Chateau supreme

How many knew that there was a local connection to the Olympic Opening ceremony? Marc Wolff, whose lovely wife Lin runs the English Book Shop in Valbonne and who lives in Plascassier, was flying the helicopter which dropped the “Queen” and James Bond over the Olympic stadium for their parachute jump watched by 20 million people in the UK alone. Marc, a Currencies Direct client, who does much of the flying for loads of feature films including James Bond and Harry Potter via his company Flying Pictures told me it had taken 6 months of rehearsal and involved him in high level meetings with Buckingham Palace and MI6, which is presumably why he was able to get Britain’s top spy to play ball. I would have liked to have been a fly on the wall at his meetings with the Palace. “You want the Queen to do what?”.

Talking of the Olympics, a friend of mine, Tim Swanee from Home Hunts was walking around the Olympic Village yesterday. He asked a chap if he was a pole vaulter. The chap replied “no, I am German but how did you know my name?”

Leaving France is like an end of a chapter. Topped with a night at Chateu du Cocove, pictured today, It reminded me of what happened at Tiddenfoot Leisure Centre in 1976 when a very different kind of chapter, the Wycombe chapter of Hells Angels came up against the person who was taking the money at the door for a gig by punk band The Damned that I was staging. That nice lady decorator was that person, and her ensuring that every verse and line of that chapter paid to get in is, to my mind, a factor in the ultimate demise of that particular chapter a few years later.

Apart from being the end point of my second book, the Valbonne Monologues, which will be published in November,  it is also the end of an era, a long and happy chapter in my life. My plan now is to be even happier based in England for the forseeable future. I believe Harvey’s real ale will be the perfect elixir to help the transformation, so I started the treatment yesterday.

The White Hart, a Harvey’s pub, is quite accessible, seeing as I have a gate from my garden into the pub garden, but there is still the irksome walk of some 7 metres before you get to the bar, so not quite perfect. However, I have decided to grant it my seal of approval on the basis that the older I get the lazier I get and the day may well dawn when proximity is the major factor in where to drink. The restaurant menu looks good but I was desperate for an Indian to we went to the India Gate in Arundel.

Sprogs 1 and 2 were detailed to stay in the house with the codicil that one of them would fetch fish and chips from the shop across the road. Someone needed to be in the house because of the needy and needless Banjo, that horrid dribbly hound loved only by that nice lady decorator, who panics whenever there is no member of the family present. As they are both students, blow up mattresses should be viewed as a luxury (none of our furniture will arrive until tomorrow), and with £20 for dog sitting duties donated to the cause they seemed more than happy.

Earlier we had stopped off at some cousins in Kent who amongst other things press their own cider. It would have been churlish to have refused the chance to sample it, and regular readers will know that churlishness is an alien concept to me, unless I have lost at sport, which of course never happens.

Chris France