Thaumetopoea pityocampa

Or processionary pine caterpillars to you and me. They're beginning to drop from their 'tents' in the trees and form their strange chains, sometimes metres in length. The main thing is not to touch them, as their abundant hairs are extremely irritant. This is NOT a photo of me, by the way. The school where the Better Half works has put out warnings about going near them, as has the Pinède park in Juan les Pins, which, as its name suggests, is a perfect place for these hairy monsters to colonise.

CPAM

CPAM: not the kind of letter sequence which speaks to the heart. But it stands for the Caisse Primaire d'Assurance Maladie, the main pillar of the French health system. Some time ago I had tried to get myself a Carte Vitale, the passport to impressive French medical cover. Today, I finally had a response of sorts: yet more documents to fill in, but maybe cover in sight (though the delay may still be measured in months). Will keep you posted. In the meantime, it meant yet another trip to the post office, yet more photocopies, further queues and all the rest. Good job I am keeping well for the moment.

PS the vidangeurs were at it again, still stylishly dressed up to the nines, emptying the 'vaults' beneath the best restaurant in town, just next to our new house. Given that it boasts how much fresh Parmesan, lobster, etc. is used every year (and the measures are in metric tonnes), perhaps some of the blockage we were suffering before the weekend is actually cordon bleu.

Fréjus

Grey skies, mist hiding the mountains, and the steady drip of rain. Must be the weekend... During the week, whilst people were at work, the sun shone, and the leisured few sunned themselves on the beach, already tanning in their bikinis. Today was quite different. So we headed for Fréjus, which for me meant only distant recollections of the dam disaster in the 1950s and a vague impression that Fréjus was a town living off the képi, with barracks etc.

It turns out to be a seaside resort, but with a lovely historic centre, very considerable Roman remains (a theatre, an amphitheatre, an aqueduct, town walls and gate, water-tower and lighthouse). It being wet, we reserved them for another time and headed for the groupe épiscopal, the old cathedral precinct. The decision was a good one, not just because the ticket office was dry and warm, but because here was one of the most interesting complexes of religious buildings we had visited in a long while.

There was a fifth century baptistery, re-using marble and pillars from the Roman city, a romanesque church with proto-gothic second nave, and, best of all, a canonry cloister with original fourteenth century caisson paintings (some 1200 of them) reflecting a mix of ribaldry,
monster fetishism and delight in birds and beasts. The guide who showed us round was one of that new breed of impressive, educated enthusiasts, a far cry from the ex-military, often mentally scarred people who used to be put into those positions in the past. The high point was his explanation of the walnut doors to the church, sculpted in 1530, and bearing some pretty unusual iconographical traits, including an image from the Proto-Gospel of James, showing the wedding of the Virgin, with the unsuccessful suitors breaking their unflowered rods (a pun on virgo, I suppose).

Port Vauban

After spending the morning doing translations for Luigino, who is putting on a Bannockburn exhibition in Falkirk, and part of the afternoon drawing up demolition documents for the works department of the town who are handling the paperwork for our facade repairs, I thought I deserved a walk, preferably where there weren't too many people. I headed for the Fort Carré, skirting the yacht basin and the repair yards. It's surprising how many of the yachts need repairs: there is an army of tradesmen and Aussies busy on the trim of these vessels. The activities include upholstery for the acres of sunbathing mattresses, electronics and electrics for the gizmos sprouting on the bridge decks, caulking and holystoning for the teak decks (think Caillebotte again), and even specialists in gold leaf. That last one puzzled me, until I realised there was hardly a vessel whose name wasn't loudly picked out in gold, the size and thickness of the lettering usually in direct proportion to the naffness of the name.

Beyond this opulence lies the real heart of the harbour, the repair yards, where every closely packed portacabin and shipping container seems to hide welders, glass fibre repairers, and motley rigging specialists, all working extremely hard. Between the rusting containers and the half dismantled boats, there are weeds, old car tyres and bales of decomposing cable. Definitely not chic, and not even tidy, this place feels real, and it is locals who are working, not antipodean year-outers. Next to these outcrops of reality, there are small landing stages belonging to clubs and associations, usually advertising, via a handwritten notice, their next homely and probably very sympathique outing, replete with pastis, barbecue and boules. This is definitely not the style of the very swish and exclusive International Yacht Club of Antibes, whose grandiose smoked glass and concrete headquarters, with helipad, looks down on the humble huts from the other side of the water.

Merde alors

You may remember, some time back, I wrote of an incident in the rue Sade, where a lady was liberally annointed with excremental chrism. The offending engine had been one of those specialist lorries which deal with sewage, a kind of enormous vacuum cleaner and fire-engine all in one. That time, I had been a distant witness: this time, though, it was first-hand experience.

