Flight to freedom comes to an end

So what do you do when you have been sipping wine all day in the sunshine getting a tan? You go out to Valbonne Square for even more wine, leave your phone and cigar box in someone’s car, wake up with a raging thirst and a horrible headache and a mouth that tastes like the inside of a budgie cage. I was told that when in the sun you are supposed to drink more to avoid dehydration, but it does not work. And another thing, I also distinctly remember some TV adverts when I was growing up about 50 years ago that said smoking is good for you. Based on the evidence I have in my mouth his morning, I think the makers of that advert were mistaken.

Leaving the phone was not a great idea, as today’s column was almost written, but on the phone, necessitating this rewrite. It also means that the photo I had intended to use is also unavailable, thus today I have one that the Nice Lady decorator took from the plane as we flew into Nice airport on Friday. You can just see Tracy Belazaire waving from her terrace in Villefranche sur mer if you look carefully. With my eyesight I can see that she is sunbathing topless, can you? it is a very fine sight and enough to make an old man very happy.

Tracy does her best to be uplifting

But the weather is glorious again so, with the aid of a Resolve, the hangover cure, I should be ready for tennis, if it happens, with The Wingco, Blind Lemon Milsted, and the Master Mariner Mundell, however, a three-line whip has been issued by that Nice Lady decorator forbidding me to lunch at the Auberge St Donat in favour of lunching on the beach on the way to the airport for that trek back to England this evening. I am torn. On the one hand, tradition dictates that the Auberge must be the post tennis venue, on the other hand, lunch on the Meditteranean coast in warm sunshine does have its allure.

Over dinner with Peter Bennett from Blue Water last night, I had planned an attack to get him to buy a batch of The Valbonne Monologues for all his charter clients, but he deflected me beautifully be revealing that he had done a deal with Currencies Direct and that I should be grateful for small mercies, which I hope become big mercies. I had even offered to print a limited edition of the book in Blue Water blue, and call in the Blue Water Valbonne Monologues, but he wisely decided that his reputation as the best yacht broker in the south of France and the mighty Blue Water brand might not be enhanced as much as I was garrulously claiming it would by being connected. He is wrong of course, there would almost certainly be a negative impact, but he was too polite to say.

So the fun is nearly over and the return of reality, that I still have a year in exile in England to complete, will crowd back in this evening, and the misery of that will be compounded by a proposed diet day tomorrow. I feel like a man who has been in a darkened room for months suddenly having the curtains drawn and letting the sunshine flood in, and then having the curtains gradually drawn to a close again. still I now have the basis of a tan, and just two weeks to go before the next escape, this time to Monaco for another 50th birthday, but that now seems a long way off.

Chris France
@Valbonne_News