I was invited to spend up to a month in a grand villa in Provence with some friends who live a long way away from me. This kind of thing never happens in my life so I jumped at the chance to stay with a bunch of oddballs and get to know a place that was previously foreign to me. Provence and the Côte d’Azur are probably quite hellish in high season, but as the bright, warm spring took hold and the flowers started to bloom, it was hard to imagine anywhere better on earth, apart from Norway, maybe. A lot of things happened in three weeks, sometimes being in the house felt like participating in a TV reality show, but here are some of the things that I’d like to remember.

The House
It’s halfway up a hill on the outskirts of town and it’s so much bigger and grander than any of the photographs imply. There is an olive grove in the garden and the house produces its own oil, olive and lavender). There is a too-cold-to-swim-in (I tried) saltwater pool. There is a tennis court where we fatties volley badly. The view from the house takes in the entire valley below, it makes you feel as though you own the world. Big is not an exaggeration, there are rooms upon rooms, amenities you’d never imagine needing, everything is decorated so appropriately and tastefully. There is a chandelier in my bedroom suite, a bathtub that swamp even me, a closet as spacious as any room in my flat at home. A spiral stone staircase leads past a salon on each floor. There is a formal dining room and a sitting room. The kitchen is big enough for nearly everyone. None of us can believe the opulence and wealth and we become excited as new friends arrive and take in their new home, wide-eyed, slack-jawed. We live here now, this is our life.



Take a look at a little film I made of the house (.mov 3.9mb)

Ill
At the height of my fever it hurt to look at the fussy wallpaper in my room. I couldn’t eat and felt weak and crappy all the time. I lost my voice and could only whisper. The fever wouldn’t go so the housekeeper arranged for me to visit his doctor. Doctor Yang gave me a thorough examination. He spoke no English. D came with me and we muddled through. It’s hard to give your name and address and phone number to someone in French when you are feverish, it felt like a test. He prescribed me an armful of products and I started to feel better.

The Frogs
They live in the ponds in the grounds and croak loudly all day and all night. There are loads of them and they are really cute. You’d think with a croak like that they’d be interested in showing off their frogginess, but no, they plop away into the water as soon as you even think of approaching them.

Sanglier
The housekeeper shot and killed a wild boar by the swimming pool. He loves to cook so he made a wild boar stew and brought it over for people to eat.

Monaco
The road to Monaco is dizzying and fast, it takes you over viaducts, through tunnels and between vertiginous valleys and outcrops. People drive too fast, but I am careful. Monaco is a place of high rise flats and discreet mansions. Roads are steep and winding, it reminds me of Hong Kong, lush and tropical but not, thankfully, humid. A network of public lifts take you up and down the hillside. There is dogshit everywhere. The harbour has a swimming pool, the Rainier III pool, which is open at odd hours and is shabbier than the photographs of it suggest. You can but Formula One tourist crap in the tourist crap shops. The Casino and opera house look like Disney renditions of themselves, hyperreal. Middle aged men drive Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Maseratis on the street, those flat cars, red and yellow. So many of them in such a tiny space.

St Tropez
I’m still fighting off the last bit of illness when I go to St Tropez for the first time. The town seems extra otherworldly and strange, I’ve lost my voice so I just float around the place listening to mp3s on my dorky headphones. There are purple jellyfish in the harbour waters. I watch a well-dressed man activate his yacht’s automatic gangway, he presses a button and the wood and metal plank goes shhhhhhh-clunk in front of him. The yachts in the harbour are as clichéd and spectacular as the tourist photographs promise. They’re bigger than you can imagine, insanely opulent, and yet only a metre or two away from the quayside. You could jump on one of them and run amok if you wanted to. I want to. I love seeing rich people like this, as entertainment. People stand and stare at them, it’s a zoo. I buy some raspberries, it’s all I can cope with eating, and watch the people go by, cackling inwardly at the haute couture Eurotrash fashion disasters on parade.

