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.