Whatever Happened to Dirk Bogarde?

The Vasco da Gama Bridge

I watched that movie ‘A Bridge Too Far’ once and I don’t think I have thought about it again until now. It had no theme tune I could hum to, nor any dance moves that I could practise. Shallow I know, but it’s just how I remember movies. I still raise my right arm and point skywards when my children have a fever at night, and it’s the same when I am in the bakery and the assistant asks ´which one do you want?´ and I find myself saying ‘that’s the one that I want, ooh oooh ooh honey´ or, if the assistant is slightly cross-eyed, my best Robert De Niro ‘are you talking to me?’ comes spilling out as if someone else has said it.

The movie ‘A Bridge Too Far’, in case you haven’t seen it, was all about an operation during World War Two to seize some bridges and stop the Germans’ advance on somewhere or other. Myself, I would have ambushed them at dawn while they were laying out their beach towels on the river bank, but these army types like to do things the hard way.

This leads me intentionally, and rather smartly, to a bridge too far in Portugal.

largest bingo hall in Europe

I had the good fortune of taking my mother back to the airport last week (yes I am trying to say what you are thinking , only I am not actually saying it, okay?) However, before she left she wanted to see Belém Tower because I told her it was the largest bingo hall in Europe, and she wanted to see Jerónimos Monastery because I told her it was where Custer’s last stand was.

We got to Belém OK but we got hopelessly lost trying to get to Jerónimos, which is almost directly opposite but we couldn’t find a place to do a u-turn, so after swearing at the sat nav (which my mother thought was the bingo caller) Wife got the map out. “I think we can do a right, right, over the bridge, left, left right and ooh look at that, it looks like there’s a really really long bridge a bit further on, Christ it must be a long bridge.”

site of Custer's last stand

I got a little worried about Wife’s eyesight at this point, as one of the biggest bridges I’d ever seen in my life was staring us right in the face. “No, not that one, a really long one” she insisted, pointing excitedly at the map. But this was a really long one. “Yes, this one is really long, but this other one, it must be, like, four times as long, it looks like it’s near the airport, maybe we should check it out, we are going to the airport soon though aren’t we?”. “We are though aren’t we?” So we had lunch, got lost again trying to find where we’d parked the car (we should have left the window slightly open for Mum while we were gone, especially after the Ben and Jerry’s fiasco, but luckily it was parked in the shade), and decided that from the airport we would take a drive out to find that bridge. There are two in Lisbon that are visible, if you have goldfish eyes, one out the right eye and one out of the left.

We figured that the G.P.S would find it, although it is that big I am not sure we could have missed it, but we did manage to take an hour to get from Belém Tower to Jerónimos Monastery that morning and lose an entire car park so anything is possible, and off we went.

shorter bridge a bit further along

Having explained to my mother that there is no airport car parking at Lisbon, which is why they are building a new airport, we dropped her off at the nearest bus stop and let the sat nav lead the way. Then all of a sudden the wife said ´hey, I think we are actually on the bridge´. I looked ahead and as far as my eye could see there seemed to be bridge, bridge and more bridge. Nearly 11km of bridge, to be exact. 20 minutes of bridge. 650 MB of Wife’s videoing of us crossing the bridge, complete with me screaming “stop recording now” when I realised that I had been slagging someone off on camera. It was the most amazing bridge I have ever been on and if it had been one that the Germans were on one side of during war, it would have been 1954 by the time they’d goose-stepped over it in those jack boots. Indeed this was a bridge too far and Michael Caine would have had some serious driving to do had he had to cross this with a mini (I know that is not the same movie but Michael Caine was in ‘A Bridge Too Far’).

As we drove on and on I turned around and looked back and the wonderful city of Lisbon was right there out of the back window of my car. Out of the front window was the arse end of a huge truck which I managed to avoid and I reminded myself I was in fact the driver and not the passenger. Never mind, I decided it was best to focus on the driving and comforted myself that I could get this view of Lisbon on the way back. This bridge is beautiful. Apart from the beautiful scenery the bridge itself is beautiful, it turns and goes up on little slopes and then down again, a bit like a Scalextric™ track, a bit like they just built a little slope up here and put a corner in there just so you could admire everything more. I was so moved and grateful to be alive that I forgot to wonder if my mother had managed to get her large case off that bus and up those stairs to the departure desk. I felt even more grateful that someone had engineered this bridge and constructed it right there where you could see the beautiful city of Lisbon and more so that I was able to drive over it one way and then, rather expensively owing to a toll, back the other.

Ponte Vasco da Gama

When asked after the war if he thought the bridge operations had gone well, General Browning replied “Well, as you know, I always felt we tried to go a bridge too far.” Well, General Browning (“What can you do with a General, when he stops being a General?” – see, ‘White Christmas’, I think about that movie all the time…), it cost me about €2 to cross the longest bridge in Europe and took about twenty minutes. It didn’t cost the Portuguese people anything and took 18 months to build. And it cost my Mum about £80 and took her about 4 hours to get home to Edinburgh. So next time you are faced with an enemy you need to repel back across the water, use Easyjet. Then you can go trip trapping across the bridge without worrying about any trolls.

Vasco da Gama Bridge (Ponte Vasco da Gama): Factfile

• The longest bridge in Europe
• 17.2km (10.2 miles) long
• 9th longest bridge in the world
• Opened in 1998
• Took 18 months to build
• Inward sloping street lights so as not to disturb marine life
• Toll one way only, approximately €2.35 for a car
• Designed to withstand earthquakes 4.5 times stronger than Lisbon’s 1755 quake

Click here to learn more about the man the bridge was named after.