Two-bar electric heater…the grille on the front gives it away. Short seminar to follow on these twentieth-century icons, the horrific accidents they caused, and the fact that our electrical outlets are rated at 13 amps because of them!

And I’m finished. It’s time to let Daniel out of the lions’ den.

Only 20km to go now, and the Pyrenees grow more vivid, until, through a break in the trees, I see Oloron-Sainte-Marie.

And moments later, the walls of Navarrenx

The ancient road from Orthez to Navarrenx, trees planted generations ago to give shade to the traveller.

This is the land of the Wars of Religion, and of Montaigne and Montesquieu. The placenames are a reminder of those wars: I pass through Labastide-Villefranche to Sauveterre-de-Bearn. Bastide: small fortified town. Sauveterre: safe ground. The view from Sauveterre-de-Bearn toward my destination.

Backtracked along the south bank of the Adour to the confluence with the Bidouze, and followed the latter through Bidache, where the Chateau de Gramont commands a turn in the river, to Came, where I left the riverbank.

Given that his writing had kept me company all the way, and on other journeys, it would have been rude not to climb the hill to the cemetery at Urt and pay tribute.

…rolling towards Dax in the early evening.

…followed by many hot hours through Les Landes…

…on past Les Grands Lacs…

…with views over the ocean, and inland over a stark sandy landscape to La Forêt de Gascogne…

It resonates in particular with the current pervasiveness of generative AI, large language models feeding us the weighted average of what we have already written or mechanically reproduced, slowly driving giant graphite rods into the fissile energy of our creative core.

“faced with this world of faithful and complicated objects, the child can only identify himself as owner, as user, never as creator; he does not invent the world, he uses it; there are, prepared for him, actions without adventure, without wonder, without joy”

He sees the modern plastic toy as merely “reduced copies of human objects” not designed to stimulate invention or creativity, but to mean and model the norms of the adult world, and so..

The renowned Dublin physician Dominic Corrigan (1802-1880) - every medical student learns of ‘Corrigan’s pulse’ in aortic regurgitation - so espoused the beauty of Archachon and rhe health benefits of its climate that it stimulated tourism, and there remains here an Allée Dominic Corrigan

After that, I just turned the cranks to Arcachon