Remembrance, forgotten?

As I said to my dermatologist, don’t make any rash decisions, and it was not a rash decision to have lunch at Les Pierres Rouges in Valbonne with Pierre le Grande aka Peter Lynn and his delicious wife Judy.

The meal was exemplary as usual, my personal choice was the pea and ham soup, followed by a brochette de la mer, including very good scallops, gambas and monkfish. However during lunch, Pierre nearly alerted the nld (the nice lady decorator) to yesterdays picture, but somehow I managed to intervene and guide the conversation into safer territory. As I write this, that nice lady decorator is full of a great deal of wine (probably close to what was pictured yesterday) and is cursing the cd player and threatening it with spending the rest of its life in the bin, so I need to break off for a second to show here where the play/pause button is located.

OK, job done, I think the player has at least a temporary reprieve, although from what I can currently hear at this moment, it would have been a merciful release for it to die on the spot or to be dumped in the skip. Don’t get me wrong I think I quite liked Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells when I was 19 but I am now closing in on 57 and it is a dirge. Actually come to think of it I didn’t much care for it in the early 70’s either.

Valbonne, empty for the two minute silence except for the one lady who forgot to put her clock back recently

My picture today is of the streets of Valbonne quiet during remembrance.  Earlier yesterday at 11.00, I called for 2 minutes silence to reflect on those who had died in combat. This is of course possibly the only time each year when even that nice lady decorator remains silent for an extended period.

My work of course does not stop, even whilst lunching, the relentless high-powered endeavour that is my hallmark meant that effectively, I was still hard at work, with two new customers signed up to benefit from the services of Currencies Direct via the email during lunch. This was as I was being reminded of Marc de Provence to which I was introduced by Peter Lynn some six years ago when I first moved here. It is a white spirit apparently distilled from all the old bits of grapes left over in the making of wine. So I was drinking essence of grape pips and skin, thus you can see it is not all wine and roses down here in the cote d’Azur.

It would be impossible to get through lunch without remembering at least one of the gags I recall from the best joke teller I have ever met. Women are like apples, they mostly stay at the top of the tree until picked by a man. Men however are like grapes, they have to be stomped all over to be worth having dinner with. Maybe that is what I should submit to Riviera Woman for my article?

An unaccustomed calm will descend on our household from Sunday for a whole week as that nice lady decorator will be flying to London. I am not suggesting that she will travel quidditch style if you get my meaning as that would be rude, and regular readers will be aware that rudeness is not one of my traits, no, this time she will use the more conventional method of flying by plane with my son James to do some err… decorating at our house back in the UK.

This means that as I write the pubs in Weston Turville will be re stocking and preparing with barbed wire, hard hats and earplugs in readiness for the inevitable onslaught and I will have whole delicious week to watch porn and sport work quietly and furiously and contemplate my forthcoming trip to Australia.

Nigel Graves will be disappointed to know that my tickets for the first day of the Ashes Test in Brisbane Test have arrived so I shall not have to watch the cricket from my hotel bedroom as he had hoped.

Tonight is Frances Thompsons supper club in Valbonne with an Indian theme, so I will get out my feathers and tomahawk….. Actually that is a terrible joke, I hope I have enough material by the time it comes round to publication to be able to edit (scalp?) that bit out. Oh bollocks I haven’t. Blimey, bollocks and scalp in the same sentence….

Chris France

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