Too Good To Be True?

What do you do when you see, or hear of something which is too good to be true? You know what they say – if it’s too good to be true then it generally is. Madoff proved that. New Labour proved that. I could go on.

Last week I spotted a scooter in Angloinfo, our local web forum. I’d been looking for a small 50cc moto for Guy. It’s a bit of a pain running him about at the moment and when he goes to Lycée it’ll be even worse. The idea was to get him an old scooter, work on it, get it running, get him used to running about in the lanes on it, get him tested and then let him loose. J, of course, has other ideas. He’s her little boy!

I’d been looking at the forum for ages and we’d almost got a scooter a few weeks ago but the guy never phoned back, which was probably just as well as the moto was a girlie white/cream colour. And then the other night I spotted an advert for a nearly new scooter, a PGO Big Max 50, which I’d never heard of. I looked it up on the web and other than some criticism of its rather pedestrian performance, it seemed an ok machine. Strangely, the price had been reduced by 20% within a couple of days of the first advert. I say strangely because generally scooters are snapped up within hours of being advertised on Angloinfo, so for a nearly new machine to not only be available 5 days after the first advert (how did I miss it first time round?) but to be reduced because it wasn’t selling was interesting.

I looked it up on the web again. It was being sold with only 1200 miles on the clock and was now half the original price and it was only 9 months old! Very strange but I couldn’t ignore it. I would regret it.

I sent a few e-mails and agreed to go down to Antibes (about 1 hour away) to see the scooter. The guy was working and suggested I meet his girlfriend who was the actual owner. He said she was pregnant and didn’t want to drive a scooter in her condition, hence the sale. It sounded fishier and fishier.

Having met the girl, who was distinctly pregnant, I was then led down lane after lane to a very ‘ethnic’ part of Antibes. A door opened and I was led up a steep flight of stairs to a rather dark, dingy apartment. There seemed to be people and kids everywhere but in the corner of the kitchen stood the PGO Big Max 50. It was gleaming.

I was told that the bike hadn’t been used since January, that the keys and papers were in another place but if I left some money as a deposit it would be reserved for me. I could return for the scooter the following day to test it and complete the sale.

Everything told me to get the hell out of there but the ‘too good to be true’ deal made me hand over €100 and say I’d be back early the next morning.

I then met J and her friend for lunch and we went to the local police station to check the bike out. Everything was ok and I was back in Antibes at 7.30am the next morning, with a bag of dosh to complete the deal.

A few test runs up and down the lanes, the ritual handover of the money, the completion of reams of paperwork and the bike was mine, I hoped!

It’s now back in Tourrettes and Guy is delighted. Within minutes he had photographed it and had the pictures on Facebook. Every time I look at it and consider the price paid, I think it’s all too good to be true. Maybe the wheels will fall off next week and it will prove to have been …… to good to be true.

Food Glorious Food - Again!

Tourrettes is particularly well off for restaurants, as is Vence, our nearest town. This is probably to do with the fact that both places are sightseeing hot-spots and consequently, there is no shortage of places to feed the hungry tourists.

When I first arrived in Tourettes, the ex-pats would all gather in the Bar des Sports every Sunday. We’d get a table in the back room and between 20 and 30 of us would have a right good lunch – adults and kids alike. Sorting out the bill was a nightmare but at the end of the lunch everybody was very well fed and quite squiffy.

As a family, back then we also frequented the Bar Midi, but the large lunches were restricted to the Sports Bar as they had the space for large groups – the most we’ve ever had in the Midi is about 12 people.

Over the years, we drifted away from the Sports Bar as they became quite complacent despite the amount of custom we gave them (both bars are absolute licences to print money), refusing us service if they were too busy and generally failing to acknowledge us, despite our years of patronage, so we started frequenting the Midi.

Generally, the food in the Midi is fresher and we know for a fact that much of the vegetable and salad ingredients are grown in a field just below us and probably contributes to the fact that J thinks the Midi’s Salad Nicoise is the best ever. Me – I think their Rôti Pork and their Quiche’s are to die for but the absolute star of the show is their Hot Chocolate and Pear Gateau. With a boule of vanilla ice cream, it is just amazing and I’m afraid if I lose my willpower and have one, I know that an afternoon nap is then a necessity.

Tourettes has many other restaurants and we try and go to all of them at least once a year. The Chez Grande Mére which does couscous and lamb dishes and the recently changed Bacchanales, where the up and coming chef,  Christophe Dufau, used flowers (pansies in case you’re wondering) to decorate his dishes quite liberally – not to my taste I have to say. Christophe has recently moved his restaurant to Vence and has just won his first Michelin star. Maybe this accolade for the competition prompted temperamental superchef Jacques Maximin to close his wisteria-covered Michelin starred restaurant in Vence - his home and his place of work. Having cut his teeth at La Bonne Auberge in Antibes and become a star at the Chantecler at the Negresco in Nice, he left it all for the arrière-pays that is Vence but, as I say, word is that Maxima has now closed.

