Sturm und Drang

Yesterday's storm was one of the best yet. It started with a blackening of the sky over Ventimiglia, Menton and Monaco. The blackness was sinisterly backlit with a strange afterglow illuminating Nice, as if the town had caught fire.

Over the next few minutes, strange columns of fire developed: probably just shafts of sunlight filtered through minute gaps in the raging clouds. The wind began to blow from all directions, not a pleasant prospect for the fishermen in their tiny boats. Then came lightning, thunder, and the rattle of large hailstones on the roof. To cap it all, the flashes of lightning then picked out flurries of snow.

Welcome to the winter wonderland of the Côte d'Azur.

Ventimiglia

A quick trip to Ventimiglia today, accompanied by a very competent Italianist, who did all the transactions for me, including working out, from the strongly Ligurian accent of the waitress, what exactly the home-made cake we ate was (it was apple).

The market in Ventimiglia, as I have written before, was stunning, and unbelievably cheap compared with Antibes. My translator bought Castelmagno cheese, which I had not tasted before, artichokes and trombette, what the Antibois call courgettes muscadines.

The trip up to the old town was the usual obstacle course between thick layerings of peculiarly orange dog dirt, but the view from the Porta di Nizza was as good as ever, rolling breakers coming in smoothly towards the shingle beach, the low-lying market gardens and sinisterly empty seafood restaurants. One of the latter had the singularly auspicious title of "Sea Gull Hotel". I like the separation between "sea" and "gull". Made me think of Hitchcock for some reason....

On the larger of the two bridges over the river Roia, there were almost Kosovan crowds, bearing bundles: turned out they were French shoppers, of very modest pouvoir d'achat, attracted over the border by the much cheaper booze and nosh.

On the way home, when we finally boarded a train (the previous two had been cancelled), the first announcement, repeated afterwards every couple of minutes, was that the train hosted 'two pickpockets' (deux piquepoquettes), and would passengers kindly pay attention to their belongings. No sign of the fuzz, though. Maybe the PPs were officials of the railway line. As a distraction, my translator had the good luck to be reading La Stampa: I, lacking such highbrow distractions, had to put up with a long discussion between two overweight retards about which internet site provided the best bargains for OM branded football shirts. Bernard Tapie must have been squirming with pleasure.

Rafle

When picking up the BH from the station in the early morning, after her trip to Normandy, I spied through the sheeting rain a row of blue-uniformed filth, national, railway, municipal and border. All of them packed rambo-sized sidearms and seemed to find elasticated trouser-bottoms tucked into Doc Martens the height of paramilitary chic.

It was another revenue raid, timed to coincide with the arrival of trainload after trainload of poorly paid workers and unpaid lycéens. They surrounded all possible exits (the handbook for the vélodrome d'hiv must still be used by our gardiens de la paix) and made everybody coming off the trains wait in the freezing downpour whilst they, in the dry, proceeded to check everybody's papers.

They were probably after fare-dodgers and illegal immigrants, perhaps the same thing in their eyes. The actual catch was socially more nuanced, with a fair few well-dressed followers of Marine Le Pen caught out too. The treatment meted out by the boys in blue was different, though, with anybody under twenty-five, or ever so slightly tanned, sent immediately, after being searched, to the paniers à salade, whereas the good ladies were asked politely whether they wished to pay with Carte Bleue or by cheque.

Deluge

The BH is in Normandy, seeing her Dad, and no doubt appreciating the peculiarly benign (for grass at least) climate of the Véxin. When she left yesterday, heading towards the drizzle and cold, it was sunshine as usual here. But this morning I was awakened not by sunbeams but by sullen thunder, and by the insistent, well actually frantic, drumming of rain on the roof. The rain has lashed down all day, with a violence unknown in Normandy. The lights have been on all day, too. Idem the heating.

Perhaps, when one's thoughts are with one who is in a different clime, the climate of imaginative adoption becomes one's own, and Antibes - in a peculiarly literal interpretation of the intentional fallacy - adopts the weather fronts and temperature gradients of the Seine Maritime.

Names

Names mean different things to different people. Our neighbour here in the rue des Cordiers is Mamo's restaurant, officially called le Michelangelo. At the moment it is being renovated by an army of assorted tradespeople. As it happens, the Michelangelo's interior is being tarted up by Boccace Décor and the electrical work is being carried out by Campanella Electricité. Means something to me, but does it mean the same thing for Mamo? At what price Plomberie Générale Gadda, Domotique Vico or Serrurerie Pirandello?

Dip in the Oggin

Just the briefest of blogs to say that today, 17th November, the weather was so nice, and the sea was so, so blue, that I decided to go for a swim. And very nice it was, too.

Miracle-Gro

Despite one or two interesting examples of ecclesiastic architecture, and a colourful pilgrimage of fisherfolk to the sanctuary of Our Lady of La Garoupe, Antibes does not strike us as a particularly religious place. A strange setting, therefore, for a very small 'miracle'.

The BH had gone into the penny bazaar on the Place Nationale. Her mission was to find a kitchen roll dispenser, and she found one, which meant queueing quite a while to pay. Meanwhile, Yours Truly was hanging out in the Place, loitering without intent.

I noticed somebody staring at one of the plane trees which cosy up incongruously to immense palm trees in the square. What was he looking at? I took a closer look.

Somebody had nailed, in the distant past, a small cruxifix to the tree, and the bark had begun to grow over the body, a living cross.

Kennst du das Land

OK, not oranges but lemons.

I've already waxed lyrical about the joys of Antibes autumn. This time it is closer to home. Some considerable time ago, before the summer, the BH bought me a lemon tree shrub (I'd been dying for one). We nursed it through the summer months and the autumnal downpours.

Well, finally, we have had the reward. Perfect lemons, used first of all in indescribably good quince jam and jelly, and secondly in a wonderful salmon and fennel recipe. The lemons were juicy, tasty and just exquisite.

Battue en cours

It's the start of the hunting season. Not the mushroom one, but the serious, bloodsoaked one with firearms and dogs. Yesterday we headed, on Armistice Day, which is a holiday in France, for the Tanneron, to walk the mimosa-covered hills.

When we got to the carpark at the beginning of the walk, we saw a lean, almost famished dog - very old fashioned looking - wandering in the woods. We thought nothing of it. Then we saw the sign: "Battue en cours".

It was an organised hunt for wild boar. The dangers were threefold, and none of them attractive, namely to be savaged by the dogs, charged and eviscerated by maddened wild boar, or gunned down by trigger-happy retards with big toys. We decided, without saying a word, and yet with perfect and instant agreement, to move on.

As we drove slowly off, I realised how close we were to the last eventuality, as behind the bushes on the side of the road, posted every thirty metres or so, there was a leering hunter in camouflage gear, with an incongruous orange cap on his head, and massive artillery trained onto the road we were driving down. Evidently the tarmac, in their eyes, was an ideal free-fire zone, where they could indulge in a little blamablamablama, as Steve Bell puts it, when drawing the Juki Imbrah. We accelerated and held our breath, with a prickly feeling down the backs of our necks. Exit from the fire-zone seemed to take for ages.

Our walk took place elsewhere, but with our eyes and ears ready for the slightest signs of further venery. The barking of domestic dogs, and the slam of car doors in the distance, carried on the calm air, made us jump.

