St Tropez and some more of the posh bits of France.

That’s a fish soup and a tomato and mozzarella salad. Simple food. Perfect food.

Marigold Says…

We’re back in proper Provence now. G will tell you all about old places and I will do the rest.

We went to Port Grimaud. Market on of course. Had a mooch. Really lovely. How rich must these people be, townhouses in muted colours, boats, market produce, bread shops and fabulous clothes for beautiful people. Espadrilles were the order of the day or gold sandals. Wonder if you have to pass a Perfect Look test to buy there and show them your wardrobe.

Although it was a canals system all round it didn’t pong, just the smell of perfume wafting about and herbs. They were going around in golf carts, suppose it was a bit like the Prisoner series.

I bought nothing. The only thing I really wanted was a selection in huge barrels of everything liquorice. I queued with my bowl ready to grab like Oliver, and the Dutch man in front weighed a paltry amount and it was 7 euros. I slunk back and told G there was a massive queue.

We were on our way to St Tropez the home of the beautiful, rich and fashionable. Well we failed on all three counts but were dead set on going anyway.

Found a parking space, could have sold it for a huge profit. It was left vacated by, wait for it, a leather skinned elderly bloke with a thong thing on. The only other things he was wearing were a baguette and a bag of tomatoes. I think that was what they were.

Shops were as expected serving white lacey garments and bikinis small enough to fit a doll. I saved some money there. We stopped for a coffee and noticed over the road were girls serving cocktails wearing roller skates that lit up. When the drinks arrived they were served with sparklers in. Fab.

Walked along the famous front. Of course it is a showing off place with motor bikes adorned with gorgeous pillion passengers. So that is where perfection lives and why not. We went to a very swish restaurant on the beach. G noticed there were three Ferraris in the car park. Definitely not a fast food place. Inside there was a wall of famous people who had dined here. I only recognised a picture of George Clooney and G said ‘he’s just walked in.’

A waiter dressed like a footman from Downton Abbey showed us to a table right on the beach and gave us menus about twenty pages thick. As they were in French, obviously, I said to G, ‘you choose, it’s your birthday,’ which I thought was pretty clever.

It wasn’t even his birthday but we’re not very good at organising things like birthdays so this would be a few days late.

It wasn’t even George Clooney either unless he has put on four stone and got a new woman with mad hair. Actually, from the front he did look like him. G said the woman he was with looked ‘lively.’ Her hair certainly did.

Went to a hill village next, can’t remember the name. Really old of course, but we took the wrong turning coming down and ended up in narrow corridors for roads with deep drains on the side. No room to manoeuvre. I started screeching imagining a scraping noise. G said it will be quieter if you get out and walk in front. Was he going to mow me down? I felt like shouting ‘bring out your dead.’

We eventually made it to the bottom. Then this fat bloke on a rusty old scooter kept charging from behind. I shouted something which is international forgetting the hood was down. He gave us a fat finger. We laughed and hurried off.

We actually don’t eat out very often in pricey restaurants on holiday or U.K. it doesn’t float our boat. Now we are in France we love going into the good Patisseries and choosing a flan or getting some bread and buying some cheese and tomatoes. We always buy a tart especially the custard ones with apricots or prunes in. Often they have tables outside and sell drinks. For us it is perfection and we don’t need to dress up which is a bonus.

Today I had a cheese and courgette flan, followed by an apricot tart. G had similar. His tart had blackberries all over it. Lovely.

We moved on, only about forty miles, and today we talked to a French woman from Nice who had lived in Manchester. They come to the area to exercise the dogs most days as all the rivers around Nice are nearly dried up and smelly. This is the only river nearby where the dogs can swim. Her friend brings her as she and her husband gave up driving in Nice years ago after pranging the car several times. She was so nice and I got the impression she was enjoying using her English.

Good job as we are very limited in French speaking. Me especially. I manage very well in bake shops. This morning I wanted a tarte with little dark berries on. I didn’t know if they were blackcurrants, bilberries, or something very different so I pointed at it it and said,’une tart with thingies on.’

The woman said, ‘myrtille? Certainement, madam’ or something very like that. I will know what to say next time. G usually goes to grab a table so he is very impressed with my knowledge as I always bring something back. Not always what I ask for but I don’t mention that.

Just read the Swiss have suggested showering together to save water etc. Whatever next, how would that save water, unless one of you stood behind the other or on their shoulders. It seems to be compulsory in films. Also G has different soap products than me which would cause confusion. I use lovely high end shampoo and soap, G doesn’t, just bog standard cheap liquid soap as smelly stuff causes comments like ‘this stuff stinks’. I don’t think he is the shampoo makers target audience.

Also, the shower is the only place where one gets time to oneself, and I cherish it. Apart from the toilet, but I don’t cherish that as much. Next thing they will be suggesting not washing or showering at all.

Another ridiculous idea is not heating up the oven before baking. WHAT? Wouldn’t it be better not to bake cakes at all, just buy a packet of biscuits? Life is getting very complicated. G said we should all eat off paper plates or old newspapers.

Is that the wealthy heiress to a perfume empire shopping at Port Grimaud? Ah, no, it’s Marigold

G Says…

We haven’t been to Port Grimaud or St Tropez for years. They’re near neighbours, St Tropez being a very old fishing village that ‘took off’ when Brigitte Bardot made a film there in 1956. The film was Et Die cra la Femme – And God Created Woman ‘ which managed to offend large swathes of the population due to its sexual content, but made ‘BB’ a huge star and turned that humble fishing village into the millionaires playground that is ‘SanTrop.’