Yesterday evening, I noticed some water bubbling through what I took to be a cast iron stopcock inspection hatch in our impasse. I thought nothing of it, as our neighbour often uses his hose to clean out the litter. A little later, however, whilst plastering, I heard the sound of really heavy ironwork being moved, and I looked down into the impasse. René, the neighbour, along with his pal from the printing works opposite, was grappling with the bigger inspection hatches, which by now were embarrassingly generous with outpourings of cuvée Kabinett WC. I have never seen so much welling up, it was the primal ooze, and it was rising fast. I thought of the sorcerer's apprentice, goodness knows why...

I went down to the impasse to give moral support to René: he had been sent down to do the business by his partner, whose entirely laudable attempt to wash his shirts had ended with a faecal back-up right into her washing machine. Clearly SOMETHING HAD TO BE DONE. And quickly.

The trouble is, in Antibes, not much happens quickly, unless you know the right people and preferably have an Italian surname. But I was reckoning without the fantastic luck of having two neighbours who work for the council. They summoned the town vidangeurs (no question that they were going to have to go private like everybody else). The said operatives arrived in a gleaming, one might almost say pampered truck, parked blocking the traffic, had a chat, then a fag, then came into the impasse.

They were quite the most elegantly dressed sewage workers I have ever seen. Immaculate Pringle style sweaters in a chic navy blue, emblazoned with the city's coat of arms and a proud motto (service des égouts), adorned their torsos, whilst designer waterproof trousers (blue with yellow piping) and enviable waterproof boots graced their lower bodies. They knew their stuff, when it came to crap capture, though.

Out came the gigantic hoover pipe, and just like starched and prim housewives in early television ads discussing Daz or Omo, the operatives debated which of the panoply of attachments to fit to the pipe. Finally an accord was reached, commented on by the onlookers and dog from the Clos Pierre Angelini, home of the Pétanquiers du Port d'Antibes, who seemed to be expert critics, with years of viewing experience, of this kind of event.

My god, that pump was effective. What is more, it could be seen to be effective, because their choice had fallen on a transparent nozzle, which revealed all that came to pass through the tubing. It was defecatory history, going back months, probably, and these were the Lord Caernarvons, patiently excavating, layer by layer, the underground treasure of Tutalegou.

Cannonball furnace

One of Napoléon's tasks, when still a lowly artillery officer, was to uprate the defences of the bay of Cannes, by improving the batteries on the Lérins islands. Iron shot was not that dissuasive to naval vessels, whose stout planking meant that, give or take a few decapitated seadogs, the ships suffered relatively light damage. However, the planking was made of wood, which was highly inflammable. Napoléon decided that red hot cannonballs were a serious risk to such ships and commanded the construction of cannonball furnaces, still visible at the batteries, which could heat up the projectiles to incandescence in just a few minutes, though getting the fires to the right temperature first must have taken a while.

Hard to imagine standing below decks on a tinder-box, crowded man-of war, with powderkegs and magazines under your feet, waiting for that red-hot whizz, the hornet's nest of wood splinters, and the smell of burning. However, the imagined appearance of the cannonballs can be judged by the fantastic sight of the dawn over the sea here, as the fiery orb of the sun comes whistling over the horizon and turns the palm trees instantly aflame

Shadows

One of the most arresting images in Dante's Purgatorio is a scene where some of the now incorporeal inhabitants wonder at the all-too-solid Dante's ability to cast a shadow. It is not the kind of remark which a northern poet would have made: instead there would have been references to leaving squelchy footprints in the mud, or something about raindrops showing up on his clothes. Down here on the Mediterranean, however, shadow is something hard edged and substantial, and I still find a thrill casting my own shadow. Here are two images attesting to our Dantesque solidity, one on a dirt track above Pégomas, and the other taken from the landing stage on the Île Ste-Marguerite, just off shore from Cannes. Didn't meet any penitents purging the stain of sin, though.

Men of iron

Sauveur and his son came yesterday to put the metal railing in place. They suffered the usual agony of lugging heavy objects up our stairs, only to find that the railing wouldn't get through the door and last bit of stair. A matter of two centimeters at most. There was a terse council of war, terse because they didn't have much breath to spare. Finally the decision was taken to remove the front door, no mean undertaking in itself, as the door is solid tropical wood, weighing a good few kilos itself. This solution worked, and the two of them started drilling. With the house still fairly empty, and tile floors everywhere, the whole place resonated like the inside of your head when the dentists use the slow drill. The net result is fantastic, though, and we are really glad we chose traditional artisans and not some ironwork 'artist'.

