Psychogeography by Will Self

Author:Will Self
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Côte of Desire

The Côte d’Azur isn’t really a place at all – more a state of mind stretched out over hundreds of kilometres of beaches, headlands, outcrops, fish restaurants, walled villas and foul-tempered chiens. This sun-soaked coastline is like the strap of a bikini, suntan-oiled then teased by the imagination. My parents borrowed a house one winter at Cap d’Antibes. I was two years old and a precocious enough consumer to complain vociferously at receiving only a red plastic train for Christmas. I remember eating oysters; a palm tree growing in a courtyard; my mother collecting sea-smoothed chunks of coloured glass on the beach. She put her bounty in jars filled with water which she placed on the windowsills of the villa; the wintery sun shone through these stained-glass canisters.

Like all exotica experienced in earliest childhood, the South of France became entangled in my mind with its representations. Was it Willie Maugham who entertained at Cap Ferrat – or me? Was it Scott and Zelda who wheeled their Bugatti along the Corniche – or me? The swaddled figure scratching away in his notebook on the beach at Bandol, was it Thomas Mann, or, yet again, me? Hemingway and Picasso fighting on a canvas ring in the market square of Juan-les-Pins (where my lovely goes to, tra-la-la-la-la-la-la!); Truffaut and Bardot sunning themselves on Ari’s yacht; Cézanne reducing the rocks to savage geometric configurations; Maigret nosing about Porquerolles savagely puffing on his pipe. Me, me, me, me-me-me!

So when I actually got to go there in early adulthood the experience remained curiously unreal, not least because I was under the auspices of louche Anglo-French aristos. We ate long lunches at restaurants in perfectly conical medieval hilltop villages, then drove to Les Calanques and dove off the white stone ledges into the inky Mediterranean. Or else we fetched up in Cassis, and after downing the requisite langouste quadrille, took the bizarre little mock submarine, which, semi-submersed, pedaloed across the harbour, affording us obscure views of the reefs of old Evian bottles on the seabed.

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