Surface detail

Most of old Antibes consists of houses that have been modified many times. Beneath an apparently 18th century building, modernised by some Scandinavian second-homer, you can discern elements of a late medieval house. Walls, like palimpsests, carry the traces of previous windows, often of completely different dimensions, and at heights which indicate that even the internal floors have been changed at least twice.

Some of this tinkering is hidden by the ever-present plasterwork, but often neglect or shoddiness, or more recently a genuine desire to highlight ancient features, means that the pentimento shows through.

Amongst the buildings which have recently been done up is the Chapelle Saint-Bernardin, from the early 16th century, in a narrow street near us. The facade is gothic, despite the date, but what is more interesting is that the restorers have made visible the sculptures over the door. The chapel belonged to the confraternity of the Pénitents Blancs, a lay catholic self-help society whose principal purpose was to bury the dead. The sculptures show the penitents in their grisly uniforms, waiting to cart you off to the cemetery.

Back from market

Spring and summer are what make the reputation of resorts like Antibes, but if one is looking for gastronomic ecstasy, then autumn is the time to come, particularly if one's purse can stand up to the rigours of the pricing policy in the marché provençal.

Today, apart from cheese and honey, and enticingly misshapen tomatoes, we bought quinces, walnuts and almonds, and wonderful little local lemons, destined for salting to make citrons confits.

Season of mellow fruitfulness

Yesterday saw us brave the narrow, twisting road over the mountains to Collobrières. There isn't much to Collobrières town, apart from a nice medieval bridge and ducks on the river. The trip there, though, is spectacular, with the winding, single-track road snaking amongst impenetrable plantations of chestnut, cork-oak and mediterranean pine. The colours in autumn are indecently spectacular. We looked for mushrooms, getting hopelessly entangled in the undergrowth. Other pickers had found the local delicacy, sanguines, a kind of scarlet chanterelle. All we found were two parasol mushrooms (a large example above, standing a foot high from the ground) and a cèpe. We didn't dare eat them, as there is a similar-looking lepiota species which is deadly poison.

The real reason, as always, for going to Collobrières is the Confiserie Azuréenne, which makes marrons glacés and other chestnut-based, more-ish delicacies. Choosing one's poison is difficult, and probably impossible without a pause for reflection, aided by their ambrosial chestnut ice-cream. There is always a risk, with delicacies rarely consumed, that the memory has plumped up the recollection of goodness, and the retasting turns out to be a disappointment. Not so with Collobrières ice-cream. Words fail, or rather are smothered in a bouchée of total papillary delight.

The ice-cream set us on the right course for purchases (chestnut flour, marron glacé fragments, crème de marrons, and several kilos of ice-cream for the Xmas and New Year season), and made us feel we were in the right place at the right time, despite the absence of anywhere to eat or drink, and the dreich reminder of a steady drizzle down our necks.

On the way back, we stopped at a vineyard to sample their wares. Very dry rosés, lightish reds, available in bottles, bags, or whatever container you could bring along. There was one chap who filled a jerrycan with the rouge. He seemed to know what he was doing. We bought a selection, and headed home through the increasing mist, bearing gifts which certainly exceeded those of the three wise men when they were preparing Xmas.

Autumn at last

The weather has changed since coming back from Piedmont. The wind has freshened, and the leaves have been stripped from the trees, filling the streets with piles of potential compost. The unexpected bonus is that we can once more see the Alps from our windows. The other advantage is the free show of spectacular sunsets.

La casa in collina

This week saw us in the Langhe, the wine-growing area east of Cuneo and south of Turin. As if excellent (and often expensive) wine weren't enough, the region is also renowned for truffles, chocolate and hazel-nuts. We tried them all, except for the fresh truffles, which were beyond our means.

We were staying in an agriturismo, the Erbaluna, at La Morra, in the epicentre of the Barolo producing vineyards. The B&B was spotless, roomy, well-appointed, had a wonderful view from the terrace, but where it really excelled was in the breakfasts. Home-made jams, home-made cakes and tarts, home-made bread, local cheeses and hams, freshly picked pears and tomatoes. A feast. And in the appartment, they had thoughtfully provided examples of their wine-making expertise, ranging from a deliciously fresh and light dolcetto, through to its bigger brothers, the massive, tannic reds made with the Nebbiolo grape.

The wine producing villages are very sleepy places, despite the tangible wealth oozing from the various enoteche. The vineyards were a great place to wander, however, with marked paths snaking amongst the rows of vines, catching breathtaking views over the rolling, steep hillsides. With the vineleaves turning orange and red, and the second growth grapes just asking to be eaten, the wine trails, however long and frequently almost vertical, were definitely a high point of the trip. Further round the slopes, where the sun was in less plentiful supply, it was the turn of the hazel-nut plantations. Not an inch of land was wasted.

Turin, to which we repaired by train, was cold and foggy. Our dizzying ascent up the inside of the Mole Antonelliana was architecturally interesting, but the panorama was pretty limited. The cinema museum, housed in this massive folly, had some extremely interesting (and moving) exhibits of the attempts to create 'moving' images, but I found the later galleries, dealing with the star system, and with cult elements like SciFi, rather gimmicky. Still, the museum was heated, which had to be in its favour, considering the temperature outside.

Of the smaller towns, we liked Alba, the regional capital, and found Bra and Cherasco rather dead, despite the sophisticated chocolate vocation of the latter. Much more lively, and well worth returning to were Cuneo, whose chocolates (cuneesi) have to be the best we have ever eaten, and whose city centre combines elegant architecture with a genuine lived in feel, and then the small town of Saluzzo, which summed up for us all that Piemonte has going for it: a wonderful street architecture, big squares without traffic, lovely, ancient shops, a café culture. We bought fruit, vegetables, meat of extraordinary quality, for prices which were much lower than in Antibes. Definitely a place to go back to.

In terms of authors for landscapes, I feel the definite winner here has to be Beppe Fenoglio, rather than the once hallowed Cesare Pavese. So maybe the title of this particular blog ought to be I (venti)tre giorni della città d'Alba. Nice place... will definitely go back.

Nice day

Some days suck. Other days just work out perfectly, and one is at a loss to explain why. Today was one of those good days.

One easy explanation is that the BH is on holiday, which means that she didn't have to get up at the crack of dawn, and she could wait for me to buy fresh bread before having breakfast. We have taken to buying a very rustic, dense country bread with a wonderful elastic dough and a thick, tasty crust. Consumed with coffee on a bright Antibes morning, with snow on the Alps and sun on the snow, it was bliss.

I finally figured out a way to do some plasterwork on the ceiling, after a botched attempt last week. This involved woodwork, to reconstruct the laths, and working with wood and cutting tools always puts me into a good mood.

To cap it all, we were able to eat out on the terrace for lunch. It was actually hot in the sun, and I sheltered a bit when taking my coffee. More than the actual heat, it was the luminosity which lifted the spirits.

In the afternoon, I gave in to temptation and went for a swim. There have been near constant gales for the last week, churning the sea, scouring the seabed, and bringing in to land large quantities of fairly dangerous flotsam (see picture). But to get back in the oggin after what looked like the onset of winter, and to swim out into the bay of Antibes, kissed by sunshine and sparkle, in late October, was absolutely priceless.

