Dawn. Menton

It’s 7.15 in the morning and the moon and Venus are dangling in a brightening sky.  I was awake and ready for work three quarters of an hour ago but then my computer decided to update itself and took an age.

A watched laptop never configures so I decided to go onto the terrace and watch the world wake up.

Monsieur Martin the baker is busy in his shop, baking baguettes and serving early breakfasters.  A man is sipping coffee in one of the seats ouside and watching people hurry to work.  By the look of him he has no where to hurry to or maybe he does and is just very relaxed.  Or enjoying his first coffee of the day.

An insect chirps busily in the tree in front of me.  A blackbird wakes and begins to sing.  In the distance, closer to the beach, seagulls squawk at each other, their irritable sounding ‘yike, yike, yike’, cutting through the air.

The traffic is light and with no shrill motor-bike engines revving to prove the manhood of their riders.  An ambulance weaves slowly through the traffic, lights flashing but no siren blaring.  I assume it’s someone who had just had a heart attack, who needs speed but no noise.

The sky is a moving feast of clouds.  They barely seem to move while I watch them but when I look up after only a few moments the pattern has changed remarkably.  Like a huge kaleidoscope shaken by a child god.

The sky is brightening now.  It’s 7.25.  The moon and Venus are growing faint, I thought for a moment they had been snuffed out by the light.  They seem like dying lovers, all life ebbing from them, clinging on while sight remains so they can see each other until the end.  A red mist takes them and they fade away.

But then the reddening cloud thins and I can just see the bent bow of the moon.  The crescent is so thin it looks like it may break.  Yet somehow, despite its fragility, it remains in place, defying the brightness for a little longer.

The clouds over the sea remain dark but higher in the sky they’re turning pastel pink.  They look like a stepping stone path across the sky.

A train rattles out of the station, heading for Italy.  There was only one passenger on the earlier train.

One of our friendly doves has come to see me, staring across from its perch on the terrace edge.  It shakes itself and a white feather falls.

The trees have re-gained their colour now.  In this light I can see the line of trees in the gardens are turning brown, hanging on like the moon, but soon to fall and disappear.

This will be our first autumn in Menton.  The last of the seasons for us to experience; we’ve loved the winter, spring and summer.

What a pleasure awaits us.

When Cultures Collide

I was inches away from death yesterday and didn’t realise it until moments afterwards.

My wife and I have moved from England to the South of France, to Menton on the Riviera. It is the last French town on the coast, a frontier town, wedged between Monaco to the west and Italy to the east. For centuries it had seesawed between one or other of the Italian dukedoms, France, the Principality of Monaco and, between 1848 and 1860 became a tiny, independent city-state like medieval Florence.

I love the idea of borders, margins and frontiers so it is little wonder that I have been so attracted to the town, holidaying here several times each year. Now, at last, my dream has come true and my wife and I live here. Yet my dream nearly proved the end of me.

Menton is a sedate and calm town, clean and well-ordered, with friendly and polite people. It is a French town yet many of its inhabitants illustrate the town’s roller-coaster history, bearing French first names and Italian surnames. Many people slip from French and Italian with ease and the town, although French, has many Italian influences in its architecture, its cultural interests and its food. The border between the two nations is now permeable, the austere border and customs posts decaying and forgotten. At weekends in particular, the town fills up with Italian families who own second homes here. Menton can feel both international and uniquely Mentonaisse at one and the same time.

This makes it easy for an English ex-pat to begin to assimilate, particularly given the long association between Menton and Britain. In the nineteenth century wealthy Britons flocked to the town to escape the cold of winter and it was a favoured place for those suffering with weak chests and consumption. Sadly, it did not prove a cure and many died here.

In the month since moving to the town my wife and I have twice attempted to travel to Ventimiglia, the nearest town on the Italian side of the border. We were thwarted by strikes on the railways, one French, one Italian. Yesterday, we were successful and took the fifteen minute train journey across the border.

Ventimiglia is a mere seven kilometres from France yet it might as well be seventy or seven hundred. Where Menton is open to the influence of Italy, Ventimiglia seems resolutely closed to any influence from France. Italy is, as I once remarked, a different country. By this I mean that the differences are startling in two towns so close together, the cultures so very different. In Menton the two different cultures inter-mingle, in Ventimiglia they collide or are ignored.

The noise level is louder in the Italian town, people speaking at higher decibels in conversation, yelling loud and lengthy calls across the street to friends, all accompanied with more vivid and flamboyant body language. The French have their Gallic shrug, the Italians have a vast and operatic repertoire of sign and gesture.

The coffee tastes different, the wine tastes different and the cuisine, which looks similar, proves different in the mouth. The two languages, estranged siblings from the parent Latin root, are articulated in very different ways so that a word which looks almost the same on paper can sound utterly unlike when spoken. The public buildings in Ventimiglia are more unkempt than those in Menton, the people more stylishly dressed.

My Lost King novels are set in the transitional time of the Norman Conquest when the English and the Norman cultures collided catastrophically. Crossing from France to Italy today must be similar to the experiences of our ancestors in 1066. Different outlook, different language, different expectations, different laws.

Different ways of crossing the road.

