Two more nights in Cancale

It was not my two who planned Brittany, in the end. It was their grandson, who is ten, and who came to the kitchen table on the last Sunday of the summer holidays to see why his grandmother had been looking at the same laptop for an hour. She told him she was looking for somewhere quiet by the sea for September. He asked if he might have a go, and she, who has planned every holiday of her married life at that table, slid the laptop across.

He typed into the Vacamp map, without capitals, sea calm good food. Then, after a moment's thought, crabs. The map, I understand, took all four requests seriously. By bedtime she had five campsites in a line, from the Dutch coast down to Brittany and back along the Belgian one, each of them by the water, with the nights she wanted and the dates arranged behind them. The boy went up to bed having planned his first holiday. It was not one he was coming on.

His grandfather took the last word to heart. On our first evening, on the Dutch coast, he walked down to the breakwater with his telephone and sent the boy a photograph of a crab. He did the same in Normandy. By Brittany it had become a duty, and he performed it at the same hour each evening, with the punctuality he once kept for the office.

At Cancale there is a row of stalls on the harbour wall where oysters are opened onto paper plates, and people eat them on the steps with the tide out and throw the shells onto the mud. I was not present. My two had gone down on the e-bikes, and I was on a pitch above the town, level at the first attempt, as it happens. I have the account from him, who gave it to the boy that evening at some length.

She stood in front of the stalls for a long time. In forty years of hotels and business dinners she had never eaten an oyster. He has eaten a great many, out of politeness to clients, and has never said a word in their favour. She ordered a dozen. He offered to help. She declined, went back for a second dozen, and on the ride home asked him, quite seriously, whether we were in a hurry.

← The beds at low tide. She has asked me not to say how many.

We were not. That evening, at my table, she gave Cancale two more nights, and the dates behind it moved back by two days, as dates do. Crozon, on its new dates, had no room. She sat with this for a moment. Then she took two nights from the Belgian coast, which had only ever been somewhere to sleep on the way home, and found another campsite in the same corner of Crozon with room and a pitch of my length. We would still be home on the day she had promised our daughter.

For forty years a plan, for my two, was a thing to be kept. The hotels were booked in January and left on the morning printed on the confirmation, whatever the weather or the oysters. I had wondered whether a route would simply be the same folder in a newer form. I need not have wondered. It turned out to be a list she was allowed to change, and it had the good manners to rearrange itself when she did.

← Next September, as it stands. Cancale has kept its six nights.

The rock pools at Crozon were very good. On the second evening he went out further than usual for a crab of real quality and came back with his good trousers wet to the knee. She said nothing. She hung them on my ladder to dry.

We have been home a week. The road atlas is back in my door pocket. The oyster knife she bought on our last morning, from the woman at the third stall, did not go into the cupboard with the wine. It lives in her handbag, I understand, and goes everywhere she does.

P.S. The trip is saved as "Brittany, again". She has added a sixth stop.

With every good wish,
Oliver

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