lines: (i) destabilised emerging markets; (ii) increased immigration and terrorism; (iii) increased anti-immigration sentiment; (iv) increased support for devolution from the EU; (v) increased security powers prevent the public from understanding what is really driving the cycle.
Each issue is a chalice designed to be filled with the blood, sweat and tears of whichever questing nation, knowing that the resultant concoction will be revolting to at least someone, and thus bound to cause a debilitating belly ache.
Our populations have fuelled the cycle with support because they are misinformed and because they are misguided in their emotional reactions to problems they don't understand. The broader issues would each of them take a lifetime to study. Their scope of course includes all manner of painful incident and narrow injustice, but the majority of life that surrounds them is innocent and at peace. News and conversation are geared towards interest, a relativistic concern that promotes the most unusual as the most engaging. There is a natural sensitivity here but I believe it to be deliberately and then inadvertently exaggerated. Thus, when thinking of immigration, for example, we are drawn into considering the opinion that we are reaching some sort of critical point, that communities are undergoing fundamental change, that society can't bear the cost and so on, but in reality even the formulas for such assessments are beyond easy agreement. Then there are the images, the strongest, most unusual associations that the brain has picked up and through shock cannot let go of. What the brain fails to do is at once absorb the full implications of the matter, across the pertinent amount of time. We should be trying to counteract our natural tendency to misappreciate through simplification, but instead we are failing to call a spade a spade, or properly define the problem, which is that xenophobia, and more broadly division and opposition, are cultural priorities, and ones that are being enforced across the full spectrum of mental stimulus. The underlying point I read, and that I feel needs to be warned away, is that success here should drive acceptance of the ultimate objective, war, on the right terms, and here the target a controlling hand in the global power balance.
Marseille, in my two days there, was anyway extremely likeable. On my first evening I ate very well and then smoked by the harbour, sat facing the bob and sway of yacht on Med. On the odd moment I might cast my head back over a shoulder to check the seafront square and saw, one time, it is true, an Arab lady in a customary outfit. As a true contrarian, I can't help thinking the headscarf and the shawl rather pretty, perhaps because they are unusual. In general, the population of Marseille seems intrinsically Mediterranean, and all the better for it, the sunshine smoothing off some of France's hard edges.
The next day I walk to the edges of the Calanques. The city stretches into hills and seaside suburbs, and then slips into narrow lanes, strands and streams of habitation leading into the hills, the coast then rising steeply up from cove and cliff, and curving out and around to look back on the city. Family life, bronzed and unfussy, is conducted on the beach. The world cup now swinging, the men pace nervously around the bar, drinking, smoking and cursing. When France beat Argentina, they sing the Marseillaise. Teenagers whoop on mopeds and return to the city under the sunset.
Nice, my next stop, blends, swoops and swirls into the Italian Riviera beyond it. The towns, Nice, Bordighera, Sanremo, have all an air of happy holidays: concentrated pleasure in an attractive location; architecture softened from the standard; easy music, the classics of the 80s, remind the night that the magic is not yet lost.
The Italians, somewhat like the French, live in cultural satisfaction, believing themselves already acquainted with the best life has to offer. Understanding the potential of their land, and vying to express the superlative, against their enemies, across the ages, they have then filled the space available with their chosen expressions of the ideal. It is so fucking Italian. Being used to only a pinch, two or three Italian restaurants in whatever British town - Casa Italia, Pizzeria Mamma Mia - a splash of colour to be indulged once every so often, it is almost too dense to bear if not in the right mood. If one is prepared to open the heart and stretch the solar plexus, to push out the sternum in reach of the higher notes, then it is fulfilling at the level of one's capacity, an everyday concept of the ecstatic.
The lines and layers are more interesting in Italy; the land of a sharper cut; the geology, formed from the centre of the melting pot, sits beneath a musky perfume; the ideal of beauty an aspiration towards divinity through the craft of mimesis.
