Scattering of ashes

This morning the lifeboat crew took a family out to sea to scatter the ashes of their father/grandfather/great grandfather, who had spent years having fun on the water off Antibes, and wanted to be buried at sea. The youngest person aboard was a little boy aged six months.

The weather was clement, the ceremony short and dignified, and the whole event was curiously uplifting - I'm sure the family felt it too.

Twelve tone theory

For the last few months we have been living a trogloditic existence: strange, you might think, when we live on the second and third floors of a house. The reason has been the long, detailed restauration of the house's facade, which has meant living behind scaffolding, with closed windows, plastic sheeting and shutters battened. This is not a happy state to be in, and the etymology of window (wind-eye) begins to assume real importance in the summer's stifling heat.

Well, now we are almost at the end of the process, and the colour is being slapped on. We have had a lot of grief over the colour scheme, not from the stone mason, who is both chromatically subtle and sensitive to clients' concerns, but from the town architects, who have their own ideas on what goes with what.

The BH has suffered the most, as she has a much more developed eye for colour than I do. Each time she goes out of the house, she has been inspecting the latest layer of gunk lovingly spread over the walls, for quality (the workmanship puts Blighty to shame) and for tint (hard to tell with all the under-layers). She has now begun to see the final coat applied, and is somewhat dismayed to find what she calls Italian or Niçois hues going on, rather than the much more faded, pastel finishes common in Antibes. Still, the stuff needs to dry before you can actually tell what tone will be the final one. Watch this space.

ça marche

Just to say that the LIFEBOAT beeper works. I was called out just as supper was ready: a tow just in the roads near the port entrance, so lots of rope work and no time to enjoy the view. Still, it's good to know that it sends the message, loud and clear.

The BH, having heard over the phone that we were about to cast off, took this picture of us gunning out of the harbour. We are the tiny blue and orange dot between the curly street light and the nearer lighthouse. The white blur on the lifeboat quarterdeck is a group of us readying the towing winch.

Beepable

In the old days, the lifeboatmen used to be summoned to the station by the firing of maroons. Here in Antibes, they used to sound the air raid sirens... until the good citizens thought that their sleep was worth more than lives at peril at sea. Now they use pagers, called 'beepers' with rather ambiguous affection by the crew.

I've just been issued with one, which rather alarmingly went off five minutes after I got it. Luckily, old hands were near, who told me just to replace the battery. In the past, a number of people have arrived breathless at the lifeboat station, only to find that their beeper had gone on the blink with low juice, and had been beeping to itself.

I was at the station this morning as part of a polishing detail, as a kind and public-spirited sponsor (Mitsubishi Electric) had provided air-conditioning equipment for the crew room (no luxury in this climate, especially for crew who have to go directly from the 'shout' back to work). The publicity photos would have to show a gleaming boat, and for once it sparkled.

Face in the street

In the family albums there is a silhouette, one of those strange precursors of the black and white photograph, made by cutting an outline portrait of the sitter in black paper, and then placing it against a white background. I don't know how old it is, but it goes back quite a way, judging by the clothes being worn.

Well, today, in the streets of old Antibes, I was introducing young A to the sight of a magnificent grey cat sunning itself in a doorway. It turned out that the cat (and other equally pampered specimens) belonged to a well-known Chinese artist who has his studio here. As a sideline from sculpture in clay, he does silhouette portraits.

I asked him whether this was still practiced in China. No, he said, it was as rare as here, and then offered to do a portrait of A in one minute flat. Keen to see whether he could keep his promise, I said yes. He was a real psychologist, keeping A's attention whilst cutting out the black shape with enormous wooden, yes wooden shears. And, one minute later, he rang a bell, A slipped from his trance, and the portrait was ready.

As he was cutting away, I told him about the old family silhouette. Intrigued, he offered to do me, too, for free. By this time, there was quite a crowd watching.

Nice man, nice cats, and nice portraits.

Face in the papers

Accosted by our stonemason this morning, who told me my face was in the newspaper. So we went off to the local office of Nice Matin, and there I was, microscopic, in the back row of a group mugshot of the lifeboat crew, taken at the reception held for the mayor at the Yacht Club d'Antibes.

Does this mean I have arrived, at last?

Night thoughts

No pictures this time, because it was a night exercise with the French navy rescue helicopter service. We cast off at about nine o'clock and headed out to sea chased by a glorious sunset which lit up our wake in vibrant shades of orange and puce.

Rendez-vous was for ten o'clock off the Lérins islands. On board we had a guest, one of the navy controllers from the watch station at La Garoupe. It was funny talking to her in the flesh having heard her voice on the ship-to-shore VHF transmissions.

At the dropping zone, we waited around in the growing darkness, the boat wallowing wildly, despite the very little swell. Once in a while, both to get back in position after drifting, and to keep the batteries charged, we would circle back at low speed. On one of these manoeuvres, the cox saw some unusual splashes to port.

Yours truly was handed a pair of regulation binoculars. Very strange, we were surrounded by greyhounds, or so I thought. In fact it was a pod of dolphins, excited by our boat's way. Everybody except the cox and I crowded onto the foredeck and observed these streamlined, sleek animals weave elegantly and seemingly effortlessly in and out of our bow wave. Pretty impressive.

Then came two messages with opposite effect - first of all did we mind a trainee pilot? He would practice with sandbags before having a go at the real thing. Though terrified at the prospect, we said, not at all, no problem. Tension mounted visibly, helmet straps were tightened instinctively, and emergency cords felt... surreptitiously. A distinct smell of impending danger. And then another announcement! Exercise cancelled. Everybody breathed out for the first time in minutes, as if they had been underwater.