To cap it all, this evening the public library put on a show mixing jazz and literature, performed by professors from the conservatoire and from the local theatre. It was spectacularly good: intelligent, subtle, sincere, and performed with mastery. It got an audience of sprightly pensioners dancing and clapping in the aisles as if back in a Bill Hailey concert, but, as far as I could see, nobody slashed the seats.

Vieille ville

Many of my postings have dealt with that uncomfortable feeling, half way between disgust and envy, of living in a town where conspicuous consumption provides the main means of employment. There is, however, an older, humbler side to the town, albeit one latterly invaded by second-homers and twee renovators from northern climes.

Much of the old town consists of fishermen's houses, basically tall buildings with just one room on each floor. The problem with these houses was stability, they tended to lean towards each other alarmingly, as the lateral forces of the roof were not redirected and contained by adequately oriented beams in the floors and ceilings. To counter this sideways tendency, and relying on the close proximity of other buildings, the inhabitants jerry-built flying buttresses from one house to another. This is a partial view of a lane which counts more than a dozen such repairs.

Many streets in Antibes have their resident beggar, who sleeps rough, accompanied by a pack of mangy dogs and an all-pervading stench of fermenting urine. The present consumer society does not seem to know what to do with them, even when they faecally occupy the doorsteps of shops, offices and residential buildings. It seems this is not a new problem. The plaque in the other photo intimates that the business of ignoring the indigent is not new, and hints at a truism which says that the very need for moral reminders is itself a sign of general neglect.

Climate Change

Plenty of theories, even more controversy, particularly as to whether evidence is conclusive, beyond seasonal and macrocyclic phenomena. Well, in Antibes the evidence confronts you from your window, albeit only for the delimitation of seasons. No British gradualism and compromise here.

Last night, after a radiant but blustery day which I partially spent in Nice, the wind started up without warning. Terrifying gusts, from all points of the compass, howling of unsuspected apertures in the house, slamming of shutters, alarming creaking and groaning from trees and even our roof-beams. It was the beginning of a violent storm: the rain, thunder and lightning hit about a minute later. An hour later still, and all was calm again.

This morning, the sun was streaming in through the windows and the sky was a Wedgwood blue, but, when I looked out towards the Alps, there was fresh snow. Considering I was swimming in the sea only the day before yesterday, this was climate change indeed.

Cooperative Agricole

An Italian friend encouraged us to visit the local Coopérative Agricole, saying the prices were keen and the apples, in particular, were excellent. Today being definitely not swimming weather - high seas and a very cold wind - we decided we would take her up on her advice.

The locale was somewhat nondescript, like one of those temporary car parks occupying wasteland whilst planning permission is being sought for a building. Inside, though, it was an Aladdin's cave of odds and sods useful for farmers, from bales of twine through to rubber galoshes of a kind I hadn't seen in forty years. There was jam, too, and wine, along with olive oil, soap and large quantities of orange flower water (what for, I wonder?).

At the checkout, with a strange assortment of items, we watched as a customer tried to pay for a hefty pole, about two metres long and maybe three or four centimeters in diameter. He knew what he wanted it for, but the caissière didn't know what it was, and asked the other checkout operator.

Quick as a flash, and manifesting absolute certainty, he cried out, for all the Coopérative to hear:

"C'est un manche de fourche à fumier, ça."

Good to know there's an address where you can still buy one, should the manure turning urge come on suddenly.

Real and imagined pleasures

Antibes offers all kinds of pleasures. Some of them belong to dream peddlers, who basically tell you what you need for the good life and happiness - such as having not one, not two but three monstrous outboards for your permanently idle yacht tender. Others are just unbelievably simple, like these seniors just chattering with a glam, bikini blonde whilst taking the mid-October sun on the beach, raising their voices to be heard over the surf.

Villefranche sur Mer

Today demanded somewhere different. After a couple of glowering days, the Sunday weather forecast sounded good. Blue skies, clement winds, smooth seas. We decided to head for Villefranche sur Mer, erstwhile Mediterranean base for the Tsarist navy.

Villefranche is a deep bay just after Nice. A wonderful sight for tourists, but an exceptional haven for ships. Today, for instance, there was a meeting for lateen rigged boats: they sailed prettily in the roads, and their crews wined and dined copiously on the quayside (paella and rosé by the look of it).

Our visit was more strenuous. Starting from the sea-level railway station, we headed almost vertically up to the Mont Alban fort, some seven-hundred feet up the cliffs. We started in what was effectively a tunnel; la Carriera Scura, the dark street. Afterwards, it was just the equivalent of staircases in the open air. We lost count of the steps. Once down, we dooked ourselves in a pellucid sea before heading for an indifferent lunch in the lanes of the old town.

Visually, Villefranche sur Mer is one of the prettiest towns of the Riviera. The kind of place which makes you wonder why you have wasted so much of your life not living there. But once back in Antibes, we realised that picturesque cliffs aren't everything.

Psalmody Antibes style

Just round the corner from our house, just beyond the Archives Municipales, there is a nondescript house with an arched doorway. There are many of these arches in Antibes, and this one didn't look too special. However, when the sun slants across the limestone at the right angle, shallow, crude epigraphy reveals itself.

The spelling is barbarous, and this is what I think it ought to be saying, corrected, in rhyme:

Ecce quam bonum
Et quam iocundum
Habitare fratres in unum

Oh how nice, and oh how jolly, that the brothers live together

Trite, until you realise it is a quote from Psalm 132 (133), often set to music during the reign of François 1er, and certainly sung by Savonarola's supporters during their holy hooliganism. Not an innocent text. So perhaps a more appropriate biblical rendering is in order:

Behold how good and joyful it is for brothers to live in unity.

By the way, there appears to be a date on the chamfered underside of the lintel. Can anybody decipher it?

Looking the part and walking the walk

Back in the Esterel, this time with boots and hiking sticks. Last time, though we enjoyed the spectacular, Colorado in miniature scenery, we had had some pretty hairy moments coming down scree paths, wondering when mincing steps would turn into involuntary skiing down the unstable gravel. This time, we were equipped. It felt fairly self-conscious, but the extra kit proved its worth almost immediately. All the other oldies on the trail were sporting it too.

We didn't backslide once.

This evening called for a walk along the port. The Better Half had strained her vocal cords instilling bibliographical skills to the equivalent of Secondary Ones, whilst I had tempted my luck in warm, ideal swimming waters, but had not counted on a close, groin-centred encounter with the dreaded meduses.

So we were both in need of flanerie. During this pursuit of inner peace through outward, meaningless displacement, we passed all kinds of yachts. Those clearly closed up because of death/taxes/financial ruin; those in search of a more active owner; those whose crew just hope they can go on waiting and polishing; those whose days in the port are numbered.

Various scenes stay in the retinal memory. A group of Germans, perhaps gay, trying, ever so seriously, to look as if they were having a good time on the quarterdeck of an obviously medium-sized yacht; a Swiss chap trying to look happy... whilst drinking himself, panama-hatted, to oblivion on a sailing yacht - completely alone. His reading matter was the floor plan of a flat, not of a yacht.

