Mimosa Miracle

Yesterday, the best of the daylight was spent up on the Tanneron massif, above Mandelieu la Napoule. It's a great place for walking, when the locals aren't hunting boar (see a previous blog). What was special yesterday was that the mimosa, which grows like giant weeds up there, was just coming into bloom, staining the hillsides with almost vulgar beauty.

Though I actually came to Antibes a year ago last New Year's Eve, somehow seeing the repeat performance of the mimosa miracle felt much more like the proper anniversary.

Saucissonnage

Last week we saw lots of police cars, loaded with heavily armed filth, heading in the direction of Juan les Pins. Neither of us knew what was up, so at the next choir practice I asked whether any of the local singers there could explain what had been going on.

A soprano, coincidentally a town council big shot, told me that though she couldn't explain what we had seen, she could explain a big shoot out the night before. "Where?", I asked. "La Badine", she replied, along with a tally of those wounded and those at death's door.

The day after choir practice, I headed for the public library and began looking through Nice Matin. Sure enough, there had been a serious fusillade between cops and robbers only about two hundred metres from where we used to live, on a really peaceful street where nothing ever happens.

A score of anti-gang police heavies had staked out a couple of cars parked suspiciously, and when the occupants got wind of being observed, they drove at the police road block, knocking two policemen over and injuring them. The numerous remaining colleagues amongst the BRI stormtroopers did not like this at all, and opened up with everything they had. The speeding car was comprehensively creamed, along with its four occupants, who are now in intensive care.

Details about the chappies seriously ballasted with police lead are still meagre, but apparently it was a gang of 'traveling folk' (the official euphemism here for gypsies from Eastern Europe) who specialised in saucissonnage. Luckily I was in the public library when I read this, for I was able to ascertain that far from being something to do with salami manufacture, this saucissonnage was a criminal technique consisting of forcibly entering rich people's homes and torturing the occupants until they revealed where their money and valuables were. Apart from guns, the riddled car contained handcuffs and a plentiful supply of that wonderful DIY resource, duct tape, which would make fantastic gags, but would be very painful at the moment of being removed. The gang had apparently carried out over a dozen raids of this kind in the département, which is why the police were there in such numbers. Glad I wasn't walking there at the time.

Come li stornei

At sunrise every morning during this cold spell, there is an insistent cheeping sound from the street. I hadn't paid it any attention, thinking that it was the odd bird gorging itself drunkenly on the semi-ripe (never ripening), partially fermenting dates of the palm trees.

A closer look yesterday morning revealed, however, that the noisy avian chorus came from the plane trees next to the curtain wall of the town, right outside our window. It was the sound of hundreds of starlings warming up before setting off in whirling, dense clouds, to their daily gleaning of food.

Sometimes it takes a banal occurrence to fully appreciate a poetic reference. Take Dante's description of the run of the mill 'peccator carnali' in Inferno V:

E come li stornei ne portan l’ali
nel freddo tempo, a schiera larga e piena,
cosi' quel fiato li spiriti mali

di qua, di la', di giu', di su' li mena

The contrast with the 'historical' lovers, described as cranes, and the 'literary' lovers, described as a pair of turtle doves, seemed obvious enough. What had never hit me before was the concreteness of Dante's description of the starlings, in their cloud-like, changing flight.

Those inhabiting southern climes may have read this as self-evident, but for one from the Boreal regions, it was a revelation, an ornithologically realist simile.

Nadolig a Nôs Calan

Back from Blighty after a spot of grandchild duty in London. Even the stories of epic nappy-fillers didn't stop the BH from being a teeny-weeny bit jealous of the time I had 'having a shot'. I have to admit that being around with a child at that age, when development is so fast and gratifying, is a real joy.

Here Xmas was had without me, but with the other son to the rescue (including to share in the culinary delights: no mean contribution) it was not as lonely as it could have been. My Xmas involved walking from Hampstead Heath to Kennington and back, as there was no public transport. Actually, walking across an almost carless city, greeted periodically by folk wishing you a Merry Christmas, is a good way of getting in form for, and recovering from, excessively good food.

