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Grandes vacances 2009: South of France

— A long, episodic trip through Provence and the Côte d'Azur.”

Rather than face the nightmare of writing up a two-week trip on our return, I decided to keep a sort-of journal whilst on the road.

This article shares with you some of the nonsense I wrote, though I find to my embarassment that very little of it seems actually to be concerned with the places we went and the things we saw!

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South of France 2009

Summer in Provence: sun, cicadas, wine and lots of tourists!

Day 1 – Arles

White stone walls mottled with greenish grey like a soft cheese, then unruly, orange roof tiles, then a soft, luminous blue unpunctuated by clouds.

Until a moment ago a pair of old shutters blocked out all that, the same sort as those on the windows opposite. Buckled by age, paint peeling, no longer certain of the colour.

Last night we ate at the same crêperie as two years ago, a couple of tables away. Overlay the negatives and you’d get a print of us watching us, a bit tipsy on house red and the benefit of hindsight.

Then Cesária Évora sang at the Théâtre Antique in her oddly dispassionate style. Barefoot and indifferent to adulation after years of supplying a background for cafés and dances.

The coda of every lovely song was instrumental, so she’d take the opportunity to shuffle off to one side. More often than not, when the cheers rang out she often had her back to us.

Day 3 – Mormoiron

See also: our walk at Gorges du Toulourenc

Late afternoon deep in the Vaucluse, always in view of the implacable Mont Ventoux.

The sun turns the ivy around the window a luminous apple green. Cicadas click away fervently, the chorus appended occasionally by an A-minor for solo scooter.

Look across the valley and wherever you find farmsteads with their pink-tiled roofs, they’re accompanied by precisely spaced rows of vines. Carefully conceived herb gardens. A cross-hatching of lemon trees.

And Nature has its own sense of order, even if the patterns are infinitely more complex. Nature’s calculations are never simple because they’re heedless of temporal need, but it can’t escape anyone’s notice that Provence is inherently neat. Nature has set the example around here.

A dry, peppery smell of wood smoke follows on. However this is the twenty first century, and the smell’s coming from the oven at the village pizzeria.

Day 4 – Les Beaumettes

As a guest, I tend to show a lot of concern for other guests.

In the lift, I won’t talk over the heads of other guests. At the breakfast buffet, I’ll be the last guest to choose the last pastry.

It could be me or it could be my Englishness. It could be both.

Today I caught myself in the act of swimming quietly. I’d modified my ugly strokes and ungainly kicks to minimise splash. I stayed underwater for the majority of each pool length. In fact, I was disturbing no-one and observing everyone.

Poolside, a girl was in at the deep end of one of those current affairs tie-ins, those books that the hit the shelves as soon as – or possibly before – some world event.

So when Obama visits Israel, all good bookstores will have The Jewish Conspiracy just as soon as Air Force One touches the tarmac at Tel Aviv.

When avian flu or swine flu or fish flu goes pandemic, people who bought Deadly Strains also bought A Brief History of Plagues and you might also like TB or not TB: the Tuberculosis Timebomb.

Poolside girl’s hefty hardback is written by the only man to predict the current financial crisis two decades ago. Apparently he’s been banging on the doors of destiny and waiting in the corridors of power but nobody listened but at least he can console himself with the royalties from An Open Letter to the Bandit Bankers.

So I’m swimming in this tiny pool while Rome’s burning and the pool’s so small I can get away with writing “just done fifty lengths’ on postcards.

And it suddenly occurs to me – in yet another blinding epiphany – that I am an adult.

Yes indeed. I’ve lost my virginity, abstained from voting and held a dinner party but none of these happened in a flash.

What tells me I’m an adult, it’s looking at all these poolside folk. They’re all younger than me or about the same age. Like me, they’re here on their own account. Like me, they can pretty much pay their own hotel bills.

Day 6 – Les Beaumettes

Another day, another tourist village. Expectation and reality are erratic like the hills and plains of the Vaucluse.

Oppède-le-Vieux was rescued from obscurity by a car park, a one-way microsystem, gift shops and artisans’ ateliers. This same uneasy truce between high and low culture keeps many a hilltop hamlet going and the guidebooks keep the tourists coming.

With all those ceramic cicadas and bags of lavender, even buying a postcard smacks of tokenism.

It’s a precarious dependency, a commercial dialysis that demands from visitors a certain amount of imagination. It’s halfway between a weekend retreat and a theme park.

All these hilltop villages were built where they were to keep folk out. Now they’re desperate to keep folk coming in.