Suddenly, a spark of hilarity lit us up. A Canadian yacht was berthed at the end of a pier. It was a very ordinary yacht (at the going tariff of a million quid per metre) but it had just the most impressive 'equipment' we have ever seen. No aircraft carrier has a 'bollock' like this, which is so big there is a man-hatch approximately man-sized. Difficult to imagine, apart from the usual 'mine is bigger than yours' playground ritual, what such a big sphere might contribute to.

Flaneries

Baudelaire did it in Paris. Walter Benjamin got into Passagenwerk, too, in Paris mostly. I've got into Kennington, Lunnun town.

Couple of observations, just haphasardly...

In Kennington's magnificent supermarket, not far from the gasworks, frequented assiduously by the usual sandwich buyers (working in estate agents', judging by the cheap suits) and hypercaloric ethnic mums (where are the dads?), when looking for sardines for the sprog, I came across the proud Shitto brand of tinned fish. One wonders whether nomina sunt consequentia rerum...

In the National Gallery shop, when looking for postcards, came across a very lifelike Vincent Van Gogh doll, not for the under fives, according to the label, which boasted a detachable ear. I checked. The left ear, disturbingly lifelike, was on a velcro mounting. Was it his left ear he razored, I wonder?

Outside Downing Street, a couple of clearly very special, special, special advisers, bearing 'important papers', were unceremoniously turned away from the bigwigs' entrance and told to stand in the queue with the rest. They were mightily offended, but gave in in the end. The officer who performed this exquisitely satisfying ritual, which briefly restored my faith in democracy, was armed with an automatic pistol on the right hip, and what looked like a Taser on the left. Which would he have used in the event of trouble?

Guest Editorship

Today Antiboiseries is being guest-edited by me, Arthur Usher, as the usual blogger is swanning around in sunny Kennington town, wheeling me around in my pram, which he still doesn't drive that well. I have shown him all the local sights, including the supermarket, the city farm, the swing park and - last but not least - the back garden, where I have been trying to explain the theory of bipedal locomotion to quizzical onlookers. Once I had a sufficient audience, I showed them it was easy in practice, too.

There was a price to pay, though, as Taid insisted on making me cawl cennin* for today's lunch, and I was obliged to polish off a whole bowlful, leaving him with none for his own ethnic cravings (the real reason he had made it in the first place).

After this luncheon, I explained the finer points of Duplo deconstruction, knocking spots off mere Derridean rivals, before playing a few show-off arpeggios on Mummy's guitar.

*translated from the normal blogger's barbarous middle-high Taidish, this comes out in English as plain leek soup. I made him alter the recipe to include a nourishing spoonful of creme fraiche, as Nana is French.

Calabrisella mia

On my way back from a fruitless attempt to find a parking space at the rue Lacan (there has been a totally predictable cock-up in our booking of the new underground carpark), I discovered the reason why Antibes was chock ablock with cars looking for a space. Apart from the wedding industry (positively Fordist in its cadenced Saturday intensity), today is the beginning of the local Calabrian festivities. Many of the 'Italians' here are southern, and most of them are Calabrian.

The thudding sounds of drums and the shamanistic rattle of massed tambourines, in the insistent rhythm of the tarantella, accompanied by almost trance inducing ostinato figures on the accordeon, announced the arrival of the contingent, which marched with extraordinary discipline and distinctly un-French precision. It was a stirring sight.

What is strange is that the toe of Italy, just about as far south as you can get in Europe, has traditions that look as if they come straight from Bavaria. Exquisite scarlet and white costumes for both men and women, knee-breeches and dirndls respectively, super-competent oompah bands, you name it. The similarities are uncanny. The only difference is in the skin colour, a healthy tan over that olive complexion you get in the deep South, instead of pasty faces and freckles. Maybe it's the preference for vino rosso over Bier that explains it.

Kackejaegerstaffel

Sometimes we are woken up, around 5.30 - 6.00am, by the sound of high pressure hoses. La ville d'Antibes has a fleet of small tankers, about the size of a campervan, which clean the streets and the gutters with high pressure hoses. The spray is incredibly effective, removing most of the signs of the evening before's (possibly Anglophone) debauchery: drink cans, plastic beer glasses, coke stains, chips still in their cardboard basket (with ketchup), spray-painted vomit.

But this Sarkosyan karcherisation has almost no effect on the ubiquitous dog turds, which seem to contain their own adhesive, both for sticking to the street and for clinging to your shoes. This is where the municipal motocrottes come into their element. They are standard scooters, emblazoned with the city's coat of arms, but with a powerful vacuum-cleaner riding pillion. Two nozzles, on extensible hose-pipes, run down each side, towards the rear wheel.

When the motocrottiste spots a turd at three o'clock, he scatters pedestrians in a full power frontal attack, performs a balletic swerve, aims one of the nozzles towards the pavé and bags, vrooom, tatatatatat, another kill. Some of these chaps deserve the Blue Max, but their survival time, against all the canine odds, must be measured in weeks, if not days.

Theory proved

Well, not really proved, but sort of psychologically, pre-scientifically reinforced. The wind has turned and started to blow from the south, from the Mediterranean. According to my grand universal hydraulic theory, the lovely warm water should be quitting Palermo and heading back for Antibes. Wherever it came from, the water, though not tropical, was noticeably warmer, and the day before's inhuman grimaces as the water hit the gonads did not seem to be in much evidence.

Vent de terre

Yesterday's baignade was bracing. Strange, because the wind, coming off the land and heading for the sea, was actually hot, like that puff of superheated air when you bend down and open an oven, pulling back your head involuntarily when the heat hits you.

This morning, after a complicated search for beach toys (now definitely out of season) for grandson to use in his London sandpit, we ended up on the sandy Ponteil beach, the one with the wonderful view and the shallow water. The high buildings behind the beach protected us from the wind, and the sun was hot enough to make us sweat. Mindful of yesterday's sea temperature, the BH decided not to swim, but yours truly thought - publicly for purely visual reasons: blue sky, blue sea, brilliant sunshine on the Alps, but privately out of misplaced machismo - that a dip would be really nice.

I waded in, and as I did so, I saw the contortions of all the fellow bathers, male and female, as the waves reached for the sensitive parts of their anatomy. It was too cold to stay for long. The water was what Edinburgh east folk would call 'Baltic', pronounced boll-tukh in their peculiarly gracious patois. But why was it so cold? Nineteen degrees apparently, instead of a usual twenty-four.

My theory, unsupported by any scientific evidence, is that the offshore wind has driven all that lovely warm surface water past Corsica and on towards Africa. What we now need is a brisk onshore wind to drive back 'our' warm water, unjustly heating the northern coast of Sicily and Tunisia.

Windy

Some time ago, the roller blind on the outside of our attic Velux window decided to give up the ghost. The roller mechanism gave way, leaving the ribbed metal (plastic?) blind to unfurl in a sad series of bunches which prevented the Velux itself from opening. But without opening the window, how do you get at the blind? And without removing the blind, how do you open the window?

Today, Nature found a simple, Gordian remedy. A violent gusty wind from the north east picked up the blind and its metal casing, which are quite heavy, and flipped them casually 180 degrees. We can now see through the Velux, and just pray that the wind does not send the whole caboodle sailing through the air to crash into the street.

I shall be following the weather forecasts for the next couple of days...