On the way back, with the tension broken, everybody started talking about their families for some reason.

Fireworks

Last night, T and I went out in the vedette to shepherd all the boats which had put to sea to watch the fireworks at Juan les Pins. The fireworks were spectacular and noisy, with smoke billowing out to sea, but what was really startling was the mayhem on the water, with reckless driving all round, and few of the boats with full sets of navigation lights. On the way back, T, acting as lookout, avoided us a collision with a steel hulled craft which could have cut us in two.

Busy day out

Yesterday was a pretty busy day. Not just because we have family with us, but because I was all day out with the lifeboat. The morning was spent stocking supplies, water and fuel in anticipation of the silly season of 'shouts'. Then it was out to sea, taking water samples, doing a census of both marine mammals and jellyfish (we saw neither), and recording the nature and density of floating rubbish (mostly plastic, but a surprising amount of sodden baguettes). During this work, we were called up and sent to Villeneuve Loubet to rescue three people whose scooter had started sinking. We took the three people on board, our diver Guillaume secured flotation to the scooter, and we towed it into port.



Then an instruction trip to the Abeille Flandre, a hefty salvage tug. Lessons on towing, on emergency procedures, manoeuvres. Trips into the gigantic bowels of the winch compartments and the engine room. Finally we got up to the towering bridge. About five minutes into the spiel on the towing controls (think spacecraft, but all in massive steel), our emergency radio went off again.



Eight people on an inflatable, engine conked out, heading for the rocks. It was like one of those corny war films when action stations is sounded. A human avalanche slid down the companion-ways, seven stories down to the well deck and the access to our lifeboat.




Cast-off drill double quick, so quick that we nearly kidnapped the watch keeping officer of the tug, who happened to be on the boat looking around.

Off towards the islands, at 25kts, blue lights flashing, radio squawking, tow ropes being prepared, hats flying off astern in the wind. Pure adrenaline. Then lookout stations, trying to spot a brownish cream inflatable against brownish cream rocks.

Then we spotted it, in water too shallow to take the lifeboat. So it was launch stations for our inflatable, as our diver put on diving gear for the second time in three hours. By this time, luckily, I had been partially trained in towing, so I knew which bits to get out and tie on to which.

It turned out the people needing rescue were Italians. We were two Italian speakers on the lifeboat. Useful when you need to get legal acceptance for the tow, and when you need to explain to landlubbers that if they continue to put their hands between their boat and ours, there might be a shortfall of fingers by the time they landed. We towed them very slowly back to Mandelieu, where they were taken under the wing of the harbourmaster, but only after they had signed the form promising to pay us back for the fuel we had used (690 euros). Yours truly acted as the go-between, accepting an Italian cheque later that evening, in a large 4x4 with darkened windows.

Operation DELPHIS cancelled

Yesterday the Antibes lifeboat was supposed to act as an observation platform and shepherd for a survey of marine mammals out in the Mediterranean. Our survey area was about 10 nautical miles off the Esterel, in a part of the sea about 3500 feet deep. Having arrived at the station at the allotted time, there was a no show from the lifeboat. Five minutes later it came into port, with tired hungry crew on board. After we tied up, I found that they had already responded to a 'shout'. Somebody who had fallen ill on a boat anchored offshore.

As coffee brewed and croissants were consumed, we learned that the DELPHIS had been cancelled, as the weather conditions were regarded as a little too risky for the many small craft which were to take part. So it was a chance to go dolphin spotting en famille. The lifeboatmen, their families and floozies (no overlap as far as I could judge) boarded the vedette. The BH (family, I have to stress) was amongst them, trussed up in a fetching red lifejacket with blue piping and yellow straps.

We roared off into the Med. Very quickly, even the mountains became invisible in the heat-haze, and we were absolutely alone in the oggin, about 18km offshore. Suddenly the cox cut the motors, and shouted "Prés à l'eau". Turned out that the poor chairman of the lifeboat branch, in order to please local traditions and, who knows, obtain financial support, had been one of the bearers of the enormous Virgin Mary statue, which is carried, barefoot, all the way from the cathedral to the sanctuary of la Garoupe. The path, with its stations of the cross, is very stony and steep. So the Prés (président) was very much in need of a wash.

Yours truly decided to take the leap (literally), too. So here we are, not quite touching the bottom, eighteen km out to sea, and in 550 fathoms of water. Clear as glass and piss warm. We were the only marine mammals seen that day. We did our best to gambol and dive, but, from the DELPHIS point of view, it was small beer.

You can wear fur again.

A rather large but amiable lady in the rue James Close in old Antibes seems to have found the ideal solution to the quandary of how to wear real as opposed to artificial furs without cruelty to animals. She wears a living cat round her neck. The cat really enjoys the vantage point, the woman has a silky soft stole. It certainly doesn't slip off, thanks to those retractable, razor sharp claws. The occasional sharp reminder in the nape of the neck was worth it, she said. Mind you, wearing fur in today's blazing heat seemed more than the call of fashion duty.

Chirrup, chirrup

That's it: summer is audibly here. Over the din of the workmen's drills and hammers, I can hear the cicadas in the trees outside our house. Late this year, though, and certainly makes a change from the 'piped' cicada tapes one hears in the souvenir shops of the old town.