There'll be plenty to say about Malaysia - excellent trip, miss the place already - and to catch up on other things (Darlington, Reeth and so on), but the launch of the new P&O superferry, Spirit of Britain, pulls rank ....
I don't make a habit of doing my weekly shop in Calais.
But two days after arriving home from Penang and Kuala Lumpur, I discovered that the reason my Blackberry had stopped working in Malaysia was that the six-year-old sim card had finally died. They do, apparently, and since the phone is a French one, it was to France I had to go to replace the card.
The move proper back to France is looming but not quite soon enough. I need a phone, and have left it too late to make sense of buying a British one for when I am here. The mission had to be undertaken.
The business end of the visit was a doddle. There and back by ferry on the same day cost only £30, less than half what it would have taken to use Le Shuttle from Folkestone to Coquelles. And it brought early acquaintance with P&O's newly launched Spirit of Britain, the very existence of which offers hope that crossing the Channel by sea, and not encased in a tunnel, has a future.
And the Orange shop in Les 4 Boulevards shopping centre was not as overrun with customers as the branch in Hyères invariably is. I was seen and sent happily off with new new sim card within 15 minutes. The neighbouring Carrefour was virtually deserted, despite it being Saturday around 1pm, and it was also a lot cheaper, item for item, than my Intermarché on the Med.
Calais is not among the jewels of the French coastline, but it is still possible to eat very satisfyingly there.
Lunch for two at La Sole Meunière on the Boulevard de la Résistance was a four-course meal preceded by amuse-gueules and including a choice of local offerings from the cheese trolley.
It came, with a hearty Languedoc-Roussillon red, a Canon du Maréchal, to just €61 for two. That struck me as being staggeringly good value. The people of Calais may not get out much to the shops, but they can wine and dine a lot more tastily and economically than their better-off compatriots in more fashionable spots.
Calais has obvious problems. A neighbour in London is from the more chic Boulogne, just along the coast, and says Calais has settled back into a depressing state of nothingness after the short-lived economic boost of the building and opening of the tunnel. I was amazed at how few people seemed to be out and about on a Saturday afternoon.
But the voyage home was given a little buzz of excitement by news as we checked in that we would be travelling on board Spirit of Britain, which had entered service only the day before.
The local press reports betrayed a touch of Gallic indignation - almost totally English crew, menus only in English - but covered lots of column centimetres all the same. La Voix du Nord thought the event, to be followed by the launch of Spirit of France a few months from now, offered a little optimism amid concerns about the future of traffic between Calais and Dover.
The ship was gleaming, comfortable and highly impressive in almost every respect.
The queue for coffees in the main lounge was long. But this is low season, the ship was nowhere near full and you can hardly fault P&O for having only a couple of assistants on duty, though it was clear that either they or the coffee-making equipment found it a struggle to cope.
But the interior finish was impeccable and the provision of free wifi meant I could listen to the second half of Blackpool v Sunderland - yes, the desired away win - on an internet link.
P&O's Brian Rees tells me the Britishness of the experience reflects the customer base (90 per cent of passengers are from the UK) but adds: "We nod in the direction of France by duplicating on-board announcements in French. And we try to highlight foreign language speakers within our crew - who have little flags on their name badges to signal the languages they speak."
When Spirit of France is formally named at a ceremony in France, he says, that will represent a "little gesture towards the entente cordiale and to cement the relationship we have with the Nord Pas de Calais area where we have such deep roots, not least with our own colleagues who live in and around Calais".
None of which, of course, should necessarily stop P&O adding another small, painless gesture: French translations on menus. As for the crews, they may be overwhelmingly British but it was a French employee who produced a well-thumbed street map to show me where the Orange shop could be found, SatNav having rejected the given address.
Conclusion: Eurostar and Le Shuttle are good, if increasingly expensive, ways of getting between England and France, and I shall continue to use both. But after decades of ferry travel - for many years I even had those P&O shares that paid modest dividends but brought cheap concessionary fares - I hope the introduction of two handsome new ships on the Calais-Dover route helps to preserve the choice of crossing La Manche on the sea rather than below the seabed.
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