Carambolages

Visitors to France are frequently intrigued by the pitiful state of the bodywork of even new cars. The dings and dents are everywhere: front and back, sides, and sometimes even on the roof. Obsessive car polishers, of the English suburban variety, would have nightmares about their paintwork and panelling being under constant risk.

Most of the reason for the front, back and side dings and dents is a peculiarly Gallic propensity to drive at speed within inches of the car in front, or to reverse at full revs on the assumption that a parked car you hadn't yet seen will absorb the shock and tell you, very approximately, when to change the foot pressure from the accelerator to the brake.

Today, at Castorama, a kind of B&Q DIY store, one car did a spectacular carambolage, reversing with a roar out from the parking space, turning at full wheel-lock, and ramming another car (brand new) on the side. The impact had real added value in that the new car which was the victim of this tangential aggression was one of those strange ones with sliding doors. Needless to say the complicated sliding mechanism was now completely skewed, rendering it unlockable.

Later on, whilst going for a swim to recover from Castorama, we crossed the road at a pedestrian crossing. For once, the car speeding towards us braked hard and stopped. It was a large, shiny, very desirable Mercedes convertible, clearly turbocharged, as was its blonde driver. We were just about to wave in a friendly way to acknowledge this unwonted courtesy, when there was a fierce squeal of brakes and the inevitable, irritable sounding of le klaxon. Just because one car had stopped, in obedience to all the laws of the land, did not mean that this other driver couldn't just accelerate her way through. She was blonde, too, with a rictus which showed that she wished she were driving the Mercedes and not the tatty Peugeot she was actually in.

The classy blonde in the Mercedes just looked in her rear-view mirror, saw that the klaxonneuse was the motoring equivalent of white trash, and... did nothing. It was as if she had decided to park her car and admire the view of the Port Vauban. Finally, when the face of the driver behind had turned a nice shade of puce, the first driver, smiling at us, put her foot down to the floor. As the turbocharger kicked in, the Mercedes almost reared up on its hind legs and disappeared in a twinkle of the eye, leaving the Peugeot driver to stage a puttering, shamed departure from the pedestrian crossing. Her scowl was still there, held in place by her make-up, and seeing it gave us great satisfaction. Sometimes, perhaps not often, the rich indeed have their social utility.

Memento mori

Yesterday, when coming out of the voter registration office in the town hall, we paused to look at a long, wooden-framed vitrine which filled all of one inside wall of the mairie and continued quite a distance around the next. Behind the glass, inside almost Victorian oval card frames, were hundreds of photos of Antibes' "glorious dead". Many of them were clearly from families which had lost several sons at a time in more than one conflict, in a dreadful generational continuum of grief. Quite a lot were also very local names, still to be seen on shop fronts and written on the sides of tradesmen's vans. One wonders how many families still bear the scars, nearly a century later, particularly of the bloodletting at Verdun.

War memorials are everywhere in France, usually sculpted with a creepy pomposity, but the image you normally see in village squares is of a heroic bronze, marble, sandstone or even cement poilu, advancing, mud-free and ungassed, towards an invisible enemy whilst beckoning on those behind him, sometimes at the eager beck and call of an ambiguous female figure - Death or Marianne, it makes no difference. Here, though, there were just photos, like in Italian cemeteries. Somehow it brought it all to life, the death I mean.

Amongst the serried ranks of young men posing stiffly in uniform were photos of entire families of Jews deported to the Lagers. The casual happiness of these family snaps, taken at weddings and picnics (probably the only surviving images), contrasted with the victims' awful but as yet unknown fate, whereas the soldiers knew once they donned uniform, and as they solemnly sat for the photographs, that their job was to be cannon fodder.

The very latest photo, in exactly the same format as the very earliest, was of a young serviceman recently killed in Afghanistan. There was still space in the vitrine for more...

Back online

Back after a gap caused by a trip to Wales to see the family, and also occasioned by high temperatures which have certainly reduced cerebral capacity (or the willingness to use it).

In the meantime, we have been dealing with the usual hassles: the facade repairs, after having been approved by the town hall, and after umpteen changes, each one more expensive than the last, dictated by the Architecte de France, has now been put on hold, because the owner of the lower half of the house has sold his share, without telling us, to a group of smoothie estate agents. We will have to wait and see, but it is unlikely the works can now be done this autumn.

On the administrative front, we met with the best and worst of the French system. The best was getting ourselves registered to vote - a charming lady at the town hall helped us with the forms and the whole process took about five minutes and a minimum of repetitive strain with the biro. The worst was getting papers for a friend to visit us, where we had to show everything we had on our incomes, our tax liabilities, even the square footage of each room in the house. Naturally, the offices for the different pieces needed were in different parts of town. The resultant certificate looks like a medieval papal bull. Let's hope it is more effective!

We have also been trying to get a place at a nearer underground car park, which has just changed management. The booking forms, though very elegant, were completely incomprehensible (a common situation in France), so we went to the car park in person and asked the duty manager to show us how to fill it in. He was helplessly, comically drunk, like in a pier end music-hall routine, a perhaps fortunate condition which methylically hid the fact that he was barely literate. Who knows what he put on our forms. If we get a place, it will be a miracle.

What has rendered all this distinctly bearable is the unrelenting blue sky, sunshine and warm sea. We swim twice a day, and so far haven't been restung by jellyfish. I have taken to wearing goggles to swim underwater with the myriad of strange, brightly coloured fishes. I wonder how many of them are edible? They certainly have posed the same question about me, for from time to time you can feel a little nibble, like a tickle, as the fish try to see what humans are made of.

Coursegoules

Today we were back in the foothills of the Alps, on the Plateau de Saint Barnabé, a lunar chaos of limestone with an extraordinary richness of plants eking out a difficult existence in the harsh conditions. We set out on our walk from Coursegoules, the next big village along from Gréolières. That village had been nice, but this one was even nicer. Unspoilt, still viable as a community, and spic and span. They have a super website also, which gives the clear indication that they are passionate about their community.

Our path took us due south, rising steeply towards the plateau through the typical woodland which covers the non-sunny side of the valleys. Even in the most inhospitable areas, the signs that people had made superhuman efforts to clear fields for cultivation were everywhere. The fields were so small, and the cleared rocks so abundant, that the drystone walls appeared like the ruins of some Cyclopean city, spread out over miles of rolling hills.

Lunch was had, in the form of a hearty picnic, on the doorstep of an old chapel in the one hamlet which almost had agricultural potential, and even a touch of green. Though the chapel was closed, our voices echoed strangely from the gaping, glassless windows. The lunch was somewhat hurried, though, as a thunderstorm was looming, and we knew from experience that it wasn't wise to get caught out at that altitude. We steamed back up the mountain, literally, because the impending storm made the air very close and sweaty, and we were almost running to get over the exposed part of the track.

We reached the car with only a few drops of rain on us, and a few loud warnings of thunder. All the sweat and heat was worth it for the views and the scents, and the swim in the sea when we got back sorted out all the stiffness.

Fleurs de courgettes

Just a short blog to say that we have made our first courgette flower fritters. We bought a bunch of the flowers from the market. The flowers are a spectacular orange in colour, about two to three inches long in the petals, and strangely resemble chicken's feet.

