Sunday afternoon around the fifteenth of the month will be sure to find me crouched over the typewriter pecking out the last elusive paragraph of this column. If you can fight your way through the Gauloise smoke you will see a lonely figure wearing an imaginary green eyeshade and chain-drinking Whittard’s Earl Grey. Bereft of inspiration after a recklessly vinous lunch, I am throwing in my last hackneyed reserves to stretch an exiguous theme for a few more lines. Click here
Archive Stories
Saturday, November 6th, 2010
Juxtapositions
Jacques Renoir, a filmmaker friend living in Cagnes-sur-Mer, near Nice, tells a tale of a middle-aged couple who set out on a day-trip in the arriere-pays to celebrate their wedding anniversary.
In the course of a gastronomic lunch the husband goes for a pee and comes back with his flies open. His wife whispers to him, and in closing his zipper ever so discreetly he traps a corner of the tablecloth in his trousers.
They stand up to leave and everything crashes onto the floor – plates, glasses, remnants of wine and so on: A double bill for the damage. Click here
Posted in Archive Stories
Saturday, November 6th, 2010
The big idea
“The Big Idea always comes from the unconscious mind. Nobody ever arrives at a very big idea through a conscious, rational thought process,” is what I think I heard David Ogilvy, the veteran adman say in a nocturnal programme called Keys to Creativity on the BBC World Service. Click here
Posted in Archive Stories
Monday, September 27th, 2010
Dreams
I am driving someone else’s car. I think it belongs to a woman in the back seat or else sitting beside me. She warns me to be careful as I take corners too fast.
We are driving on the right-hand side of the road with pools of water (recent rain?). There is a kind of stone barrier on the right and beyond that the sea – the waves are beautiful, pale blue-green. Click here
Posted in Archive Stories, Fiction, Words
Monday, May 24th, 2010
Marseille: a taste of Africa, a taste of Provence
Marseille is a city waiting to be discovered for itself not for its fearsome reputation – notably among people who have never been there – as a hotbed of crime, corruption, drug-dealing and social conflict. And indeed, this grand old Mediterranean port of 800,000 people – second largest city in France – still grand in its post-industrial decay, has had its fair share of troubles, unemployment and a large and sometimes restless immigrant population, largely North African, languishing in the bleak northern suburbs. Click here
Posted in Archive Stories, Columns
Sunday, March 14th, 2010
Topless rules OK
It was a cultural revolution of sorts. As Mao Tse-Tung might have said: ‘Let a million bosoms bloom.’
It started almost as a local event. Legend has it that the first bikini tops came off at Tahiti Plage, near St. Tropez. The year? Most plagistes would settle for 1970, give or take a season or two either way.
Take in the scene.
An unremarkable summer day with a faint breeze coming in off the sea, rustling the palm trees, setting the beach boys to work tightening the parasols, and wafting the first pungent smells of the plat du jour – mmmm, l’epaule d’agneau aux herbes – across the patio to the serried rows of baking bodies. Monsieur Felix is starting on his rounds with a sheaf of menus. Fingers are snapping to order aperitifs. The beach is coming to life after a gloriously somnolent morning.
But what’s this? That agreeable strawberry blonde in the white bathing suit is sitting up at the windbreak. Without her bikini top? According to Tony, she’s a Swedish-speaking Finn, although what that has to do with it I’m not sure. Of course, we’d all noticed her undoing her top when she turned over on her front an hour or so ago. And, of course, several of the girls do that. Still. And look, there’s another a few yards away. And another. Why, it’s our very own Martine! And Jean-Pierre doesn’t seem in the least concerned, quite smug in fact. As well he might; what a figure! And there’s another. This is incredible. Click here
Posted in Archive Stories