Here, New Year's Eve was signalled as usual, at Midnight, with the sounding of the hooters and sirens of the big yachts in the harbour. It gave the BH a peculiar satisfaction to hear the tinny excuses for foghorns on some of the really sumptuous, mastodontic vessels, as if the vicious meanness, which had given rise to the mega-fortunes in the first place, had survived the instinct for opulent display and competitive garishness lavished on the yachts, and had surfaced in a detail, a cost-cutting, cheese-paring worry over the expense of safety equipment.

This morning, after overnight thunderstorms, the sea was really rough, with spray coming over the ramparts, despite the complete absence of wind. The onshore wind of the storm had brought in huge quantities of driftwood, flotsam and especially Posidonia seaweed, rendering the waters close to the shore black and tarry, as if in the aftermath of an oil spillage. Perfect weather, then, for a bit of daft dooking. A band of hardy swimmers, ranging from ten year olds to great grand-dads, braved the waters, or rather sludge, assisted by a crowd of well-wishers, a local politician, and a complete team from the French Red Cross. The best performance came from the great grand-dad, who didn't seem keen to get out of the water, and could be observed, swimming in an exaggeratedly slow-motion crawl, far out to sea, on his own.

Sturm und Drang

Yesterday's storm was one of the best yet. It started with a blackening of the sky over Ventimiglia, Menton and Monaco. The blackness was sinisterly backlit with a strange afterglow illuminating Nice, as if the town had caught fire.

Over the next few minutes, strange columns of fire developed: probably just shafts of sunlight filtered through minute gaps in the raging clouds. The wind began to blow from all directions, not a pleasant prospect for the fishermen in their tiny boats. Then came lightning, thunder, and the rattle of large hailstones on the roof. To cap it all, the flashes of lightning then picked out flurries of snow.

Welcome to the winter wonderland of the Côte d'Azur.

Ventimiglia

A quick trip to Ventimiglia today, accompanied by a very competent Italianist, who did all the transactions for me, including working out, from the strongly Ligurian accent of the waitress, what exactly the home-made cake we ate was (it was apple).

The market in Ventimiglia, as I have written before, was stunning, and unbelievably cheap compared with Antibes. My translator bought Castelmagno cheese, which I had not tasted before, artichokes and trombette, what the Antibois call courgettes muscadines.

The trip up to the old town was the usual obstacle course between thick layerings of peculiarly orange dog dirt, but the view from the Porta di Nizza was as good as ever, rolling breakers coming in smoothly towards the shingle beach, the low-lying market gardens and sinisterly empty seafood restaurants. One of the latter had the singularly auspicious title of "Sea Gull Hotel". I like the separation between "sea" and "gull". Made me think of Hitchcock for some reason....

On the larger of the two bridges over the river Roia, there were almost Kosovan crowds, bearing bundles: turned out they were French shoppers, of very modest pouvoir d'achat, attracted over the border by the much cheaper booze and nosh.

On the way home, when we finally boarded a train (the previous two had been cancelled), the first announcement, repeated afterwards every couple of minutes, was that the train hosted 'two pickpockets' (deux piquepoquettes), and would passengers kindly pay attention to their belongings. No sign of the fuzz, though. Maybe the PPs were officials of the railway line. As a distraction, my translator had the good luck to be reading La Stampa: I, lacking such highbrow distractions, had to put up with a long discussion between two overweight retards about which internet site provided the best bargains for OM branded football shirts. Bernard Tapie must have been squirming with pleasure.

Rafle

When picking up the BH from the station in the early morning, after her trip to Normandy, I spied through the sheeting rain a row of blue-uniformed filth, national, railway, municipal and border. All of them packed rambo-sized sidearms and seemed to find elasticated trouser-bottoms tucked into Doc Martens the height of paramilitary chic.

It was another revenue raid, timed to coincide with the arrival of trainload after trainload of poorly paid workers and unpaid lycéens. They surrounded all possible exits (the handbook for the vélodrome d'hiv must still be used by our gardiens de la paix) and made everybody coming off the trains wait in the freezing downpour whilst they, in the dry, proceeded to check everybody's papers.

They were probably after fare-dodgers and illegal immigrants, perhaps the same thing in their eyes. The actual catch was socially more nuanced, with a fair few well-dressed followers of Marine Le Pen caught out too. The treatment meted out by the boys in blue was different, though, with anybody under twenty-five, or ever so slightly tanned, sent immediately, after being searched, to the paniers à salade, whereas the good ladies were asked politely whether they wished to pay with Carte Bleue or by cheque.