We looked up lots of recipes for the batter, and chose one from Nice, which has chopped parsley, and where the egg white is beaten before being mixed in. The Better Half took care of the batter. Meanwhile Yours Truly prepared the flowers. The instructions we followed required the removal of the pistils, an operation which felt like cleaning squid or gutting fish, and which left loads of greasy pollen on my fingers.

The real test came with the fry-up. The batter worked like a treat, sealing all the fragrance and freshness into the flowers, and producing crisp carapaces containing a concentrated essence of courgette flower steam. Unspeakably good, and worth doing again.

Mont St-Martin

If you travel west on the motorway from Antibes, past Cannes and Mandelieu, you come up against the technicolor obstacle of the Esterel. This is a massif or range of hills, the main peculiarity (apart from their almost cubist shape) being a wonderful shade of red, which sets itself off marvellously from the toothpaste blue of the Med and the dark green of the stunted trees of the maquis.

Today, we gave in, and headed for a walk in the Esterel, via the madness of Mandelieu traffic. It was worth it. Almost immediately we were in a lost world - clumps of dense vegetation following the rare watercourses, and bare rock, glowing with childishly primary pastel colours. The walking was tough, not just because of the steep climbs and descents, but also because this is August, and the sun is at its most powerful. We perspired as we aspired, but finally achieved the summit of Mont St-Martin, where we found, amidst the chaos of rocks and tangled undergrowth, a pre-Roman oppidum. Can't have been fun bringing water there, mind you, even if the view was sublimely spectacular. On the way, we disturbed an animal, which thrashed its way through the underbrush - a few seconds later, there was a grunt like something out of Jurassic Park. Had we disturbed the young of an escaped cochanglier, one of the dreaded, totally illegal hybrids between domestic pigs and wild boars, as fierce as the boar, but with the familiarity with humans of the pig? We'll never know, but it was a tense moment.

As the crow flies

The day before yesterday, it being hot, as usual, we decided to head for the hills again. The destination was Gréolières, a village on the Roman road from Vence up into the Alps. The etymology of the toponym was none too reassuring: gracularia, the place of crows. Didn't see any though, even though there were a few birds of prey hovering around, mixing with the hang-glider set. By the way, the tiny village you can see in the centre of the photo is Aiglun, presumably the place of eagles.

The village was charming, with the occasional real inhabitant, unlike most of the bijou villages perchés, with their shops, nay boutiques, selling soap, ceramics, perfume and cicada recordings. We bought plums, a baguette and some raw ham from the tiny épicerie, and headed off for the ski station even further up into the hills. Like all ski stations, snowless in summer, this looked like something from the Bosnian war, after the Serbs had cleaned up and mined it all. No matter, though, our destination was the big hillside on the other side of the valley from the ski slopes. There was a logic in the choice: two words are important in the local geographical descriptions, adret and ubac, referring respectively to south facing or north facing slopes. The ski slopes, naturally, needed to be ubac, to avoid the snow melting too soon, whereas for a nice summer walk we wanted an adret.

Sometimes, however, one can be on to too good a thing. As we set out, the mixed sun and pine tree shade dappling the path was very pleasant, but when we reached the more sparsely covered upper slopes (and we're talking of over 4,600 feet up), the full strength of the minimally filtered sun began to take its toll. A strange feeling, fresh air and a leaden sun. Still, the wild lavender, which was everywhere, seemed to thrive, as did all the splendidly gaudy butterflies.

On our way back, we met quite a few people coming up the road with buckets and plastic bags, clearly out to hunt something edible. I wonder what it was? Too early for mushrooms, surely, and too dry for snails.

Aérateur II

Ventum habemus. After bruised fingers, drops of copious almost cinematic sweat stinging in the eyes, and a fair bit of cursing (English expletives seemed appropriate to the locus), the aérateur has been installed, and made to function concurrently with the lighting. The trouble was that the lighting wiring was on one side of the room and the vent for the extractor was on the other.

The smallest room didn't seem very small when I had to run cabling around the tops of walls almost inaccessible to a hammer, which was needed to anchor the wire holding clips. The fan itself had to be embedded in a shelf, with an exact 100mm circle to cut out. Perfect circles are not easy to cut, particularly without a padsaw or circle cutter. I ended up drilling scores of holes, and then cutting between them with a chisel. The said shelf then needed putting up, in exact alignment with the pre-existent but hopelessly mis-positioned metal vent tubing, which had to be recut in situ. Nice job when it is next to the ceiling, in a dark corner, with insufficient room to work a saw. To cap it all, the walls were made of undrillable hollow brick (a kind of thick tile sandwich), so the supports for the shelf needed a different solution to the normal screws and wallplugs. I ended up paying through the nose for a specialist glue which will hold almost anything to anything.

Still, it works, when the lightswitch is flicked on, and it stops when the light is put out. Whether it will deal effectively with the aromatic aftermath of a cassoulet is something only time will tell.

Aérateur

Today was a moment for bricolage. For the culturally aware, this may be an anticlimax; because my bricolage involves the banishment, via an electrically driven fan, of expulsive digestive odours in the lavatory. Those who who have read the Urblog will remember my struggles with the 'throne'. Since then, I have done painting, tiling, lighting - and now it's the turn air quality.

The first stage was linguistic: what was the word for an extractor fan? I am beginning to be expert at interrogating the do-it-yourself websites, looking for the keywords that allow me to ask for the appropriate products. In this case the word that was missing was aérateur (note the accent on the 'e').

The next blog will be a real time account of how to control the aerateur.... without giving the impression one has set it in motion for a particular bodily reason.

Cipières

From our terrace, looking north, we can see the curtain walls of the town, the umbrella pines of the boulevard which runs round the port, the assorted masts and paraphernalia of the yachts in the harbour, the angled bastions of the Fort Carré, and far in the distance the inexorable rise of the hills as they struggle to gain altitude to call themselves the Alps. We look that way each morning, to see what the weather is doing, including fresh coverings of snow (in July).

Yesterday, tired of looking at this neverending spectacle from afar, we decided to go hiking in the foothills. The intended destination was Cipières, a village above the Gorges du Loup. As with almost any journey worth taking here, the first part was hell on wheels. The coastal strip must be one of the most concreted, motorised parts of Europe. An hour and a bit later, and a mere fifteen kilometers on the clock, we hit the Gorges du Loup, a dramatic cleft in the mountains, with the road precariously clinging to vertical cliffs and a torrent a vertiginous distance below. Cipières was at the end of a winding and dizzying road, largely made of small concrete beams levering off the cliff faces. Signs warning us of the dangers of rockfalls left us somewhat puzzled as to what to do if the eventuality actually arose.

From Cipières we headed up into the hills on foot, first on the GR4, and then on a local track. The aim was to see one of the many bories, or stone igloos, which still dot the countryside around here. The path, basically unstable scree, took us through a botanist's paradise, with huge clumps of thyme, savoury, origano, wild lavender and so on. As we marched through this herbiary, the plants exhaled a powerful, inebriating essence, distilled by sunshine. We filled our knapsacks with culinary abundance, whilst swatting away clouds of exotic butterflies (and the occasional, tenacious horsefly). Everywhere there were the signs of foraging by wild boar. Not animals you want to meet on a narrow path.

