16th MAY, 19:46pm, 200 hundred kilometres from Marseilles (or anywhere sensible)

16th MAY, 19:46pm, 200 hundred kilometres from Marseilles (or anywhere sensible)

Some hours have passed since the last time hours had passed.
We are somewhere not in Cannes, but we are much closer than we were.
Andy is currently on the telephone to Radio4 about all that we are doing and why we are doing it. It is going out on air later tonight. It’s still raining.

Si has been driving for the last few (many) hours and is doing a rather good job of not crashing. I can’t drive, so I respect this.

The direction in which this is going, is South. The roads are blocked for the moment. Rush hour. I would tell you where we are in France, but I have no sense of direction so I couldn’t possibly do that.

Sharon the film maker managed to blow a wheel on her car earlier this morning, so she is someplace far from us right now. So we are not miked up and bugged.
Which is nice.

Her film will be interesting I think.

Right now we (Si and Andy) are doing quite great team work (the radio interview is over) in getting us out of a car park somewhere where the world is very green with long strips of tarmac. Roads and that.

The send off the other night was great. Despite the chronic fuck-ups in setting up for the grand unveiling, it all turned out quite well. Though upon leaving and turning a corner we ran over a bollard somewhere towards Piccadilly.
The bollard lost, the van is hard.

It has just been stated that we shall be driving hard to hit up Cannes by midnight.
Most excellent.

Check out the video blog for today. It’s quite good.

Basically, not a lot has happened since the last time I wrote something. That said, we are a hell of a lot closer to where we’re meant to be than we were twelve hours ago.

We just found hills on the horizon (well, some other people probably found them before us, but we’ve not seen them before so now they’re ours).
There is sun above these hills. And it has stopped raining.
And as I wrote that it has started raining again. Still, the clouds are hardcore;
it is quite a stunning sight.

We are picking up speed. French radio is appalling.
Apparently “We are going to arrive in darkness”.
The place we are staying is a road up from the beach; the ocean rules at night.
Tonight we will be on that beach.

So I say we will arrive in total fucking glory. And Cannes will be ours, for a bi