Lacoste is the ancestral seat of the Marquis de Sade, but today it gets by with an American-run art school. Gordes, Bonnieux and Venasque are beautiful in a look-don’t-touch sort of way. Roussillon plays second fiddle to its ochre quarries.

And you can’t buy a newspaper in a museum shop. When local teenagers spend their days selling guidebooks to sweating Germans, there’s a problem with economic longevity.

To north Europeans the South of France is a big green idyll. For locals however, it’s all services and subsidised agriculture.

Some expats will inevitably sell up back home, move down here and start their guesthouses. They make the capital investment.

Landless locals are left to think up increasingly daft ruses by which to lure visitors. You could distract yourself for years with these enticements, so many are there and so keen are they to outdo each other, these self-proclaimed parks, musea and farms. Honey, abstract sculpture and the history of snails. Lavender, leather and corkscrews. At the end of every live demonstration, a giftshop.

Day 8 – Moustiers-Sainte-Marie

Living in an unloved spot on the fringes of town – cast out like village idiots – these are the bricolages, ceramics dealers and pool businesses. The garden centres and stonemasons specialising in dinosaur sculptures and gravestones.

Wander into a paint wholesalers’ and you’ll find among the vast range of hues, tints and tones there’s an empty space where the lavender paint pots go. Same situation in every paint wholesalers’. No lavender; maybe next week.

Deep in the mountain behind Moustiers-Sainte-Marie, there’s a dark secret. Those camper vans, those motorcycle tourists cooking in their leathers like jacket potatoes, they stop in the layby before the village to take the photo everyone at home wants to see. They don’t know what’s inside that mountain.

There’s a cave where a giant used to live until some Knight of the Templar drove a lance through his heart. In that cave, under yellowy spotlights, that’s where they carry on their clandestine commerce. Their dark dealings. In that black hole above the picturesque little village, six days a week, half day Wednesday and lunch from twelve until three, is the reality of the underground trade in lavender paint.

Day 13 – Cassis

J says everything’s past its best around here; but then she’s spent all day in slow traffic.

She’s got a point though: if we’re persuaded to look at places like St Tropez and Menton through Piz Buin tinted Jackie O’s, the reality is that the towns and beaches of the Côte d’Azur are full of Vogue readers, not Vogue models.

And there’s lot’s of them. Indeed you have to wonder how the rest of Europe functions at all with this sort of seasonal population displacement.

The bar below our terrasse attracts the naffest types – it’s done up like Ibiza but it’s attracting the Costa del Sol. Skinny hairdressers slowly encircled by a pack of craggy polo shirt lechers, all collars up and smoked aviators. Khaki shorts and canvas deck shoes, finished off with a chunky sailing watch.

They’ve been playing the same CD all day on repeat. Someone else’s background is our foreground. Sometimes, you tap your feet to a familiar song, catch yourself doing it then tell yourself off.

You tick off the songs every time they come around and you do it despite yourself. It’s like a pub quiz when the answers come droning out – you don’t care at all but you still go through the motions. Every two minutes fifty of golden disco shit passes by, it’s like a stopwatch counting off your life.

The banal smell of high street perfume mixed with sad bar food, pre-frozen nachos and pre-scorched, pre-packed chicken club sandwiches. Clumpy caesar salads and microwave chèvre grills that stay cold in the middle. One size only: catering size.

Comes with a drizzle of mango coulis. Comes with a couple of wilting green leaves. Comes with a side-portion of disappointment.

Day 17 – Cassis

I’m drinking Gamay de l’Ardèche from a plastic beaker.

Even if the label says it’s all about the fine aromas of strawberries and cherries, I’m getting spicy tobacco and a mild craving for a smoke. According to the label, I should enjoy this wine with beef or cheese at room temperature, but I’d rather enjoy it with a cigarette.

Smoking beguiles the smoker. Even if you walk away, you can always come back if the conditions are right. All you get when you quit is a bit of short-lived self-satisfaction and a tidier cough.

When you quit, some might say that it’s about taking back control lost to the evil weed. These are not and have never been smokers.

I won’t light up now of course. I’ve got no cigarettes on me anyway and the nearest tobacconist is at least two minutes’ walk away, the second shop on the left if I’m not mistaken.

I’m going ever so slowly deaf thanks to a merry racket of cicadas, the entire global population of which seems to have taken up residence in those two trees.

The calanque across the bay – a headland of bald orange rock – it’s turning peachy and looking much less threatening as evening draws in and the sun says farewell for another day.

Traffic files by, en route from beach to billet. With these cicadas I can’t hear it at all. It’s wonderful.