The landscape is carstic, weathered limestone, with extensive fields of steep scree (baous). Scratching a living from the land here (utterly parched in summer and buried in deep snow in winter) must have been a desperate business. Signs of titanic labour were everywhere, with terracing and destoning of tiny fields reaching well towards the near perpendicular summits. The borie, when we found it, was huge, with walls well over a metre thick, and an entrance which did not need you to stoop to get in. Life for the shepherd sent to pasture goats up there, at over 1000 metres altitude, must have been anguishing and lonely, like Ledda's account in Padre padrone.

Let there be music

One of the advantages of Antibes is that it gets some of the musical overflow from the Juan les Pins Jazz Festival. A week ago, for instance, we heard the Glenelg Jazz Ensemble from Washington DC. This school band, with some of the kids really young, produced better playing than I have heard in years. They really knew how to swing, and their ponytailed conductor-flautist was no mean dancer either. The night before last, it was the turn of the Delft Studenten Corps band from Holland. They were technically flawless, and had a good line in vocals too. More importantly, they put on a fantastic show. They were dressed in rumpled DJs, complete with orange bowties (what else?) and Heineken braces. More than half of them, being blond, bore a worrying likeness to Boris Johnson. There were trombone quartets played with the feet, like a chorus line of Tiller girls, there was a clarinettist who played Balkan rhythms over Glen Miller, whilst suspended upside down, there was a drum solo played on the outsize pads of a barytone saxophone. They ended their set dispersed amongst the crowds in the Place Nationale, singing and playing a rowdy Dutch (drinking?) song. The only slightly dubious note was the presence of less-than-respectable looking photographers, who seemed to be trying to groom some of the little girls tempted to dance in front of the stage.

Mondo bello

Last night saw the usual procession of limos stopping to drop 'people' off at Mamo's restaurant next door. One convoy consisted of the usual darkened glass black people carriers, front and rear, with the heavies, and sandwiched in between was a red sports car so low slung it had difficulty in negotiating the speed bump in front of our house. Clearly, security conditions weren't quite right, so the convoy went round the block again, the sports car roaring manfully as it negotiated the speed bump at approximately baby crawling pace. Second time round, the security detail judged things to be optimal. The burpmobile rolled to a halt in front of the restaurant door, gave one last blast of its throbbing exhaust, and deposited a diminutive but perfectly formed blonde into the restaurant.

A few minutes later, another convoy arrived. Somebody worth greeting, because Mamo and the whole équipe were there to salute the arrival. First out was the ubiquitous helper-door opener, next came a large but slightly superannuated dog, and finally a poor chap who struggled, even with Mamo's considerable muscle to help him, to get out of the car. Quite tall, and dressed in a Graham Green style tropical suit. What really impressed me, even at forty metres distance however, was that his enormous teeth glowed in the dark. Behind me, the BH said quietly, but with a certain frisson betraying life-affirming matinees at the cinema during important moments in her life, 'Celui-là, c'est Jean-Paul Belmondo.'

Those whom the gods love, die young. James Dean and his ilk. Belmondo has lived long enough for his beauty and vigour to founder on the rocks of time. Still, the fall from grace was from a height we can only imagine.

Maeghty waves

With S. and O. we went to visit the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul de Vence. The trip there was no great shakes: a succession of roundabouts and retail outlets, but once in the woods above Saint-Paul the spell began to work. The Famille Maeght supported Miro', and when they retired, they set up an exhibition space for their artist friends, in the hills above Cagnes.

I'm not an unconditional fan of Miro' (though I like his small scale ceramics), but what really blew me was the museum setting itself. Rarely have I seen (except perhaps in Barcelona and Poitiers) modern museums that gave such a purpose to visiting the artworks. I felt at times, whilst wandering around the artfully defined meanders, changes of level, plays with direct and indirect natural light, that I was in some mysterious monastery for a stern religion I knew nothing about, but could sense from the sheer balance of masses and volumes. Wonderful, just wonderful.

On return, I went for a swim, despite the admonitory orange flags. The swell was impressive, with a vicious undertow, but some people were porpoising through the breakers, so I thought I'd give it a try. I put on my swimming goggles and launched myself through the substantial surf. It was thrilling and a real adrenalin rush. I played around in the metre and a half swells, yelling as I launched myself off the curling lip of the waves just about to crash over (and showing clear blue through to the other side). Then I started swimming shorewards and quickly realised my mistake. Trying to swim to land through surf is really hard. I got spun around like in a washing machine on spin cycle, and only too late realised that the waves were full of fair sized rocks, carried on the force of the undertow. In fact it was pretty dangerous. I staggered out, raw at the knees, and somewhat lacking in dignity. Some of the other swimmers actually had blood coming from their scrapes. Still, no lasting damage done, and an important lesson learnt.

Contrasts

Not all the rich moor their tubs in the port of Antibes. Some just anchor offshore. Maybe only the really rich appreciate the savings of not paying so much in mooring charges whilst still lashing out so much on crewing, fuel and insurance charges.

A bit like loitering behind a taxi instead of loitering behind a bus. Bigger notional saving, but pretty poor viewed from the outside.

In the last week, we have seen, off the Gravette, A a sinister James Bond vessel, the Delphine, a steamship of the 1920's, and the inimitable footballer chic of the Maltese Falcon. All of them for hire, all of them spic and span, but all of them operating in a pitiless environment of unaffordable port fees.

Pink Cardboard

That's it: I've now got a French driving licence, after months of being a non-person thanks to the incompetence of the DVLA. Doesn't change much in France, but paradoxically the piece of pink cardboard, issued by the Sous Préfecture in Grasse, will allow me to drive in the UK. Strange place, Europe...

Scam

The rue Lacan between the English pub and the post office is something of a dog toilet, so we are used to walking with our eyes peeled for faecal matter on the pavement. Yesterday, as we were heading for the shops, a lady dressed in what could be described as gypsy/arab clothes came up to us and asked, in French but with a foreign accent, if we knew who had dropped the ring which she had just found on the pavement. Was it gold, she asked. Did we want it, as it was against her religion to wear jewels. When we said it ought to be deposited with the police, she pressed it into our hands, started to walk off, then wheeled round and asked us for money. Of course it was a scam. We deposited the ring pointedly where she had claimed to have found it. I prefer honest begging to that kind of insult to the intelligence. I wonder how often it works, though...

Fête de Saint Jean

Last night, strolling by the capitainerie du port (harbour master's office doesn't quite do justice to the idea of rich man's factotum such posts project here), we heard music wafting over the waters of the yacht basin. It was coming from the Bastion Saint Jaume, the old arsenal built when the port was fortified by Vauban - and now turned into a 'cultural space'. We went to investigate.

Somebody had lit a large bonfire, and people were dancing round it. Of course, it was the annual fire-worship night, the Fête de Saint Jean. Tradition has it that couples who leap over the bonfire together will get married within the year. In these days of modulable marital arrangements, I wonder what happens if people married to each other make the leap. Does it include separations and divorces?