Niceties

Today was my very first real day off on my own since arriving at Xmas. I needed a break, so headed for Nice on the train, using my Carte Sénior. The journey cost the equivalent of a cup of cheap coffee, but more of the pricing policy later.

Nice was actually hot, much warmer than Antibes, and at times the almost perpetual shade in the narrow streets of the old town was welcome. Upon arrival, I spent a dutiful half hour in the local FNAC, researching printers (ours is giving up the ghost, page by page), and looking into a mobile phone and also a mounting for our GPS. Phone contracts require the combined analytical expertise of an electronics engineer, a finance expert and a commercial lawyer. Needless to say, having watched some poor geezer getting sold a phone well beyond his actual needs put me right off. The GPS business was simple by comparison: the model we have doesn't yet have a mounting. As to the printers, they were ENORMOUS, so multi-tasking that they would probably make you toast and cappuccinos whilst printing your colour photos. I thought I was looking for a printer...

I then headed off into the backstreets, parallel to the rue Gioffredo. Nice is very much a city of 'quartiers', and I was passing through a section almost totally devoted to antiquarian bookshops and artists' supplies. One of the small bistros on the way had a menu which proved that France is indeed multi-cultural and open to foreign influences: the first two items, in order, were:-

Raviolis frais niçois
Pavé de kangourou

Crossing the exquisite Place Garibaldi, where the Turinese influence is still strong, even if the arcades are now filled with North African halal shops and fruiterers, I headed down the rue Bonaparte to get to the port district. It was a miniature Marseilles, with the same vibrant mix of nationalities, and the same profusion of small shops, selling not much, but a bit of everything. Amongst the shops was an unfortunately named Love-Models, which had nothing to do with inflatable erotica, but sold kits for model makers, including eye-catching bateaux pointus. One day I'll have a go at making one of those!

The port is a lot smaller than Antibes, so on the whole the boats are less excessive in terms of gross tonnage, but they make up for (relative) lack of size by the opulence and sheer bad taste of their fittings. Next to the port offices was a poster whose hypocrisy was, for once, in proportion to the surroundings. It was for a carbon-offset scheme specifically targetting the huge, gas-guzzling behemoths in the harbour. Little did the fools offering the scheme realise that these boats never leave harbour, their gas-guzzling abstemiousness advertised by the made-to-measure and very permanent-looking covers battened down over their funnels and exhausts.

I promised I would return to the pricing policy of the SNCF. On the 'caisse à savon' (English translation 'boggler') train coming back, a smiling conductor asked to see our tickets. The chap behind me grunted the equivalent of 'No have teecket', and the conductor's smile evaporated instantaneously. "ID", he barked, and as he did so, a good dozen other inspectors turned up, blocking the carriage at both ends, and starting the equivalent of a police raid. At least a third of the passengers were journeying without a ticket. I expected a ruckus, but they complied meekly, paying the hefty fines plus the peak hour fare (it was an off-peak journey). Why this meekness? I can only surmise that these people made a habit of boarding the train without a ticket, as commuters, and getting caught out once in a while was still a cheap option compared to the season ticket.

Carte sénior

Well, I'm past it. That's official. Perhaps fearing the onset of decrepit old age, I deliberately didn't avail myself of a bus pass for my last months of Edinburgh existence. But here in Antibes, I gave way, whether to wrinkly epidermic evidence, or merely the idea of affordable Wanderlust, wasn't clear, even to me, and I bought myself a Carte Sénior, the French over sixties rail pass.

As if to prove I wasn't past it, I spent the afternoon doing woodwork on the damaged Norman wardrobe. I had already removed most of the damaged glass (a ticklish and potentially dangerous job, for which I wore, very sensibly, a sub-aqua mask with hardened lens, though I drew a line at using the attached snorkel) and, with a chisel and hammer, had got rid of nearly all the hardened putty (still bearing fingerprints nearly two hundred years old). Today I reshaped the oak corner posts to receive the now shrunken top cornice, and reglued the broken sculpted flowers. I found myself quite enjoying the carpentry. Maybe it is a profession I could have entertained. In any event, the operation was a success, and the wardrobe now looks almost complete, albeit only glassed on one side.

Grass snakes and marrons glacés

Yesterday we went back to the Massif des Maures, the scene of our nocturnal adventures with the hound of the Baskervilles. This time, though, it was in daylight, and the sun was glinting off the mica in the schist outcrops. This was the last part of France to be Muslim, as the name suggests, and it's likely that they were not bothered by anybody else for quite some time: it really is an isolated spot, with little in the way of roads, and those few roads are barely passable by motor traffic.

