Brandy snaps at your heels

As I awoke Mr Otway from the deepest of slumber yesterday morning to get him to the airport in time to catch his plane back to England, I spotted the brandy glass beside his bed, with still some brandy left in it. It was a reminder that, after a long lunch, a serious session in La Kavanou, peeling off to The Queens Legs and then falling out of there for a late night drunken curry at the Kashmir, that,  rather unbelievably, we were still thirsty when we got to my house and considered a brandy as a suitable and necessary night-cap. John was pleased with himself because he had not drunk all of it. What willpower!

A day such as Monday would have been enough for a mere hard-drinking mortal for a week, but of course John Otway and I had done something similar on the Sunday in the company of Steve Frost and his brothers Simon and Matt, head honcho of French Mortgage Xpress and lead sponsor of the most successful book launch in Valbonne this week. The book is available by mail order from me so if anyone has a paypal account or wants to send me cash, these valuable and if required, signed first editions of “Summer In The Cote d’Azur” can be speeding on their way to you, price 12 Euros plus 4 euros p & p or £10 + £3.50 p & p in sterling, a very good exchange rate, even better than you can get with Currencies Direct. Alternatively it will shortly be available on Amazon or Lulu as soon as I can work out how to do it.

I now have some pictures from the launch and show one of these today. There may ne more to come this week. You will see that it is of a celebrity, a man who has appeared alongside some of the greatest living comedians and in some of the best sitcoms ever made holding a copy, one may even say clutching lovingly a copy of a certain book launched successfully this week..

s it just me or does Stephen Frost look like he could be Alistair Darlings love child? he has good literary taste don't you think?

Startlingly, the mayor office sent one of his deputies to enjoy the luncheon invitation, and even more startling was that she got it, she laughed when she should and we now have a meeting with her to discuss future events. This represents the opportunity for a great breakthrough: We have grandiose plans, although I admit some of these were formulated under the influence of a post book launch alcoholic haze.

So by the time most of the regular readers of this column are reading this, I will have been up at the crack of sparrows to board a plane for the glories of Gatwick. It is my parental duty to go to sprog 2’s parents evening and then to drink loads of proper English beer and feed both sprogs as sprog 1 is coming up from Guildford for the evening.

Two days of the hellish English winter await me, but it will hard to tell the difference, so poor has the weather been here for the last few days, but it seems the whole of southern Europe has been similarly affected.

More work on Friday as the detailed planning of the next literary event, the hilarious John Otway lecture on December 12th at the Auberge Provencal will commence. Already significant numbers have signed up for this early festive feast which will be sold out in advance and is currently only being promoted via this column and to people who attended the launch of my book.

Chris France