It’s roughly been two months now since I had keyhole surgery on my left knee. The procedure was to tidy up some meniscus damage (cartilage) and replace my torn anterior cruciate ligament with a hamstring graft. It’s not a pleasant thing to go through but out here in the alps this injury seems commonplace, and during the 6 weeks or so post-op that I was reliant on crutches I passed many a polite word in the street with strangers enquiring as to when it happened, how and who had done the repair.

To anyone asking how I’m doing I’ve normally replied with a customary, “OK, not bad” and to those probing further I explained that every now and then something just seems to click. By that I mean that learning to walk again in this way isn’t a gradual process where you make an extra step every day or can bend your leg slightly further after every session with the physio. Conversely, it seems days can pass without any progress and then suddenly, out of nowhere, you can unexpectedly put aside a crutch and bear weight on your bad leg, or reach out and take a stride. For me another thing clicked today when I realised that I was walking down some steps normally, stepping down right-left-right with one foot per step, just like a normal person… I’d been working on this for at least a week without any luck and even my ankle was refusing to co-operate, claiming it had forgotten how to flex that far, but today, distracted by a greeting from a pretty girl across the road, I found myself just making it work.

Honestly, I smiled a fairly broad grin and looked forward to testing this new skill on the next few sets of steps working their way down the pavement towards my apartment. They were only little steps but it’s really something. I can already walk pretty far, this afternoon covering 5km in a few hours without any real bother, and have started doing some light jogging in my physio sessions, so stairs are my only real obstacle to getting by day-to-day.

Then I made some red pepper soup which was nice, and an apple cake which wasn’t. Still, good day trumps bad day.

Chambéry seems pretty cool, and although that’s vague waffle it’s also pretty apt as I visited the capital of Savoie on a day when my car insisted it was over 30*C outside but walking around the old town the high buildings were both pleasing on the eye and generous with the shade. The history of Chambéry is far better explained in various other places but I’m happy to say that the Château is a spectacular series of buildings and the pedestrian trail around the old streets shows off a decent blend of casual pavement-café culture and modern shops. Take a glance down the odd tunnel or through an open gate to see how everything is still moulded around the huge but chaotic maze of walls thrown up over the earlier centuries. If you are visiting though be sure to take in the château early as they seem to close the doors around 15:00. If you’re passing on an evening during these summer months, however, stick your head in anyway as although a tour of the house may not be possible you might find yourself lucky enough to catch a concert in the courtyard.

Montmélian is something special too. Anyone driving out along the D1006 can’t have failed to notice the random outcrops of crumbling fortifications up in the hills, or the official brown road signs advertising a monument of interest to tourists or historians. Montmélian is very much from the era that such things sprang up but gets little publicity; I only took a brief tour through the city by car as I climbed up to the remains of the fort, but the original construction and lack of redevelopment of this hillside town is very impressive and I honestly can’t compare it to any other place I’ve visited. The streets are tiny and narrow – so narrow that the turning circle of my car caused complications – but not in the chaotic manner of a Spanish hillside town. Everything is very neat and compact, but tall, dark and at once striking.

The fort is less exciting, pretty much all that’s left is a gateway and a mound of the sort I seem to recall seeing in Belvoir Park in Belfast – there it turned out to be a meat cellar and the one here is equally as uninspiring. The view from this hilltop is the redemption though; the site of the fort is almost the sole high outcrop in a plain stretching out to the surrounding mountains on all sides. Immediately below to the east runs the Isère river and with such visibility and natural resources and on protection on hand it’s hard to imagine a more perfect setting for a fortification. For the curious, the tourist board have installed a panorama naming all the peaks on view.

In honesty, perhaps not worth a detour from the motorway, but if you’re on the parallel RN I’d suggest a quick diversion for a brief cruise through town up to the fort before a petrol refill at the Carrefour nestled at the turn-off.

I recently completed an 800mile or so road journey through France and had determined to use it to set about calculating the fuel consumption of my new-ish car. Takes a stretch of the imagination to use the word ‘new’ as it’s actually a 12 year old Mitsubishi Shogun variant which I’ve been driving for 15 months now, but armed with the fuel receipts from the trip this is the first time I’ve really done the maths on just how much it costs.

So far, it seems to use 26p of fuel each mile to run on motorways with a bit of light town driving thrown in, or roughly 23mpg. Hardly great when Toyota are pushing the new Prius with around 72mpg ‘combined’. I try to avoid town driving so can’t guess what the Mitsubishi would do, but I don’t think halving the motorway figure would be far out.

Then I took the train into town yesterday and was taken aback by the charge of £2 for a single journey covering 3.6 miles* working out at a cost of 56p per mile.

There are clearly additional costs in running a private vehicle so allowing a generous £1,000 for annual servicing and parts costs, £185 for road tax, and about £460 for insurance I’ve arrived at 42.4p per mile to run the old tank its average of 10,000 miles a year.

Even when allowing for the fact that by road the distance to town here is greater than by rail, and by starting the car journey from my house rather than the train station, the car still comes out marginally cheaper for this journey. This isn’t a diesel 4×4, either, there’s a 3.0 litre petrol V6 pushing that 2.5ton brick along the tarmac.

The confusing pricing structure of train tickets has recently been reformed in the UK but the costs haven’t come down and on the face of it just don’t provide a good argument for giving up cars when even one as ridiculous as mine is cheaper than public transport. In fact, it seems absurd when you consider the benefits of greater luxury and convenience which a car invariably offers. So I started thinking, well this journey was only a few miles long, it must be an aberration – what about a long distance trip?

By rail, the north London train station of Kings Cross is 210 miles from our local station and by car it’s 220 miles from the house. According to The Trainline, if I hop on an off-peak single tomorrow the trip will be £69.40, but as you’d expect that fare is restricted to certain trains and if I were to go on-peak instead it would cost £123.00. At 42.4p a mile the car would cost £89.09, just nipping in under the £96.20 average cost of the two train fares.

Bearing in mind that my car has terrible fuel consumption this all seems a bit wrong given the need to encourage motorists to adopt different forms of transport. A small city car or diesel vehicle reaching at least 60mpg would be in London for much less than the off-peak rail fare too.

When you look at it like this, I can’t help wondering if anyone has ever made a regular train journey (not using a cheap offer or special advance deal) that was cheaper than it would have been in a car.

Granted, on emissions there’s no contest between a train running even at mid capacity and a sole occupant in a car, but for the majority the Carbon Footprint argument is much less convincing than the wallet argument.

p.s. I know fuel consumption changes in towns etc but it’s also worth noting that petrol is currently cheaper in the UK than France, so my costs would actually be lower if the mileage I’ve recently covered wasn’t almost entirely in Europe. I’m going to pretend these balance out…

*This is site is intended for calculating your Carbon Footprint but is also very useful for discovering the distance between train stations via the railway network: Travelfootprint.org

A member of a group I\’ve worked with this season was tragically lost in Deux-Alpes on Wednesday 5 April 2006. My sincere condolences to family and friends, I\’m sure all our thoughts are with you.