DIARY OF A SUMMER

Meeting a wonderfully cool, passionate and sexy new friend for a drink on Wednesday reminded me of how much I love the South of France. She was recalling the time she spent living in Marseille and reflected on the inappropriate behaviour of the city’s inhabitants, acknowledged the high level of crime through her own experience, the dirty streets and buildings, the eye-catching cockroaches and the enduring preoccupation of the population with indolence. She made me laugh so much with her witty and comical observations. I have decided that she should be awarded a badge of honour for having endured the underlying truth and realities of the South. I, on the other hand, have fallen madly in love with the colourful charm of the place, the antithesis of glamorous St Tropez. But it is the surrounding countryside that fills me with the most thrilling joy. I have never been anywhere that so successfully eliminates my city life anxieties. Every morning during the early month of June, I woke up relishing the freedom of an almost empty beach and the warm, clean sea. I easily slid into a state of contentment and looked ahead only as far as lunch or dinner. If I wanted to do more than eat, drink and languish in the sun, I took a boat to the unspoilt fjords and explored the sandy beaches or walked along the Route des Crêtes, the highest cliffs in Europe (a sharp descent into the turquoise waters).
Going back to the subject of this new friend, I’ve just suddenly realized that if this post had not been written in the present I might have been able to namedrop impulsively! But you know who you are…
More of my pictures and little souvenir postcard.
I’m wearing a very old Princesse Tam-Tam bikini, a Lock & Co hat, Top Shop denim shorts, vintage 80s Elton John tour tee-shirt and my beloved Fjällräven rucksack.