Keeping the past alive
I was surprised to see the Dolmen Pierre de la Fée in Draguignan patched up with concrete and held together. Kay said that it would have been left to crumble in the UK. Here it was kept alive, as something to visit. It was covered in graffiti. The amphitheatre in Fréjus was also patched up with modern materials and used as a regular venue.

Le Corbusier
In 1947 Le Corbusier unveiled his plan for how people in the future would live: concrete tower blocks. He called his prototype La Cité Radieuse. People did end up living in buildings like this, but Le Corbusier did not predict that they would turn out: filthy, broken down slums full of alienated poor folk. Tant pis. The original still stands in Marseille, it’s inhabited by the kinds of people who appreciate modern architecture and it’s beautiful. The fourth floor houses a hotel and D treated me to a night there, one of the highlights of my time in France. We stayed in one of the bigger rooms, it had wooden walls and molded concrete outside the windows. There were still original features, but they had been added to with modern furnishings and the effect was kind of crappy and shabby, all part of the French keeping the past alive trait, I guess. Here are some of the notes that I wrote: shell shapes cast in concrete, wood in concrete, glass, colour blocks embedded in the concrete, rooftop kids playing, weird concrete shapes, can’t see the twon over the rooftop walls, pigeon shit inches deep outside our window, room is hot, bathroom mirror worn away, tired rooms once stylish, dark hallways, big wooden doors, smell of cigarettes, probably a lot of roaches here.

Calanques
I squealed and squirmed whilst D drove us down the steep side of a mountain safely into Sormiou. It was worth it. The sun burned down onto the turquoise water of the Calanque. There were very few people there, it was too early in the season for crowds. I waded into the inlet in my pants and the guys in the bar cheered as I did a bummy pose for my friend. It was too cold for a proper swim, unless you had a wetsuit, but it was idyllic. Clear water, fish swimming around my legs, I turn around and see D smiling and waving. Holiday.

The land and its people
The countryside is so beautiful, the people are kind and helpful but I never get over the fact that the neo-fascist Front National are a popular political party in Provence.

The Rabbit
I wanted to go and see The Rabbit and I pestered the others to come with me because it only looked like an inch or two away on the map. We ended up driving for hours up winding French and Italian mountain roads. The weather turned from late spring, to early spring, to winter as we drove further and further inland, away from the sun. We saw a dead cat in the border tunnel.

By the time we reached Artesina there was snow on the ground and a heavy mist. We had no idea where to find The Rabbit so we asked in rubbishy Italian. People pointed upwards. We drove until the roads ran out and still no Rabbit. A man on skis told us to take the ski life to the top of the mountain. We had no skis. We started walking up the mountain, in the snow and the mist. I had the Worst Shoes Ever for walking on snow, as well as general urban decrepitude and inability to deal with a snowy situation. We slipped and climbed for ten minutes, laughing so hard that I had to stop and pee. Then we decided that it was possible that we would die on this mountainside in the snow and the mist, that we could get really lost and still never find The Rabbit, and that we would be better off coming back in the summer and that at least if we gave up we wouldn’t die.

Disheartened, we drove home, past a village obsessed with Pinocchio, through Boves, where we stopped for delicious bread and gelato, and a woman congratulated us on eating, or something. That never happens to fat people like us.

Slumping
I slumped on the beach, in the car, at the house. Many days were given over to slumping.

The birds in the room
I awoke to a banging in the chimney. On previous mornings I had marvelled at how close the birdsong had felt. The birds were closer than I realised. I heard a clattering and opened my eyes to a FLAP FLAP SCREECH FLAP CRASH FLAP in my face. Two birds had come down the chimney and were flying around my room. I was barely awake and having to cope with this craziness. Flying in my room. The birds were flying into the window, trying to get out. I awoke to this. I pulled up the covers over my head in terror. I yelled FUCK! FUCK! They kept flapping. Some kind of recessive princess gene kicked in and I lay there feebly and cried Help! HELP! D was next door, she thought I’d been paralysed and she ran in in a panic. D is a practical kind of gal so she opened the windows and shooed out the birds with the curly brown seedpod in her hand that I had told everybody was the desiccated nun’s fingernail. It was a very bizarre way to wake up and it was only much later, when the shock had worn off, that we sat and shook and laughed and laughed and laughed.