To the sounds of three holed flutes, an accordeon, a fiddle, assorted drums and tambourines, and, most traditionally of all, a Fender Telecaster bass guitar, groups of people of all ages danced with a kind of frenzied skill. They really knew the steps. The nearest thing I have seen to it is a Scottish ceilidh, the same sort of assumption that everybody knew what to do. One unprepossessing couple, the man bald and wearing an accountant's expression after one too many ledger inspected, his partner with the skin quality that only too much sun and a regular supply of cigarettes can provide, dominated the proceedings. As they twirled around the fire on the baked earth dance floor, little puffs of dust came up from their fleeting feet, perfectly in time.

Heldentenor

I was walking along the rue Aubernon, heading for the Boulangerie La Belle Epoque to get the morning's semi-industrial quantities of bread and viennoiseries. The streets were still wet after the passage of the cleaning lorries, and the delivery men were working full swing replenishing the bars with their stock for the evening's beuverie.

Suddenly, over the metallic din of beer kegs being rolled from lorries, there came a sweet tenor voice, from the part of the street reserved for an antiques market (flea market really). The tune was what attracted me first: a modified and quirky version of "O sole mio". It was only when I got closer that I could pick out the text. The Heldentenor was lyrically intoning, with perhaps a touch of indulgent melisma and rubato, "O va fa'n cu-ulo, faccia di me-erda" as he was setting out his stall of junk. It was perhaps the most successful combination of pre-existent text and pre-existent music since Parry and Blake were married to each other in Jerusalem.

A circle of admiring junk dealers crowded around and joined in, perfectly in tune and on time, for the final, exquisite "merda". It was one of those fairytale operatic moments when, at the theatre, you forget the daft libretto, the wooden acting and the uncomfortable seats in the stalls, and just soak in the emotion. As of course you are meant to do.

After buying the bread, and on my way back through the flea market, I could see that the same auteur was now addressing his fellow squatters. They were approving of a recent move by the gardes mobiles, a somewhat antiquated term for the dreaded CRS riot police, to rid Antibes of traveling folk, aka gypsies, aka Romanians. The junk sellers, all franco-français and LePennistes, couldn't see the irony in the fact that they too were occupying public space, creating an obstruction, and (for those privileged to understand Italian) debasing the local moeurs with their exotic song.

Risques et perils

Antibes always looked like a sleepy place, where, apart from the dangers of motor vehicles mixing with pedestrians, life looked pretty safe. A couple of recent events force one to admit, reluctantly, that Antibes is like anywhere else.

Last week, walking up the rue de la République with the BH, who wanted to buy me 'pantacourts', or calf length trousers (very comfortable, even for the Antibes 'older gent scene'), we witnessed a bagarre between various SDFs ('sans domicile fixe', aka homeless winos) in the Gare Routière, each armed with a defence dog. It looked like it was turning serious, so I told the BH to hasten away. Well, I now read in Nice Matin that two of the participants were sufficiently injured in the affray to require A and E attention. No mention of the canine casualties, though I suspect there must have been some. The locus was rather fitting, for those, like me, into Antipolitan archaeology. The chaps and their animals were fighting on the very spot of the ancient Roman arena.

Next morning, heading for the Marché Provençal, along the rue Sade, I noticed a lot of sand and sawdust strewn on the cobbles. When this was pointed out to the BH, she said she thought somebody must have dropped and broken a bottle of olive oil. My thoughts, I must say, from having seen similarly strewn material in Edinburgh's Fleshmarket close more than once, were more sinister. And, indeed, my hunch was right. The rue Sade and the adjoining Place Nationale had, in the early hours of the same morning, been the theatre of a major skirmish, with one of the assailants being armed with a sabre. The sand and sawdust were for the resulting, copious quantities of human ketchup spilled by the seven people who ended up in hospital, handcuffed.

Finally, on a more personal though less serious note, this morning, as I swam out of the Gravette to get a better look at a graceful three masted sailing ship, flying Dutch colours, I felt a violent jolt, half way between an electric shock and a bee sting. It was my first jellyfish sting in the Med. A cracker, with raised welts all down the inside of my thigh, and an actual incision, which bled quite profusely. Glad I wasn't skinny dipping! Returned to the beach, with some caution, we got the profuse but belated warning of the presence of jellyfish from an Italian woman, who had already destroyed quite a few in her mission to protect her little boy, a real Pierino del dottore. Next, an old man pulled out a veritable pharmacy from his beach bag, and from the various tubes, bottles and sprays, offered me a jellyfish sting remedy. Maybe we'll have to stock up, too. I'm told the welts will turn a nice shade of puce by tomorrow.

Canto italiano

Tonight was (and is) the fête de la musique. The seismic technobeat is attacking our walls like the battering rams of medieval sieges. You can actually feel the pulse through your Sitzfleisch, as pianists call the foundations of their ar(se)t.

This evening, after quite a long stroll to the Salis, to find shards of pottery to act as wedges for plantpots on our slightly sloping balcony ledges, and after a wonderful swim in a piss warm sea at the Salis beach, we attended the slightly less raucous version of the fête. First call was the magical Place des Safraniers, part of the Commune libre du Safranier, home of the great Greek novelist Kazantzakis.

In the Safranier square, we listened to Provençal songs sung by the local community association, all dressed in the 'saffron' orange of the commune. Musically very approximate but culturally all there. After their slightly long set was over, we tore ourselves away from the utterly seductive charms of the square and headed for the Lavoir, near the ramparts. There we saw some splendid spectacles: two choirs, one ethnic and one academic. The ethnic one, La Chourmo, specialised in the close links between Provençal culture and Piedmont: they sang equally well in French, Niçois, Piemontese and Italian. There was one, generously proportioned lady who had real star quality: her belting version of "Benché noi siamo donne", in the throaty Italian of the rice-fields, was fantastic and had everybody joining in, even the (male) Moroccans who have lodgings around the lavoir. I think they admired her almost Maghreban ululations as she sang "o li o li o la".

The academic choir, the "Menéstrels d'Antibes", sang mostly Monteverdi madrigals. Musically, it was an uplifting, sublime experience: as they sang like angels, the water tinkled through the lavoir and the refined voices rebounded off the stucco walls. They were attempting quite difficult pieces, but the problem was they didn't know anything about the texts. It was linguistic porridge. For somebody who understood Renaissance Italian, it was quite incomprehensible. Still, better to have Monteverdi badly pronounced than Monteverdi poorly sung.

Sweet soul music

Last night we went to a concert given by the CIV big band and the Nice University gospel choir. For a choir which was only founded six months ago, the results were really impressive. The students not only sang and swayed with aplomb, but also pronounced the words quite convincingly. The only thing which struck me, though, was that the distinctly protestant theology behind the lyrics and feelings of the songs must have passed completely over the heads of both singers and audience, predominantly catholics.

The CIV big band we had heard before. They are loud, competent and generate a lot of enthusiasm. Their alto saxophone soloist was pretty much professional standard. They played a medley of R and B and soul numbers, originally sung by the likes of Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding. The guest artist was an old soul singer called Bobby Johnson, whose snaking hips and suggestive pelvic thrusts, practiced over a well nigh half century of showmanship, seemed to excite quite a lot of the audience. Still, it felt strange to be listening to pieces originally written as ephemera, now raised to the status of reverently played classics, performed from orchestral scores, and listened to by the grandchildren of the original teenagers who had bought the records.

Oh, and by the way, they did perform Arthur Conley's "Sweet Soul Music"!