Antibes par les narines

One of the ways of navigating blindfold through the streets of Antibes is by sense of smell. There are the acrid, gagging smells of the piss-soaked winos who sleep rough near the back entrance to the Parking de la Poste. Then there are the not unpleasant fishy wafts from the stands where the local fishermen sell their catch.

There are the strong rising currents of aromatic fermentation from the sewers, now beginning to heat up nicely. Then there are are the sudden reminders of restaurants, via their backstreet kitchen air extractors.

What beats the acidic smell of dogshit from the flowerbeds, a defecatory abundance which makes the job of town gardeners so repulsive here, is the heady perfume of the many orange and lemon trees. The flowers don't look very spectacular, but they give off an indecent amount of fragrance, as if somebody had gone wild with all the samples in an airport duty free shop. It's a good time to be in Antibes.

Lord of the rings

I have begun to realise that I am repeating myself. Well, not in the sense of going gaga, but rather in the sense of doing things or seeing things again.

Today, on the way to the Post Office, passing Mamo's newly done-up eatery, I thought I recognised somebody, vaguely Algerian or Gypsy by the dress code. Then she stooped, with considerable balletic abilities for somebody with embonpoint, and picked up a ring from the street, wondering out aloud: "De l'or, de l'or". I recognised the voice immediately: it was the same female con-artist who worked the Antibes street last year.

She hadn't recognised me, but I had surely recognised her.

Bain de mer

First it was cold and then it was hot. Not a puerile inversion of James Joyce but rather a truthful description of the initial freeze followed by burning sensation caused by my first sea swim of the year. The air was balmy, the sea was a beautiful blue, and everything conspired to invite me into the water.

Especially other bathers who 'tested the waters' only to renounce baptism. I just had to prove that I was made of sterner stuff. So, after a brief scan of the waters to determine the jellyfish quotient (none visible), I did a shallow dive in, swam about thirty metres out, did a brief lateral swim, then headed for the shore. By that time, sensations were a thing of the past and it was time to get out before losing muscle power.

Still, it felt good to have started the season so early: last year was a lot later (see my blog of 29th May 2009).

To the scaffold

The old town is full of buildings needing TLC. It is a constant race between three factors: the surprisingly damp conditions of the Mediterranean coast, the justified but still annoying attentions of the Architectes de France who decide things when it comes to listed structures, and the needs of the town to make tourist money during the season.

All this means that there is a small window of opportunity when builders have sufficiently good weather and municipal approval to put up scaffolding and carry out repairs. We are now into that season, and one of the properties sheathed in metal and nylon netting is our own.

Tempesta e bonaccia

The other day the wind was whistling through the thrashing palm fronds and whipping up a frightening sea. Today, however, the organisers of a regatta managed to create a record turnout, but failed to put on any wind.

Mosquito coast

There are various traditional signs that spring is with us: snowdrops, daffodils, first calls of the cuckoo. Here, it is the first mosquito bite during the night. I woke up this morning with my right eye unopenable. A mozzie had paid attention to the blood supply in my eyelid.

Aiming with my one remaining opening eye, I sent a stream of lethal flyspray into the bedroom, closed the door, and hoped that insect carnage had begun.

Deepest Africa

It must be a particular privilege of countries which have shrunk, especially those with past imperial pretensions, to have more stuff on display than they can presently afford. Britain's museums are an example, now holding on to former booty by claiming conservation standards and responsible stewardship, but not so long ago displaying looted treasures proudly as trophies of divinely-willed expansion and projection of power.

Another example is Belgium, whose colonial escapades under the aegis of Leopold II in the Congo aroused such international indignation. Leopold bequeathed his grateful nation a gargantuan Central African Museum, deep in the tropical rainforest of the Brussels periphery, at Tervuren. We decided to take a look.

To get there, like the trip up country in Conrad's The Heart of Darkness, required stamina and intrepid organisation. It was a journey beyond human experience. We took a bus, a tram, an underground train, and finally a country tram which rattled through the endless woodlands to the south of Brussels. Finally, we reached a clearing with a strange semi-circular wooden edifice, where the tram stopped and the driver left us. Was it a temple to some bloody ancestor cult? What nameless horrors had it witnessed after sundown as the waning moon bathed its decaying timbers in an eerie light? In fact it was Tervuren Terminus, standing forlorn in the middle of nowhere, with trees on every side.

