"LILLE - SQUARE COWS" a Lille Travel Page by JohnnySpangles

Lille lies within our earth-hugging grasp these days, and this is all thanks to those splendid fellows at Eurostar. For it is they that have removed the need for me to trust 5000 gallons of aviation fuel to behave itself, whilst it fidgets between two red hot engines, in order for me to get there.

It was also thanks to the further enlightenment of the wise custodians of Eurostar that I found myself travelling to Lille, from their new station at Ebbsfleet, for a mere £30 day-return. These days this is a sum that you’d be hard-pushed to buy a pint with on our over-priced little island.

Ebbsfleet, in case you were wondering, is a newly-named area that doesn’t even exist on the maps as yet, which makes it difficult to find and even more so if your sat-nav sends you off in the direction of Ebbw Vale in Wales. This recently baptised Ebbsfleet occupies a patch of the marshy, non-man’s land between Greenhithe and Northfleet in North Kent. If World War I had ever made it across the channel then this would have been the area that neither side particularly wanted, but they’d have spent four years in the mud and blood scrapping over it.

Such is the sogginess of the land that in the past the only things that ever survived here would have been wading birds and oil-slicks. However thanks to the draining of the marshes, and the shooting of the wading birds, there’s now a brand new train station sitting atop this former swamp.

A word of caution though, if you were planning to fuel your early start at this recently opened bog-raft with a wonderfully greasy fried breakfast be warned that Ebbsfleet is far too new and shiny to be reminded of our glorious culinary past. All you’ll get is a Costa-Lot coffee washed down with one of their oversized muffins, and not much change from a tenner. With the surrounding area being full of crocodiles and swamp-sprites there’s no chance of a local greasy-spoon sizzling up some sausages for you either. So bring your own camp-stove and frying-pan.

Eurostar claimed that Lille could be reached in a mere 75 minutes from Ebbsfleet. This is thanks to their super new tracks which have withdrawn the need for a man with a red flag to walk in front of the train whilst it is on the British leg of the journey. I was somewhat doubting of their claims as I was sure they hadn’t realised that Lille is actually in another country, and one that is all the way off in a different continent called Europe.

My suspicions were confirmed as were delayed by an hour. This was due to the train if front of us being stuck in the tunnel because a handful of asylum seekers had chosen that day to make a mass attempt to live with the bad food, bad weather and bad temper of England as opposed to luxuriating in the exquisite continental delights that they'd been enjoying in France. I can understand why it took an hour to sort out. Being hit by a high-speed train whilst walking through a pitch-black tunnel, holding hands and whistling ‘The Great Escape’, is going to make a bit of a mess. I can also understand why these splattered escapees were seeking an asylum, they must have been mad to want to live in England.

I had thought long and hard about buying my E3.50 one-day travel card when we got to Lille. In the end I found it to be an unnecessary expense as, apart from the thirty-second metro ride to the Grand Place, I never saw anything else resembling public transport on Lille’s narrow, cobbled streets.

Lille is very small, although it claims to be France’s fourth biggest city. I think it is fibbing. Even the metro is like a totally automated toy-train with plastic carriages that are only six feet wide. The platforms are three times as along as the trains. So it is quite possible to be stood at one end of the platform and for whoever is operating the Hornby-controller to quietly sneak the train in quietly at the other end, and then maliciously scoot it off again by the time you’ve run down the platform.

The tiny train is typical of Lille. The normal complaint if something isn’t big enough is that the quality will outweigh any shortcomings, or so girls have told me. I not so sure they believed it afterwards. The trouble with Lille is that it has neither size nor quality. So when compared to the cultural colossus that is Paris, Lille appears like a bad-tempered midget.

The state of the city’s art gallery is analogous to Lille as a whole. Reputedly it has France’s second largest art gallery. Although I think that in reality France has one massive art-hypermarket in the Louvre and then lots of very much smaller Kwik-E-Mart provincial galleries. The Lille Palais des Beau Arts has a reasonably good collection but they are badly presented and the most is not made of them. This gallery needs a makeover of Tate-anic proportions.

For instance they have a wonderful van Gogh painting of some cows that is languishing at the end of a dimly-lit corridor and hanging on stained hessian walls. Most curators elsewhere would kill for this picture and make it their star-attraction, sadly not so in Lille. A further ignominy is committed by whoever it is that runs this gallery when you get to the gallery shop and find that they stock square postcards that will fit no-known postcard album. Even worse it means that one of van Gogh’s poor old cows has had its buttocks excised in order to cram the poor beast into this unrelenting square format. So there’s old van Gogh, mad as a hatter and suffering for his art, spending all week making this painting only for some philistine to come along over a hundred years later and decide that the cow’s arse doesn’t fit his new postcard regime… and so it has to go.

To me that little act of artistic vandalism summed it all up. Lille could be good. It made a huge step towards being better when it got the Eurostar to stop there. However it now needs good stuff to get people to go there. It has some of the stuff already (good food, quaint streets, van Gogh’s cows) but it needs to bring it out, polish it up and market it properly. Until then it’s alright for a morning’s mooching, a long lunch and an afternoon fuming about where the bovine bum went. Then get yourself home in time for tea.