The destination was Collobrières, the capital of the Maures, once famous for cork processing, and now best known for its chestnuts. The name Collobrières is said to come from the word for grass snake, coluber, if I remember enough Latin, certainly couleuvre in French. Didn't see any, though.

We bought a picnic of bread and cheese, and headed out on foot into the hills, following the sentier botanique. There were plenty of botanicals, indeed so many that progress was laborious, climbing over fallen trees, roots and negotiating thickets of tree heather in bloom. The one or two spots where the thicket permitted a panorama were quite lovely.

Not far from Collobrières is the Carthusian monastery of La Verna, to which Petrarch claims to have journeyed to see his brother Gherardo. Whilst there are considerable doubts as to whether Petrarch actually climbed Mont Ventoux (and I firmly believe he didn't, at least not at the time of year he says he did), if he did really travel to La Verna, then he was pretty tough customer. On the sentiers de grande randonnée scale, this is a demanding one. Whether he could have actually seen his brother once he got there is another matter, as the Carthusians were pretty strict about visiting rights.

Having earned a reward through our exertions (some pretty steep inclines both ways), we headed to the Azuréenne de la Confiserie, a cooperative which conditions chestnuts. There was a small museum, full of strange and probably dangerous machinery, but, as usual with these places, it was the collection of old photographs which was the most suggestive, with faded, early twentieth century images of tired but still coquette factory girls leaving their shift after hours peeling chestnuts, and even more moving ones of nineteen sixties hippy types, with hairnets for their ponytails, probably high on a locally cultivated spliff, still operating the antiquated machinery now consigned to the museum.

The main reason for visiting the Azuréenne was to try their ice cream made from marrons glacés. Who cares about long shifts for the factory girls! This was food for the gods, even if mortals had to do the peeling...

On the way back from Collobrières, we picked up some wine at the cave coopérative at Gonfaron, a sleepy town with an exquisite, plane tree lined square, surrounded by delicate pastel facades, beautiful shutters and lace-like ironwork balconies, but full of chavesses in track suit bottoms seeking mutual support, mostly by complaining of man (men?) problems, whilst allowing their multi-fathered offspring to run wild. I heard one overweight specimen shout after her three children (or at least the three visible ones), calling them by name: Hajji, Kevin and Pierre. That contrast sums up the Côte d'Azur. Beauty which is almost too much to take in, and a gritty arrière pays full of the kind of problems familiar to the more depressed parts of Northern England. Still, the sun shines here, and it doesn't much in Sunderland.

Humpty Dumpty

Back from Swansea, we brought the weather with us: well, not quite the ice when we set out and the snow we had at the airport, but buckets of rain and flooded streets. Today, however, the sun reappeared and we even had lunch out of doors. Maybe the supporters of the kinetic theory of pleasure are right: there are no actual pleasurable states, only the pleasure of passing from one state to another. In this case from numbing cold to a balmy embrace of spring. I wonder whether, come summer, we will crave a reverse kinesis, from heat to fraicheur.

A couple of really important pieces of information have come through. First of all, we are really insured for the parties communes, after fearing that the structure of the house might have to remain uninsurable. Secondly, the co-owner has indeed opted for one of the estimates for the ravalement (stucco), the cheapest of course, and is unilaterally limiting his contribution. Nevertheless, this means that we can start the process of applying for planning permission to have the facade renovated. We've asked for another interview with the architecte de la ville, in the hope of getting the colour scheme accepted, along with the principle, and it is a matter of principle, of knocking the shithouse down...

On the practical front, the other half has done a magnificent job decrudding and reviving the oak table from Morgny. This table, originally constructed by the inmates of a mental asylum, and a gorgeous piece of traditional carpentry, had graced the kitchen in Normandy, but always covered in a toile cirée and subject to the daily spray of fly droppings which accompany rural living. Now it looks like it did the moment it left the inmates' workshop - just splendid, and a fine match for the Norman 'buffet'.

On a slightly more dubious note, we reassembled the old Norman wardrobe. It was one removals too far, I'm afraid, and the poor thing only just resisted being put together. Why was I humming the tune to Humpty Dumpty? When hammering in the wooden dowels which hold the joints together, it really suffered, issuing expletives in the form of groans and woodworm sawdust. After an epic struggle in three, perhaps four dimensions (certainly four, if you count time), we got to the doors. Though well packed with about four layers of bubble-wrap, one of the doors had suffered, loosing a carved wooden flower, and having the glass pane smashed. Nothing that a spot of glazing, and a touch of glue won't cure, though.