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.