On the day we visited, there were vastly expensive yachts moored in the bay, there always are, the traffic was horrendous, it always is and we were never likely to be mistaken for members of the jet set. That goes without saying.

We did, however, manage to snag a parking spot near the old port. Amazing. The man, most definitely male, who vacated the precious parking space wore only a leather thong, nothing else. Marigold only saw the rear view, bare flesh and a string up the bum basically, but I was treated to the full frontal. The memory lingers still.

The Vieux Port was busy, the restaurants were heaving and the scent of garlic and Galoises perfumed the air. We wandered around for a while, decided it wasn’t worth waiting around for a table anywhere around here and nobody offered to take us out to dine on a super-yacht.

I did tell Marigold she’d have had more opportunities if I hadn’t been cluttering up the place. I did, however, notice a poster of Serge Gainsbourg in a shop window. He was a French sex symbol at one time, possibly still is, so obviously looks aren’t important to Frenchwomen.

Marigold got very annoyed when I was still humming ‘Je t’aime’ three hours later.

We watched (mostly) old, (entirely) men playing petange or pétanque, dependent on area, but more often called boules elsewhere and decided they were far too good to offer a challenge. They weren’t playing ‘nicely’ ‘ the games were on the verge of being classified as a blood sport.

We had lunch at La Bouillabaisse restaurant on the beach. I didn’t fancy a bottle of Sauternes so didn’t order the 2000 vintage Chteau d’Yquem on offer for 960 euros a bottle. I asked our waiter if many customers ordered this. They certainly do, at least a dozen bottles of the Chteau d’Yquem are sold every month in the summer and dozens of bottles of vintage champagne. The waiter said, selling fine wines for a lot of money is no problem around here, it’s much harder to replace the stock afterwards.

I looked up Chteau d’Yquem later. In July 2011, a bottle of Chteau d’Yquem sold for 75,000 to become the most expensive bottle of white wine ever sold. Yes, that bottle was an extraordinarily great vintage, but even so perhaps future diners will fondly recall the days when a decent bottle of wine at La Bouillabaisse cost a mere 960 euros.

Port Grimaud is very different to its neighbour and in the mid 50s when Brigitte Bardot was pouting sexily for film cameras on a beach just down the road this town didn’t even exist. It was one man’s vision to transform a mosquito plagued stretch of marshland into ‘the Venice of Provence.

Franois Spoerry envisioned a town built with interconnected channels of water and traditional French fisherman’s houses, each with a personal boat mooring space at the end of the garden. The marshes were drained, the mosquito problem resolved and the dream became reality.

Port Grimaud today is charming. The houses are individually different, painted with pastel colours of ochre, pink and turquoise with brightly painted shutters and wrought iron balconies arranged around four small islands, linked by bridges over the waterways and surrounded by lush gardens.

We imagined a weekday in mid September would be relatively quiet. Oh, no it wasn’t, the place was heaving. Does nobody go to work any more?

There’s a vast car park on the outskirts, the only parking option available, and it was packed, took us ages to find a spot. At 7 euros for an hour I wish I had that concession. We wandered around, found our perfect ‘lottery winning’ house, got very hot and bothered and came out again.

Within the hour! Marigold said perhaps we should come back in February when it might be less busy.

The next day we moved on to a hotel right on a beach just outside Frejus. The owner arrived to greet us on a Harley-Davidson and insisted we spoke in English as he spoke it ‘fluidly.’

Yes, he really did say ‘fluidly.’

He had enormous teeth, Marigold was fascinated, especially as he never stopped talking and only half of what he said made sense. He showed us the visitors book, filled with fawning and obsequious comments which we were convinced he had written himself, gave me a rusty key attached to a lump of metal resembling a doorknob, only larger, and rode off never to be seen again.

Marigold called him Muffin as he had teeth like a mule.

The stairs to the bedrooms were steep, winding and treacherous. The only light worked on a push button system allowing about fifteen seconds of light with each press. That meant we got halfway up in the light and the rest in the pitch dark. We thought it a huge joke at the time, but going down again the next morning was far less amusing.

I found a torch in the car. Memo to self: keep torch in luggage.

The next morning we went to find the Roman amphitheatre in Frejus, one of the oldest in Gaul. It’s thought to date from the 1st century AD but wasn’t excavated until 1828. It was originally able to seat about 12,000 spectators and renovation work continued, with some lengthy budget related delays until everything changed in 1959 when the dam at Malpasset burst and a huge wall of water demolished much of Frejus, including the partly exposed auditorium, and caused the death of over 700 people.

This tragedy was compounded, in my view, by a very ‘1960s style’ planning decision to cease work on restoration of the original and instead convert it to a modern place of entertainment. Externally, the ancient stonework has gained a concrete neighbour.

It’s not a good look. Inside, it’s even worse. There’s seating for 5,000 on stone benches around a central arena, complete with football stadium style barriers.

A man, not acting in any official capacity, he said, just a concerned local, warned Marigold not to go into the area where gladiators once entered the arena as there were loose stones in the roof. ‘Very dangerous,’ he cautioned. Even so, I imagine the risks involved were significantly less than entering the arena to fight to the death.

Our informative local was keen to boast about his town and told us that David Bowie, Rod Stewart and Tina Turner had all appeared here in concert. Marigold asked him why the town didn’t just build a modern stadium for concerts and he said, ‘this is better, and cheaper.’

We agreed to differ. That marriage of old and new is simply hideous.

We went to look at the site of the collapsed dam. It hasn’t been repaired and big chunks of masonry, as big as cars, are still scattered around, swept down by a wall of water. Yet another tragedy for this region to endure.

Next step will be to head for the Cote d’Azur, specifically the ancient hill towns so beloved by the great artists.