The towns and cities then are dense with the most lasting achievements across a myriad of movements. From Genoa to Milan, Florence and then Rome, one wanders in the moment, attempting appreciation of each snapshot, that within its scope holds survivors from across the ages.
Opera, spaghetti, tiramisu and red wine are anyway some of my favourite accompaniments in the passage through time. I like Puccini more than Verdi, and am always very happy with vongole, fungi and al tartufo. The food was in general better than I am able to achieve myself at home: the most pleasant surprise the gnocchi, which was light and delicious, and not at all like the rubbery dumplings on sale in Britain. Feeling my way through the declensions of Italian catering, I find myself most comfortable at the trattoria level.
I take the boat from Civitavecchia back to Barcelona. A night and then a day to sail back across the Western Med. It is more or less one month since I arrived in Lourdes, and I have one more week on the continent, before taking another boat from Brittany to Ireland. In the month passed, the world cup has come and gone, France the winners, England for once punching above their footballing weight, reaching the semi-finals with an earnest performance; in the meantime, the dream of Brexit glory has come crashing down on the hard rocks of reality. Our differences in opinion seem irreconcilable, at least within the framework that the Tories, in the name of the British public, have sworn to: Brexit means Brexit.
The first issue that we have concerns the trade off of perceived advantages and disadvantages to EU membership. To interpret the Brexit zeitgeist, it seems that the free movement of goods and services is to be weighed against the free movement of people, which, pound for pound, Englishman's job for Englishman's job, is a net-zero ish calculation, again beyond formulation. Of course there is the other bit, separation from the ECJ, that appeals mainly to those Tories lurking in the darkest corridors of power. Buckets of whitewash all round... Now that we have brought the country to the crunch, instituting a crescendo of pressure for a process, we are surprisingly still unable to come to an agreement, not within the cabinet, not across the government, not amongst the population and not with our European neighbours.
Another issue is that Northern Ireland wants an open border with the rest of Ireland. Not having this might derail the peace process; having this allows the free movement of goods and people, which Brexit has ruled out on the basis of an arbitrary referendum in which there was no significant difference between for and against.
Then there are of course the gripes of poor process, complaints for such a change to the standards of state, where Theresa May’s government might define and implement Brexit however it thinks best, in private, in the midst of a fight, between unregulated intelligence agencies, for the minds of its members. Britain, bound by the Tories' "power of the word" approach to law-making, will only find out what they have done afterwards.
I am glad to be back in Barcelona. The flags have been taken down; the city is shining a little less brightly than before; some of the neon necromancers are temporarily focused elsewhere. I do some yoga and then eat a lovely stone crab with fried rice in a Chinese restaurant.
I return to France, taking the train to Lyon, a charming city with its own sense of cool. Rising between two rivers, an island eminence before the Alps, it is clean and urbane. Two days then back up in the mountains on the Plateau d'Assy, a winding valleyside village some 1,000 metres high, nestled on the slopes to the north of Mont Blanc. The pitch-up-and-see model I employ to travel almost fails me, the Sunday evening offering found end of the line almost too scant to provide me a taxi, hotel and meal for the evening, but as it was I scrape through at the close and soon find myself on my bedroom balcony with a reblochon tart and bottle of Savoyard wine.
My experience there is in general very pleasing. The views are lovely: the peaks of the range beyond my window snow-capped and sparkling; the slope back down the valley's rise an interesting mix of development and tradition. The locals I find scattered around the shops are very sweet, all of them it transpires were born on the plateau and none of them have ever considered leaving. The perception of relative happiness elsewhere and otherwise, which drives immigration, does not apply here. The mountain is hard to climb, and so is a hard place to envisage as a practical alternative, but those born at such heights are apparently amongst the happiest.
Finally Dijon, Rennes and Roscoff, all of which I like very much. The end then of Brexile, Part Four, with me waiting for a ferry to Ireland, eating a crab and caramelised leek gratin.