We found a rusty iron gate, yawning half open, held up by decaying pillars covered in sprayed graffiti suggesting genito-oral pleasures, and, taking a deep breath, headed into the domain of darkness. After following a range of signs which looked as though they had been dumped there rather than deliberately planted for giving directions, we re-emerged into the sunlight to find a grandiose palace, with magnificent lawns, ornamental fountains and lakes, dubious statues and the usual Belgian smell of waffles frying. It was the museum.

Inside, the marbled entrance hall was crowded with immense gilded statues of European gods and goddesses acting as tutelaries to adoring midget Africans invariably sculpted as children. This was clearly not a PC building. But once through the entrance, the anthropological and historical displays were both spectacular and intellectually challenging. And the best thing was that the colonial experience was pretty honestly depicted, with starring roles for Arab slave traders, Belgian entrepreneurs, a rogue Welshman (the Denbigh-born Henry Morton Stanley of 'Dr Livingston, I presume' fame) and the rapacious ogre himself, Leopold II. There were some gruesome exhibits, particularly the meticulous paperwork (Belgium and bureaucracy start with the same letter) which recorded the attempts to get the reluctant locals to tap rubber, including the report of one colonial administrator justifying the expenditure of over 2,000 rounds of ammunition, on the grounds that his policemen had after all killed over a thousand men, women and children, and that the survivors were now busy tapping rubber as they should.

So it was, after all, a journey to a dark land of savages, but the savages were us, not them. We came away with a fresh white man's burden, a sense of shame.

Dust to dust

Sounds biblical, but it wasn't. We got stuck in Brussels, thanks to the Icelandic volcano dust blocking European airspace. And then, when we got back, there was a thick layer of dust in our stairwell - enough to muffle the sound of footsteps. The Italian mason employed by our downstairs neighbours had knocked through a new doorway into the common landing, releasing atomised plaster particles into the atmosphere. We left footprints like the first astronauts on the moon.

You takes your pick

I picked up the local free paper yesterday, called Paru Vendu. It contains the usual range of small ads, from people trying to sell damaged rabbit hutches to pages and pages of gay phonesex lines. What caught my attention was the section dealing with faith healing and magic arts. There appeared to be no fundamental(ist?) difference between African animism and French Gallicanism when it came to claims of special powers. Indeed, these two ads were next to each other and offered exactly the same services. Professor Bambo sounds a lot more educated, though, whereas the Monseigneur sounds a wee bit menacing.

Hot time in the old town tonight

That's it. Heat has arrived, declaring itself in ice cream sales, summer clothing, sunbathing, crowds at the terraces of the cafés sipping rosé or downing beers. There is definitely a feeling that the winter hibernation is at an end, and the noisy sailors from the gin palaces are beginning their seasonal mating calls with the universally if not originally blonde hostesses. The birds know it, plumping up their feathers and strutting, and so do the flowers, which are getting positively cheeky in their garish displays of colour.

Only one bather today. As expected, a senior citizen. He waded out with purpose, and when the water came half way up his thighs he launched himself forwards in a shallow dive. Good for him, we thought, but then he surfaced and began to look intently at the water around him, choosing a none too direct path back to the shore. Was it hypothermia or something worse?

He began to scoop water with his hands, sending large splashes onto the sandy beach. We were none the wiser as to his intentions, or indeed his predicament.

Further down the beach we found the answer. The hot sun had brought out a swarm of jellyfish, little brown ones in their hundreds of thousands. If I didn't have a visceral hatred of the little buggers from last year's extremely unpleasant encounter with their tentacles, I would have thought this spectacle of nature in all its generosity and vigour had been poetic proof of the life-affirming powers of Mediterranean spring.

Cuneesi al rhum

Yesterday, as our Easter holiday, we took a day trip to Cuneo (or Côni as the locals here call it). The train journey took us through Nice, Monaco, Menton and Ventimiglia, where we changed to a tiny boggler with a mighty engine and powerful brakes, and headed up through the vertiginous mountain passes. Very soon there was snow all round. The track is amazing, with spiral tunnel ramps to gain altitude, so that when you finally emerge into sunlight you can see the rails you have just rolled along hundreds of metres below you.