Then of course, we have the Auberge du Tourrettes, where J and I had our wedding. The food has been absolutely wonderful for the last 3 or 4 years but recently, as you will know if you’ve read my blog, the portions have become so small that you need a Big Mac after you’ve left the premises! Even J, who loves to pose there with her girlie friends, has found herself to be ravenous after lunch, so a period of non-attendance is required methinks.  

Our local town Vence, about 5 miles away,  is absolutely crammed with eateries and if Google Trends is correct (a measure of search subjects year-on-year) they’ll be 30% less busy this year as the strength of the Euro starts to bite and people stop coming to France. That’s no bad thing really, as trying to get a table in summer is like trying to find Eva Longoria in the village – it’s impossible! Of the literally hundreds of restaurants in Vence, we have no particular favourites. A pizza at The Clemenceau under the plane trees in the old square or pan fried kidney’s in the Rose garden at Le Farigoule or if you’re feeling particularly flush, a one-star Michelin dinner at the Chateau St Martin, with its magnificent views over Vence and the coast (see picture).

Then there’s the Victoire and the Regence, traditional French brasseries which serve good food at reasonable prices. It’s true what they say about competition, it keeps the prices down and the service up.

This Saturday however, we’ll be giving Tourrettes and Vence a miss and heading to the Auberge du Caussols up in the mountains. This is, on first glance, a rough and ready establishment but once seated, the food starts to arrive in mountainous quantities and anytime I go for lunch, I advise my guests not to partake of breakfast to do it justice. When the foot long block of paté arrives, or the huge plate of grilled peppers is placed on the table, it doesn’t take long for diners to understand that they’ll be crawling out of the door on hands and knees, stuffed to the gills.

I can’t wait for Saturday! 

Food Glorious Molecular Food

Iconoclastic French chef Pierre Gagnaire claims to have created the world's first entirely synthetic gourmet dish - a starter of jelly balls in apple and lemon flavours that are creamy on the inside and crisp on the outside. Delicious eh?

So what’s synthetic food? No idea - but I think it’s making nosh from chemical compounds – you remember those jars in the science lab – no – not the ones with the dead frogs in them!

His main course, following the jelly balls, is a tad more traditional. Lobster fricassée, served with polyphenol sauce, made of tartaric acid, glucose and polyphenols. I can just see the worried looks on the faces of his diners, who will be forking out (if you excuse the pun) a couple of hundred euros for the privilege, when they see, ‘accompanied by a polyphenol jus’.

Now good old Gagnaire is not a Heston Blumenthal, although he is a multi Michelin 3-star chef. Where Blumenthal actually takes food ingredients and tries to extract the maximum flavour from them and then mixes those flavours together in strange combinations, Gagnaire is trying to do away with food altogether, or so it seems.

 Sorry – that’s not correct – what you eat is food. What he’s trying to do away with are the normal ingredients – the meat and two veg!

Foodie commentators, following this culinary experiment, have stated that in this brave new world, chefs will shun vegetables altogether, such as carrots (I can hear kids the world over cheering already), but will use the molecules which make up carrots — caroteniods, pectins, fructose and glucuronic acid - instead. And I suppose at the end of the process we’ll end up with something orange which tastes like a carrot! Now all he needs to do is start work on broccoli and I’ll be a fan.

I can see it now – instead of the waiter flambéing your crèpes suzettes in a large frying pan at the side of your table, he’ll pour some ingredients from half a dozen lab jars into a lab flask and mix them around. He’ll set it onto a Bunsen burner and ask you how you want your compound cooked!

The day the Midi in the village starts to go down this route, I’ll slit my wrists!

Link to Gagnaire’s famous Parisien restaurant, Rue Balzac, is below – he even looks like a nutty professor!

 http://www.pierre-gagnaire.com/index-fr.htm

 

Anyone For Tennis ?

I was not looking forward to Sunday. Another weekend – another blocked drain to fix. I was just getting into my dirty old jeans and smelly jumper when there was a knock at the door. J and the kids had gone off to church to pray for my soul (or whatever I have which pretends to be my inner being) and I knew that it could only be the neighbours and any knock at this time, (it was about 11am) usually means a problem or an invitation to go out to lunch. It was neither.

Tan had two tickets for the Monte Carlo Masters Tennis final that afternoon and as his little girl was recovering from an illness and Angie needed to stay with her, he wondered if J and I could use the tickets. Now J wasn’t due to get back from church until about 1.30pm, and as the final started at 2pm, it was not possible, so as men do, Tan and I decided to go.

