Privatisation of public space

We live on a lane which changes from rat-race to no-go area at the whim of a well-known Antibes restauranteur, who employs suited gorillas to enforce his dictats. Woe betide anybody who dares to ask where, and for how long, the official notice of closure has been displayed. That's the way things happen down here.

This week is the perfect closure (think 'perfect storm'), as the antiques sellers have occupied most of the boulevard d'Aguillon and most of the car park near the Harbourmaster's Office; the Antibes Yacht Show has declared out of bounds the south side of the Port Vauban; and on Thursday the market stallholders will invade the area next to the post office with their white vans. And this comes at the usual Easter moment when all the cafés and restaurants begin to encroach abusively on the pavements, beyond their allotted tolerance zone, leaving little room for pedestrians between the abusively parked cars, scooters and motorbikes and the ever-present dog-turds.

Suddenly, as spring arrives, Antibes runs out of elbow-room...

ça y est

That's it! Madame Tourterelle has eaten from my hand without holding on to the railings of the balcony. A jump onto my fingers of at least 60cm. She must have been desperate.

My calculations were different. Once she was supported in my hand, exclusively, I had a chance to weigh her (minus the rice in my palm). Another couple of months of avian-human contact and she will be ready for a pie. Pigeon or turtle dove, disnae matter...

Only joking. The feeling of having a wild animal trust you totally is absolutely addictive. And when she pecks between your fingers, looking for that last grain of (discount) rice, you feel that your place in the world is really necessary. Wish it was the same with the genus homo sapiens.

Update and small triumph

Some weeks of silence on the blog. Not a cause for preoccupation, rather I have been busy, alongside the other Copains des Pointus, brandishing screwdriver, hammer and paintbrush, readying the Caribe for its summer sorties. The work is hard, but it's good fun, because the conversation is lively and I am learning a lot about woodworking.

The lifeboat front has been fairly quiet. Not much in the way of shouts, and quite a bit of ordinary housekeeping, including counting the grubby coins from the collecting boxes (think two kilos of tiddlers, and imagine how long it takes to calculate its very modest value). Still, it is in a good cause.

The treatment at Mougins is more than half way through. I'm beginning to have the side-effects they warned me about, but altogether it is pretty bearable. I'm looking forward to not having to do the daily drive, when it is all over.

A small triumph over the weekend. I have been hand-feeding a male turtle-dove, who greedily zaps my palm in search of grains of rice. Meanwhile, his missus, much thinner, just sat and watched enviously, a metre away. Well, Saturday morning, before lifeboat practice, missus waddled up shyly and began to peck at my hand alongside her mate. I now have the two of them feeding - a blur of heads bobbing up and down. The rice levels go down fantastically fast, but it is really cute to watch. Photo courtesy of the BH.

Sunbed

Really nice weather today, so the BH decided it would be great if we could take the ferry over from the old port of Cannes to Sainte Marguerite. Cannes was in turmoil: the entire port area is being dug up, perhaps for drains. Still, we got to the car-park, bought our ferry tickets, and took a stroll whilst waiting for the boarding time. As now happens increasingly frequently, we met somebody we knew from Antibes, so the wait was enlivened by good conversation.

The ferry across was alarmingly overcrowded on the upper deck. Don't blame the passengers, who all wanted the sunshine and the view, but I thought it was a bit lax of the crew.

Once on the island, the crowds dispersed, mostly to find picnic spots and to open bottles of chilled rosé (a good idea we somehow omitted to have).

We ate our own spartan picnic (rice crackers and cottage cheese, followed by a banana)° on a metre-thick matress of dried poseidonia grass, as level as a bed, and wonderfully soft and clean. The BH took a picture of me, dozing in the sunshine. I was in exactly the same position as in the linear accelerator at Mougins, but this time the energy sensually caressing me and warming up my molecules came from an already generous sun.

In the car, on the way back, threading through the traffic chaos of Cannes, we began to feel the first tingling of sunburn: it's still only March, dammit.

°The BH heroically stuck to my dietary constraints.

Yellow Jersey

Going to get fried by the x-ray machine at Mougins has become routine. The process is very slick, and no time is wasted. But during the minute or so whilst the cross-hairs of the lasers are being lined up on my abdomen, the 'manipulateurs' keep chatting, probably to calm down nervous patients.

After a while, you get to know them, in a superficial way. Given that they are dealing with fairly intimate parts of your body (their first act to to pull down your underpants), the chat sometimes takes on a slightly intimist twist.

Last time, for instance, the lady in charge, who had been shunting me around on the slab in what could only be described as a burly fashion, started pinching my thighs and said, dreamily: "Monsieur, vous avez les jambes d'un cycliste". I found it hard to stay still in the machine after that. Was it a compliment?

Beeped

After radiotherapy (a fair old whack, judging by the noises and wheezes coming from the machine), I spent a pleasant afternoon working on the Caribe, trying to reconstruct the anchor winch. Then, as sometimes happens in Antibes, somebody stopped by and offered a pointu, with motor, for nothing. We told the guy to bring it to the lifeboat station.

Lulu and I went there to help moor the boat. As we were tying up, the lifeboat pagers went off. So we abandoned the boat and went into 'shout' routine. Off into the increasing gloom, some ten nautical miles off Nice, to tow back a large motor yacht which had lost all power, both engines and generator. Took some finding, as there are a lot of radar echoes, what with the port traffic, the aircraft flying low, and the ferries.

Still, we found her, finally, dead in the water and rolling quite violently beam on to the swell. This was the first time I had to cast a heaving line for real. Ticklish, given the movement of the two boats in three dimensions. A matter of timing as well as aim. I was very relieved that it was spot on, first pass. Lolo1's patient instruction paid off, evidently.

The trip back was long and boring, as usual, as we were much reduced in speed (7kts instead of 25kts). The deck crew, apart from the deputy cox, steering, was effectively two grandfathers: the third grandpops was keeping radar/radio watch. We managed OK, despite a combined age well in excess of the limits set down in the SNSM regulations.

Took some photos the next morning: they had run out of fuel, but not of Spanish beer (click on the photo of the stern, and look at the ladder).

Makes you forget the hum and whine of the X-ray machines...

How about a slip jig next time

After the by now routine session of being microwaved (that's exactly the sound it makes) at Mougins, I spent the afternoon painting the Caribe. Lots of people passed by, and I wondered why nearly all of them, particularly the schoolkids, started enthusing madly. It wasn't us wrinklies, in various undignified postures - and possible builder's cleavage - who made them ooh and aah. It was the ship's dog, Choco, who was doing a decidedly neat hornpipe on his hind legs. He deserved all the photos he was getting. Haven't yet seen him doing steps in 9/8 time, though...