The first time we were in Nice, we discovered for the first time the joys of long walks along the Promenade des Anglais and the sights of the city, such as the Hotel Negresco, the cupola of which is said to have been designed to be just like a woman’s breast. Typically French! We also discovered the joys of dining in the old town in Nice,with some truly delightful restaurants.
While Nice has added to its stock of tourist attractions in recent years, one of the pleasures of the city is that it is so easy to get out of by train. From the main SNCF station, you can take trains the length of the Cote d’Azur with no trouble at all, and for very reasonable fares, especially if you buy a tourist ticket. Going west from Nice, we discovered Cannes (not much to write home about there!), Antibes with its Picasso museum and Valauris, famed for its potteries, where Picasso lived from 1948 until 1956. Further west still, we discovered more pleasant seaside towns, like St Raphael, then eventually found ourselves in St Tropez.
The place is absolute bedlam in summer, with the port jammed with the super yachts of the super rich and hordes of tourists doing celebrity spotting. When we were there in December, the place was lovely and quiet and we were able to walk all around the harbour area and have the place more or less to ourselves.
Inland, too, from Nice, towns like Grasse, renowned for its perfumes, are reasonable in winter, wholly unreasonable in summer.We also found the medieval town of St Paul de Vence a wonderful delight, almost deserted just before Christmas and free from celebrities.
Going in the other direction, east from Nice, we found such coastal delights as Roquerune-Cap-Martin. Then on to Monaco,which I must admit quite frankly was a big disappointment. Who wants to see how the super rich live or how all the casinos operate? We found little of interest there, but once we returned to the railway station and continued our journey east, it was an entirely different story. We came to Menton, the last town in this part of France.
Menton is a wonderful town, full of atmosphere and an entracing old town on a sloping hill, full of historical atmosphere.We remembered that the great Irish poet, W.B.Yeats, died here in 1939 just before World War II and it took the best part of a decade to get him home to Ireland. Menton was classy without being overbearing. We were two months too early of course for the famous lemon festival that’s held there in February. Menton is called the “perle de la France”, partly because it claims to have sunshine 331 days of the year.
Crossing the frontier with Italy into the small town of Ventimiglia, it was a whole new world, with the whole town full of festive celebrations and showy delights for people to buy for Christmas, including that seasonal favourite, marrons glacés. Ventimiglia was bursting with life and vitality, a great place.
At that time, we were friendly with the late Louis le Brocquy (1916-2012) the great Irish painter, perhaps the greatest of the 20th century, and his wife Anne Madden. Any time we met up with them in Dublin they were always at us to come and visit them; in those days, they lived just outside Nice. But we never took up the invitation when we were in Nice.
One of the great things about the Cote d’Azur is that with a little digging, you can find all sorts of interesting places that are off the general radar. One place my wife had stayed at in earlier years was a wonderful small hotel just outside Grasse, absolutely idyllic, full of the scent of lavender, such a Provencal speciality. It turned out that the hotel was owned by the late Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia, which was certainly an exotic twist.
The second time we were in Nice at Christmas, the weather was equally mild; that time, we were able to stay in a better hotel, the Sofitel, which had plenty of luxuries. Again, we found Nice the ideal spot for walking.We also had an unusual angle to this particular trip. Nice used to have a dingy old railway station, not far from the mainline station, from where the Train des Pignes started its three hour journey to Dignes-les-Bains, right up in the foothills of the Alps. The old station was so dingy it had loads of atmosphere, as did the train itself, rackety and falling to bits, bumping ever higher over each join in the rails. We had bought a big bottle of red wine and some baguettes in the station in Nice and these fortified us during the long journey. These days of course, the station has been replaced by an entirely new station and the train itself has been totally upgraded.The name of the train incidentally, comes from the pine cones that were once used to feed the furnaces on the engines in steam days. We haven’t been on the new style train, but I guess that while it’s much more efficient, it's also much lacking in character. The town of Digne itself was moderately interesting, on the route that Napoléon once took. But what struck us about the town is that it’s so high up that a combination of wine and the altitude creates something like altitude sickness - at least that’s our excuse!
Back to the dreary present. This week of course has been dominated by the death of Nelson Mandela in South Africa. Undoubtedly a great man, wise and forgiving and incapable of corruption, unlike the present rulers of that strife torn country. He was magnificent as a human being; his legacy, present day South Africa, falls far short of his ideals. Back in 1990, when he was comparatively unknown, he and his then wife Winnie came to Dublin when he was made a freeman of the city of Dublin. The city was one of the first in the world to recognise him and when he arrived here soon after his release from prison, he was given a hero’s welcome. At the time, I was just finishing a book on the 50 year history of Dublin airport, 1940 to 1990. Just as the book was going to the printers, news came through that Mandela was coming to town and very wisely the decision was made that we would hold everything until we could get a photograph of him and Winnie when they arrived at Dublin airport. So the book duly appeared, complete with this photo, and I’m very glad in retrospect that we waited a little while.
