August 17, 2019
Monsoon at Mousson
Nancy to Pont à Mousson
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IN the olden days, when people wore hats and dressed in black and white, there was a way to flash subliminal messages during television programmes. Your eyes didn't see them but your brain began to think you ought to buy soap powder or chewing gum.
Pont à Mousson is like that. It's not flashed during television programmes because that's illegal as it is everywhere. But you see it every day nevertheless and you know it even if you can't think why.
The reason is that it's written on every manhole cover. The giant foundry outside the town appears to have the monopoly of filling holes in the road. Either it has the unique right or nobody else has chosen to get into such a, well, down-to-earth business.
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Anyway, a bend in the path beside the Moselle took us two sides round a wide stretch of grassland that established a visual cordon sanitaire between us and heavy industry.
I don't suppose we are the only people to have taken a photo of this Ali Baba's cave of manhole covers. But I bet most people in town are both proud and embarrassed to be associated with it. It must come up in every conversation: "Oh, Pont à Mousson? Isn't that where they make..."
We got here in the rain. Appropriately mousson is French for a monsoon. Where once rain falling in the river had made it ripple like eyes opening and closing, now it fell hard enough to depress an evangelist.
It had been threatening all day. It threatened from the moment we left Nancy after an hour-long stint of shopping and map-hunting. But it didn't stop us stopping to chat with a couple coming the other way with a small child in a trailer.
Vanessa comes from Ieper in Belgium, "or a place near there, anyway, which has even less to do than Ieper."
Ieper is also known by its French name of Ypres. British troops in the first world war pronounced it "Wipers". Vanessa dismisses it as "all battlefields and cows."
In fact it's a glorious city, restored from the rubble that was all that was left. It was also the first place that poison gas was used.
She and her Welsh husband and their child were cycling as far south as they can before time stops them.
"We love cycling," Vanessa bubbled in a Welsh accent. Vanessa doesn't talk - she bubbles with horizonless enthusiasm. She and Glyn met 14 years ago when she was in Argentina on holiday and he was pedalling through.
"I was alone and we started talking and we never parted."
I looked at Glyn. He raised his eyes to the heavens.
"And you thought it was just for the afternoon," I said in mock lament.
We got into Pont à Mousson as the rain reached its greatest fury. Like most towns, the centre is more attractive than the outskirts. It has an arcaded square and architecture reminiscent of Belgian Flanders. It also has a stage set up for a performance that we suspect won't take place.
We sat and drank hot chocolate and decided we had ridden far enough already.
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