Panic over, normal service has been resumed

Panic over, I can drink again!  After consultation with a host of the most highly respected members of the medical profession in Valbonne, and the handing over of 23 euros, I now have sufficient information to enable an informed decision to be made and made by me. I have made that decision and I am no longer on the wagon. Whilst I shall scale down my intake, I shall, after all, be able to remain jovial and funny rather than boring and morose, had the advice gone the wrong way.

It was all going to get rather difficult had circumstances not changed. Golf without a drink at the 19th hole would have been difficult, a post tennis beer harder still, but lunch at Auberge St Donat without being able to enjoy the full menu (wine is included) would have been unthinkable. My whole life would have been turned upside down. The economics of Valbonnes’ restaurants and bars would have been in tatters.

In celebration of these changed circumstances, and in support of one of those restaurants, we accepted a late invitation to dine in Valbonne Square last evening with Peachy Butterfield and Roly Bufton, who flew back from his cruise along the Italian coast to deal with some issues surrounding his “water feature”. This is how Peachy describes the alarming discovery that the local council have the right to build a huge underground reservoir on Roly and Poly’s property. Even a man with a water feature the size of a football pitch needs to eat, and it was perhaps apt that he should choose to eat with a man who is already the size of a football pitch.

A gaudy boat arrives at Amalfi a few weeks ago

Over a convivial dinner inside at Cafe Des Arcades, due to some very English rain, we discussed an app (a phone application to those of my readers who are over 50) called “fit or fugly”. It takes a picture of ones face and then pronounces that the subject is one or the other. It has been a source of enormous distress for one of my close family, an operative of the decorating kind, as the correct result was not forthcoming, I, however, braced for the possibility that the technology may be unreliable and may have produce a less than fit result, but I was surprised and delighted to find myself pronounced anything but fugly. This is a clear triumph for modern technology.

Later on, before the pear liqueur was offered as a gesture from the lovely staff at the restaurant, Peachy was discussing whether it was possible just to sip wine, and swiftly came to the conclusion that it was, however, as he pointed out, One man’s sip is another man’s glug.

There was talk of a recent event aboard D5, the enormous and fabulous boat owned by the Naked Politician, aboard whichever we never seem to get invited nowadays, probably because of “that” picture in my book The Valbonne Monologues.  It seems that, just after the passengers had disembarked for lunch on the islands, close to Cannes at the weekend, there was a squall, which was so intense that one could not see D5 from 50 metres away on shore in the restaurant, (pity there was not a squall when the boat in my picture today entered port) and Peachy (who unaccountably was invited) at last thought he might have gone blind. His comment, that “it’s going to happen eventually” can only hint at a life of juvenile bad behaviour of the most basic kind.

So far. Christine, of whom I spoke yesterday, has failed to submit her application to open an account with Currencies Direct, but I am prepared to accept that she may have been tired after an epic Sunday lunch. However, there will be no excuse if that application has not been received by close of business today.

Chris France
@Valbonne_News