Cuneo is an elegant, small but very monumental town, whose charms had been eloquently catalogued by that pioneering pair, O and S. They also recommended the charming and atmospheric Osteria della Chiocciola, which in addition to a frighteningly good wine selection for sale, does very tasty and reasonably priced meals upstairs. We had starters of spring vegetables and savoy cabbage wrapped in thin pastry, deep fried and served with what I guess was Fontina cheese sauce. Each mouthful was a papillary delight. This was followed by baked kid with Taggiasca olives. Real Easter fare! The desserts lived up to the previous courses, the BH opted for a zuccotto di pere (pear charlotte with hazelnut cream) and I had an apple, pinenut and raisin tart. The wines, by the (enormous) glass were Nebbiolo, very tanniny, and Grignolino, like a light burgundy.

The real reason why people flock to Cuneo is the pilgrimage to San Cioccolato. Cuneo must make the best chocolates in the world (though Brussels may argue the toss). The speciality is the cuneese, a chocolate filled with hazelnut ganache, flavoured traditionally with rum, but now also offered with a range of other, often alcoholic, flavours. When Ernest Hemingway stopped by at the Pasticceria Arione, I'm sure it was the rum content rather than the (elevated) chocolate content which caught his fancy. The shop's celebrated cuneesi leave your mouth in an agreeable state of anaesthesia for a second or two, followed by a flood of subtle aftertastes. Worth a pilgrimage, even on one's knees...

On the way back, we refreshed ourselves at the station refreshment hall, last refurbished around 1910, I would guess, and still the theatre of impossibly animated card games, for derisory stakes, by senior citizens. The clock had stopped, both literally and metaphorically. Good job, too, for on the way back we got stuck in Nice, courtesy of a wildcat SNCF strike.

Gattières

I don't know what the real etymology of the place name Gattières is, but it certainly lives up to its reputation if the folk etymology has anything to do with it. Humans take second place to cats.

Let them eat Mouna

Easter has brought the crowds. Lots of Italians, many of them, I suspect, with second homes here. Another exotic invasion, to be seen in the windows of the patisseries, is Mouna cake, a sort of sugared brioche. Apparently this was a cake from Oran, originally for Spanish exiles, which then spread throughout the European population of North Africa, and came to this part of France with the Pieds Noirs. As far as I can tell, it is only eaten at Easter.

Feeding the five thousand

Though everybody speaks about the ecological crisis of the Mediterranean - chemical dumping, spread of aggressive foreign seaweeds, loss of coral, plagues of jellyfish, collapse of tuna and leatherback turtle populations, the basic fact remains that the sea here never fails to offer surprises.

Down at the slipway in the Port Vauban, near where the volunteer lifeboatmen were knocking back their pastis after a morning's work on the lifeboat, I happened to see what looked like a squall crossing the harbour, but in the wrong direction for the prevailing, quite cold wind.

Closer inspection revealed poutine, whitebait, in biblical quantities, enough for quite a few miracles of the five thousand (John 6: 5-15). Why the normally voracious seagulls and terns weren't wise to this abundance beats me, unless they also, like the five thousand who left behind twelve basketfuls of crumbs, were helplessly replete at 10 am.

Salon Antibes

For the last couple of days little marquees, about ten feet square, have been springing up all along the Boulevard d'Aguillon and in the odd spaces near the ramparts. A gigantic tent - blocking our view of the Alps - has also appeared on the Pré des Pêcheurs, just in front of the town walls, where the car park often gets used as a fairground - you can see it as an enormous white rectangle on GoogleEarth. Why all this (distinctly synthetic) canvas? One of the annual rites to the tutelary deity of Antibes, Mammon, is just about to begin. It is the Salon des Antiquaires, a high class antiques fair, which heralds the harvesting of the first cash crop of the year. It will be followed by others, including a big one for floating gin palaces next week.

The antiques stuff being traded is the usual mix - marquetry veneered period furniture, 'oriental' carpets, dubious, sometimes positively leery statuary, brassware scavenged from ships being broken up, weapons with a convenient patina of 'historic' rust. Everywhere the unsubtle aroma of beeswax trying to mask the violent assault of ammoniacal compounds used to strip previous finishes.

More interesting than the exhibits are the vendors and visitors to the fair. A strange race, snobbish enough to think they have refinement and taste, but grasping enough to discuss prices and haggle with the best of the street traders in the over-sized underwear stalls at the very down-market weekly clothes fair round the corner.