A shave, shower and change of clothes in record time and we were off. It was now 11.43am and given the parking difficulties in Monaco I still thought it would be touch and go if we made it for the start. We needn’t have worried. We were in our seats at the Monte Carlo Beach Club watching the players warm up at precisely 1.50pm, which was not bad considering we stopped at the railway station en-route to establish if there was a train to Monaco (which there wasn’t), drove to another country (!), parked the car some distance from the venue and stopped to get some beers and sandwiches before sitting down.  

On our way in, we’d passed the elite having their lunch by the side of the swimming pool but then spotted the even more prosperous Monte Carlo elite having their lunch overlooking the match itself. And then the crème de la crème. The Royal Box, complete with Prince Albert and his entourage.

The players were still warming up so it was people-watching time and the only place to look was the area around and under the Royal Box where the women, no doubt, dressed to try and capture the attention of the famously eligible Prince Albert. Gorgeous haute-couture dresses and wide brimmed hats were the order of the day whilst the men were all sporting their straw panama hats. Maybe some of the men also wanted to be spotted, given the rumours which have surrounded Prince Albert for years!

But back to the game itself. The last time I was at a tennis match, Pete Sampras was an up and coming youngster so that tells you how long it’s been since I saw two guys belting a small yellow ball at each other across a net. And I have to say when Rafael Nadal (No 1 in the world) and Novak Djokovic (No 3 in the world) started playing, my immediate reaction was that the game was nowhere near as fast in real life as it appears on TV. Nevertheless, the match was interesting despite the interminable base-line rallies and was quite well contested for the first two sets (one apiece). In the third set, Djokovic hit the top of the net for the umpteenth time. The ball jumped into the air, seemed to hover for an eternity and came down and hit the net again before falling, in what seemed like slow motion, onto his side of the court, whereupon he obviously lost the point. He raised his eyes to the heavens, pointed to the sky and made a rather sarcastic ‘thank-you’ gesture to whatever is up there. I thought at that moment he would be paid back – he was – he never won another game!

Of course, the tennis aficionados would point to Djokovic’s numerous unforced errors as the reason for his loss. My view? Anybody who wears bright, turquoise blue tennis shoes deserves to lose!  

PS – I took a picture of the presentation with my phone but some guy with a white panama blocked my view. The one at the top was ‘borrowed’ from the Daily Telegraph. 

Bloggers Are In The News

In fact bloggers are making the news which is great. Of course it all started with Guido Fawkes who is portrayed as a thorn in the flesh of the Government, releasing details of those nasty e-mails which were authored in No 10 Downing Street. I bet his web site (http://www.order-order.com/) is overloading with hits as we speak and good luck to him, whatever his political leanings.

But behind those headlines of Brown’s enforcers thinking up salacious stories about the Opposition, is the real story – that New labour are so entrenched in old politics which entails press briefings in pubs, curry houses and hotel bars that they have totally forgotten to embrace the internet in general and blogging in particular. Apparently, the Conservatives have a whole generation of  internet gurus and New Labour have been trying to catch up but with disastrous results. In the words of Alistair Campbell, who is not my favourite person, the recent e-mail and blogging ‘exercise’, was not only infantile, it was incompetent. Ouch!

Then there was an article in the Times, again prompted by Guido Fawkes, about blogging and the fact that bloggers can basically say anything they like without fear of prosecution because, in most cases their hosting services are outside the UK’s boundaries and the normal defamation and libel laws do not apply.

So – as my hosting service is somewhere Google has a data centre (let’s hope it’s outside the UK), I would just like to say that Gordon Brown is a complete *!£$%.

But back to proper journalism …… or the lack of it. It seems that newspapers, who encourage virtually every one of their staff to have a blog these days, shy away from printing stories which they know to be true but which would cause a legal storm if printed in the hard copy. They prefer these scoops, which tend to be of the ‘controversial’ variety, to be published in their reporters’ blogs rather than risk being castigated for printing the story in the main paper. The reason being that whilst  several hundred thousand will read the article in the newspaper, only a handful will read it in the blog. And there lies the rub – it’s all to do with exposure, which is a rather unfortunate word when it comes to politicians, but the bigger the readership, the bigger the libel award, so newspapers are keeping quite a low profile these days, preferring the early scoop to be ‘tested’ on the internet.

And of course, blogging sites can get their stories out pretty quickly or at least, to their readership quickly. As I’ve said before, once I my blogging site is running, any new article from a blogger I follow, appears as if by magic on my screen as soon as it’s been posted. As I write this, an article about Liverpool’s football game tonight has just appeared and it was only written by a Times reporter 9 minutes ago. Talk about being up-to-date!

So, over the next few days, expect my blog to be pretty slow as several million new bloggers are added to this wonderful online community.