DAY 265 - LA FERTE SOUS JOUARRE TO SAINT-THIBAULT-DES-VIGNES: 25.5 MILES (51,000 STEPS)

Thursday 12 January, 2012

25.5 miles (Total: 2546.8 miles)– 51,000 steps (Total: 5,761,801 steps)

This was a good day. Let me tell you about it and finish with a topical reflection:

I felt in good shape as I set off on account of having had a day off to recover from my 35 miles trek the day before. I slept well.  I was fully up to date with blogs, flikr and most of my emails thanks to a productive day spent in MacDonald’s.

The weather was perfect for walking—around 9 degrees C and the route was interesting, in the sense that it was varied and required careful navigation, rather than just walking along the edge of a main road for eight hours.

Plan A had been to head for a Hotel Ibis at Montevrain, just on the other side of Disneyland Paris. Plan B was just to enjoy the luxury of having a wide choice of hotels to choose from and negotiate the best deal I could.

I was doing very well managing to hit every junction, which in the absence of a map, I had carefully written down from Google Maps the day before. Coming down from Condi Saint Libaire, I took a wrong turn at Montry and stopped at a bar to have a drink (coffee) and seek directions. The other customers and the bar tender spoke about as much English as I spoke French. When I explained that I had walked from La Ferte that morning, they erupted in ‘impossible’ pointing out that it was 40km (in fact it was just over 30). I then tried my full story and brought out my map of Europe to explain that I had walked from Olympia, Greece but this just seemed to heighten their sense of incredulity and confirm my ‘fruitcake’ status. The bar tender gave me directions to Montevrain whilst the other patrons talked and laughed occasionally looking in my direction to confirm their suspicions.

I arrived in Montevrain, but there was no Hotel Ibis and nowhere with an Internet connection. I decided to walk on to Lagny, where I found simply the best restaurant I have ever been in: here are the judging criteria—it had fast wi-fi and no fiddly access codes, just open up and you are connected; they were very friendly; they were into haute cuisine, but had enough of a sense of fun to put a Cheeseburger and chips on the menu for the occasional unsophisticated Brit who might walk by; they were happy for me to respond to emails at the table;  they had live music; the food was served with a level of artistic quality that I have never seen before; and Cheeseburger and profiteroles with lashings of chocolate and cream, came out at 23 euros. The name of the restaurant was Le B 28, 14 Pl. De La Fontain, 77400, Lagny. Using the Internet I was able to locate a hotel room at the Comfort Inn not far out of the centre.

Finally, a reflection on a topical issue: I had downloaded ‘War of the World’ by Niall Ferguson with an Apple iTunes voucher I had received for Christmas. I have listed to three of his books on my trip and they are hard going as they assume so much knowledge of history on the part of the reader, but they contain so many gems which make the effort worthwhile.

One of those gems caught my attention as I approached Paris, for it was about the negotiations in the Paris Peace Conference which followed the end of WWI and gave birth to the League of Nations—the gem, was the proposal by the Japanese that the constitution of the League of Nations should include a clause to the effect that ‘all races are equal’. This may seem odd given the later barbaric treatment of especially the Korean peoples, but it is a matter of historic record that the clause was proposed. As is the fact that it was opposed by the architect of the Paris Peace Conference, US president, Woodrow Wilson and by the Australians. The former being worried about what this may mean for policy of segregation and discrimination of African Americans and Native Americans and the latter, that it might challenge their ‘white’s only’ immigration policy and the segregation and discrimination of  the Aborigines. The move by Japan was defeated and so the League of Nations was born enshrining the belief that there were indeed higher and lower races.

One wonders where the vision of the authors of the American Declaration of Independence was when they wrote in 1776, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men.’

I later saw the reports of US Marines urinating on dead bodies of Taliban fighters, and allowing themselves to be recorded doing so, and I realised that such inhumanity is not limited to time and place. When we cease to have empathy, we cease to see someone as of equal worth. When we lose sight of a person’s humanity, then all manner of unspeakable evil becomes permissible, even justifiable, whether you are a Red Army Guard in a Gulag, a member of the SS in a Concentration Camp, an al Qaeda terrorist, a US Marine, or for that matter a British politician. For as Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, who knew a thing or two about such things observed in Gulag Archipelago:

““Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains an unuprooted small corner of evil.”

That is why human rights legislation may be frustrating to some, but it is utterly essential to preserve the dignity and equal worth of all human beings. Moreover that these rights should be assigned to an individual, not a nation, and be irrespective of nationality, race, creed, gender, sexuality or social background is fundamental to building an international society by underscoring the moral permeability of borders. How these rights are upheld in countries like North Korea, Syria, Burma or Iran is a challenge, but it starts with us ensuring we uphold them ourselves. Not because, as in this case, they have besmirched the good name of the US Marines and embarrassed the White House, but because they have denied a fellow human being their divinely ordained status as an equal and valued part of the human race, guilty or innocent, dead or alive, which in turn applies to them too.