Meanwhile in the Ukraine, the protests continue and I was interested to see that in a tree outside the Ukrainian embassy in Dublin, someone has hung an EU flag. It’s a real tussle there between those who want to link up with the EU and those who yearn for the traditional links with Russia. One protest that wasn’t reported in this part of the world, but was duly covered in some media in mainland Europe, was the protest in Paris.
The Ukrainian feminist group, Femen, who’ve made a name for themselves by protesting on a whole variety of issues topless, went a stage further outside the Ukrainian embassy in Paris the other day. Three of them squatted down outside the embassy and pissed on the portraits of the Ukrainian president that they had put on the pavement.
Other news in France continues as well to ba tawdry; it’s a sign of the recession that the news from France seems to be a succession of downbeat stories,often robberies. There doesn’t seem to be anything uplifting happening! The other day, a couple of armed robbers broke into a small jeweller’s shop in the rue St Honoré in Paris and stole €800,000’s worth of watches. This type of robbery seems to have become par for the course this year in both Paris and on the Cote d’Azur. But at least to compensate, there was news about the great show that Maison Cartier is putting on in the Grand Palais in Paris, a total of 600 jewellery creations, including the diegem worn by the Duchess of Cambridge. Lets hope the robbers don’t get in!
It’s a sad sign of the times that one of the big news stories in France the other day was about a TV programme, the Grand Journal on Canal +. The programme has a big audience in studio and the other day, someone from that audience,who turned out to be an actress, lifted her T shirt during the live broadcast and revealed to all and sundry a fine pair of breasts. The mere fact that such a happening can garner such an amount of media coverage is sign that the media in France is in a derelict enough state,reflexion of the morose state of the country,which seems to be the verge of a big popular uprising against the state and the EU generally, an uprising fortunately that seems more talked about then actually happening.
Still, what happened in the delightful walled town of Carcassone, in south-west France, the other night, is all too typical. It was apparently an unusually agitated night in Carcassone and it ended up with around 20 cars being set on fire. Sadly, setting cars on fire seems so commonplace in various parts of France that it scarcely merits headlines any more.
I also see this morning from France that a film that’s been made about DSK, the former head of the IMF, who left that post in controversial circumstances, has itself run into controversy. The film is called The June Project and the allegation this morning is that Anne Sinclair, the former TV presenter who now works for the Huffington Post in France, and who was once married to DSK, is trying to stop the release of the film. Also in celebrity talk comes the news about Gerard Depardieu, the film actor, renowned for his eccentric behaviour, popping up all over the place to claim some new nationality. His daughter Julie said the other day that she expected her father to be dead in five years time. She was certainly pushing filial outspokenness to new heights!
In the UK, one sad piece of media news this morning is that the time-honoured Liverpool Post, once a great regional newspaper, founded in 1855, is to be axed on December 19. The paper was converted some time ago from a daily to a weekly and the circulation had fallen to a miserable 5,500. It’s amazing in the UK how many regional newspapers have suffered catastrophic circulation collapses,something that hasn’t been mirrored elsewhere in the EU, despite the advance of digital online technology. An equally startling sign of changes to the traditional way of doing things came from David Cameron, the British prime minister, the other day, when he said that schoolchildren should think of giving up learning other European languages, like French and German, in favour of Mandarin.
At least this morning, there’s one bit of positive news from Uruguay of all places. It has decided to legalise the growing sale and use of marijuana, the first country in the world to do so. This seems highly sensible, although I must admit I’ve never been able to see why anyone would want to experiment with drug taking- in the first place - it’s never seemed a good idea to me .One drug is enough, a mere tincture from time to time of alcohol!
These days, it’s very hard to enthuse about the European project, the EU. It now seems nothing more than an excuse for bureacracy on a grand scale, while the euro itself has been the cause of untold economic damage, especially on the fringes of the EU. Normally, when people make a huge mistake, they eventually own up to it and change direction,but one thing that European politicians seem totally incapable of doing is admitting that the introduction of the euro was a huge wrong move. It has brought catastrophe on countries on the southern fringe of the EU and it’s now doing the same at the heart of the EU, in France.
I had a frightful example of just how bad the euro has been the other day from a friend of mine who was very recently in Lisbon. Portugal is wracked by austerity and unemployment and walking through the centre of Lisbon very recently, my friend saw a pitiful sight, a middle aged man who had obviously worked in construction and who had lost his job. He was standing on the pavement with all the tools of his trade spread out before him. He was hoping to sell them and yet if he was successful, the money would only buy a couple of days' food. How foolish are the ways of the eurozone and our masters in Europe and will we ever see all the wrongs they have inflicted put right for the benefit of the ordinary people of Europe?