Yesterday, in Ventimiglia, I waited at a crossing in the centre of the town. It was after lunch and the roads had quietened. The symbol to wait changed to the symbol to cross and, along with the rest of the pedestrians I stepped out onto the crossing. I would do this in England with absolute safety and the same in France. Not, it seemed, in Italy.

A motor-bike appeared from nowhere, raced past me inches away and was gone. If my stride had been longer or his speed a little faster he would have hit me. I would have been killed or, at best, seriously injured.

It happened so fast that I was barely aware of it. It was only when my wife cried out and the bike flashed across my vision that I fully realised what had happened.

A middle-aged woman walked across the road towards me. Her look was concerned, sympathetic. Yet, at the same time, her look of pity was tinged with an expression which hinted that the incident was perhaps my own fault, that I should be aware that tearaways hurtle through pedestrians on a crossing in such a reckless, though thankfully, skilful, fashion.

Who was at fault? The speeding cyclist? The dawdling English pedestrian? Or was it rather that neither of us was at fault, both merely following our own cultural conditioning, he driving with skill and bravado, me trusting to the green man symbol to protect me as I crossed.

When cultures collide, indeed. When motor-bikes and I almost did as well.

On our way to the Cote d’ Azur

Nine or ten years ago I decided to take a week’s holiday in Liguria, Northern Italy.  I flew from Bristol airport to Nice arriving late in the evening.  Because of the late hour of my arrival I had already booked a hotel from England.  When I told the bus driver where I wanted to get off he gave a shrug which I could not fathom.

When I got off I began to understand.  The district I had arrived at was something like the Vienna of Carol Reed‘s film, ‘The Third Man.’

The streets were dark and had an atmosphere of mystery and threat.  People hurried past in buttoned up clothes, avoiding the gaze of others.  Any moment I expected to hear the sound of a zither and Orsen Welles lurking in an alley.  I hurried on myself, keen to find my hotel.

In fact it seemed less of a hotel and more a venue for petty criminals and ladies of the night.  I felt distinctly uncomfortable, reminded of my stay in the less salubrious quarters ofNaples.

Still, I had only booked for one night.

My plan was to head across the border to San Remo so the following day I caught a train from the central station in Nice.  A lovely older lady, as fragile as a china doll, apologised for the state of the train.  ‘It is not a good advert for the Cote d’Azur,’ she explained.  It may not have been, but the journey certainly was.  I split my time between talking with her and gazing out at the scenery with excitement.  There was something truly fascinating and beguiling about the coast.

The lady left the train at Monaco and I travelled on.  By the time I had reached the last town on the French border, I had made up my mind.  I would postpone my journey to Italy by a day and see what the French Riviera and this border town had to offer.  I hopped off the train.

I did not know it but I had arrived at the town of Menton.

I walked down from the station, loving the warmth of the air and the calm and attractive buildings.  I went into the first hotel I saw, the Hotel Moderne, and was surprised to see a virtual double of a friend on the Reception desk.  ‘We have a room with a balcony but for one night only,’ the Receptionist said. ‘It overlooks the church so you’ll hear the bells.’

I snapped up the room there and then, threw my bag on the bed, and went off to explore the town.

I was entranced by everything I saw.  I eventually ended up in an old square with a strange statue staring down upon me and ate at one of the lively restaurants which crammed around it.  As I sat there, I felt a warm sense of peace inveigle itself into me.

Then I strolled back along the Promenade to my hotel.

It was as I walked along that the magic happened.

Four beautiful young black women strode out into the busy road and halted the traffic.  They then began a lively and good-humoured dance.  They were replaced immediately by two young men who made the road an arena for their athletic and daring display.  Any town that allows this to happen must be something special, I thought.  Talk about life-enhancing.

I had fallen in love with Menton.

Now, after many years of visiting the town with my wife Janine, we are on the count-down to moving there.  Only five weeks to go.

September – a good time to holiday

Image via Wikipedia

Those people who don’t like the crowds, or the heat or don’t have children often choose to holiday in September.  Everything gets a little bit cheaper and the holiday destinations less frenetic.  I heartily recommend it.

Charles Dickens was an early proponent of the September holiday. As early as 1837 he spent September in Broadstairs which he returned to time and time again.

He leaves an interesting account of the young visitors to the resort.

So many children are brought down to our watering-place that, when they are not out of doors, as they usually are in fine weather, it is wonderful where they are put: the whole village seeming much too small to hold them under cover.  In the afternoons, you see no end of salt and sandy little boots drying on upper window-sills.  At bathing-time in the morning, the little bay re-echoes with every shrill variety of shriek and splash — after which, if the weather be at all fresh, the sands teem with small blue mottled legs. The sands are the children’s great resort. They cluster there, like ants: so busy burying their particular friends, and making castles with infinite labour which the next tide overthrows, that it is curious to consider how their play, to the music of the sea, foreshadows the realities of their after lives.

Broadstairs remained one of Dickens’ favourite holiday places but he also travelled further afield.  In 1844 he took his whole family in what must have resembled a caravan around France and Italy.  He stayed at two villas for the last six months of the year.

Even then, it was wonderful to be a writer.