Climate gradients

Yesterday, a public holiday in France, was a crap day. We set off from Antibes in bright sunshine. The smart thing was to avoid the coast, both because of the holiday and because of the Cannes film festival. So, after the usual grim tangle of coastal traffic, we headed into the hills above Vence, up to the Plateau de St Barnabé.

This lunar landscape should have been at its springtime best, with all the strange plants vying with each other, and the birds trying to out-tweet their neighbours. As we drove up the col de Vence, surrounded by a riot of colour (poppies, euphorbia, grape hyacinth, thyme), the weather turned gloomier and colder.

Once arrived at the carpark (well, pasture) at St Barnabé, we had to negotiate one mighty puddle. The wind was already carrying the first drops of rain, and the clouds were spilling over the crest like the artificial CO2 smoke in pop concerts. Refusing a generous offer of bread and rosé from an archery club, we strode purposefully along the track out of the hamlet (four houses or so).

Hardly six hundred metres down the muddy track, it began pissing down, and the sound of distant gunfire or thunder began to be heard. It sounded strange for thunder, and I suggested, wrongly, that it was a quarry banging off. In a few minutes, the rain had become violent, and the thunder and lightning positively theatrical in their excess.

Luckily, we were able to shelter under the overhang of an abandoned chalet, where we froze, eating our picnic to the accompaniment of deafening cosmic disintegration, for the next two hours. Finally, too cold to stay put, we hunched up and ran the mile or so to the car, soaking ourselves in the process.

After a few minutes with the car heater on, we rolled downhill, till we found a riding stable, now inundated, but which had a small, log-cabin bar-restaurant. Seeing woodsmoke coming from the rudimentary chimney, we stopped in hope of obtaining a warming coffee. Not only did they have coffee, but they had home-made cakes and a log fire. Bliss, and steaming clothes, as we downed rustic patisserie.

Once back on the coast, a good thousand metres below, we discovered that it hadn't been raining at all in Antibes, where people were sunning themselves in the rue de la République whilst listening to the madhat melodies of the Fanfare Pistons, the band of the Ecole Centrale de Lyon. Why hadn't we just stayed put?