Le Village des Tortues
I hoped this place would be like a model village inhabited by tortoises and terrapins but actually it was much better. Le Village is a sanctuary for tortoises, especially the Herman tortoise, which is local to the area and which is always getting into scrapes. On the morning that A and I visited, we saw baby tortoises, replicas of prehistoric tortoises, tortoises of many kinds and a tortoise enclosure studded with plastic domes that you could put your head in for “a tortoise-eye view of the world.” The information boards were translated from a poetic French into a poetic English, for example: “the tortoise is a wild animal, like a wolf or a bear. It will always try to escape, it needs its freedom.” We were transfixed by an image of two tortoises having a shag. We learned that the tortoise’s worst enemy is Man and we saw a tortoise infirmary with injured tortoises in display cages that were headlined: “bitten by a dog,” “rat,” “eye problems.”

The best thing were the tortoise ponds. As we approached the 15 or so tortoises that had been sunning themselves plopped into the water in alarm. They were hiding from us, their worst predator. Once they realised that we meant no harm they’d poke their heads up through the water and climb back up on the rock to sun themselves, one by one.

Because I am evil I decided to play a trick on the tortoises; I would creep up and surprise them so that they would plop away in front of my eyes. But you know, tortoises live for many decades and during their long lives they learn a thing or two. A and I crept up and then jumped out at them, going “rraarargh!” and waving our arms wildly. But those tortoises were too cool for school, they’d seen us coming and they knew we were harmless so they sat, they ignored us and they continued to relax in the sunshine.

Le Cannet de Maures
You come across this plain after driving over the massif. The rock lies in ancient red slabs, there are cloud-shaped pines and everything is dry and ready to burn. It’s like another planet, a set for Star Trek. Daisies bloom in shady drifts, there are purple flowers, wild irises, yellow, mauve and white.

The strikes
There were a couple of general strikes in the three weeks that I was in France. Everyone was protesting. Jacques Chirac issued an emergency statement. Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin would not budge. The protesters won and the authorities had to back down.

Holy and dead
The crypt in the basilica at Saint Maximin la Sainte Baume holds the skull of Mary Magdalene, well, they say it’s her. Homeless people hold the door open for you as you enter the building, they do it for money but you might feel too freaked out to give them any. The skull sits in a golden frame shaped like a woman’s head. It has flowing gold hair and rests on the arms of four golden angels. It is both disgusting and opulent. Sometimes the reliquary is taken out of the crypt and paraded around the streets, and when this happens the holy folk affix a golden face over the ghostly skull.

Not far away, 40 minutes along the A8 motorway, is the Chapel of Saint Rosseline. She was a holy nun, a woman so close to god that when she died her body was kept preserved in a glass case in the middle of a beautiful chapel that also happens to be decorated by some famous artists. In 2006 Saint Rosseline looks brown, horrible, dried, scratchy and terrifying. You might not notice at first but there’s a thing that looks like an elaborate, jeweled, golden candlestick in a display case in the corner. Go and have a look, but don’t look too closely because soon you’ll notice that it’s looking back right at you. Those things that look like eyes embedded in the gold? They are eyes. They’re Rosseline’s eyes. They’re real, they were gouged out after she died and now they’re looking at you, sinner.

Cloudiness
D said that her happiest memories of me in France were of cloudiness and smoke: the mist that enveloped us when we went searching for The Rabbit; the coloured smoke inside the artwork at the Marseille museum of modern art that was so dense and rank that we couldn’t see our hands in front of our faces; the cloud that we drove through on our way back from Digne-les-Bains. I will never forget D wearing my borrowed swimsuit and looking like a doppeganger, opening the door to the steam bath in Digne municipal pool (the ancient spa was shut, bah) and the pair of us cracking up at the guy with gnarly toenails having a nap outside.

Pssst, some of these pics have been pinched from my housemates Max and Jose, I hope that’s ok. Thanks also to Devra!