Vence – The Best Place In Europe ?

Vence is our local town. It’s about 8 miles east of Tourrettes and has a population of about 17,000 which rises significantly in the summer months when tourists flock to see its history and art and to eat in its multitude of restaurants.

It’s easy to be a bit blasé about your local villages and towns but Vence is not to be ignored. It’s been an occupied site since before 230AD when the Romans decided to settle there and call it Vintium, a fact confirmed by pillars outside the small cathedral, which house a stone tablet, dated 239AD and dedicated to the Roman Emporer Gordian III.

Over the centuries that followed, the Ligurians followed by the aristocratic Villeneuve family turned Vence into a walled town, the battlements of which still stand today as do the five gateways which provided access to the inner part of the town. It was the Villeneuves though who put the place on the map.  

In the early 1100's, Romee de Villeneuve who,  though only the Baron of Vence, managed to marry his four daughters rather well. One married the King of England, the next the King of France, the third the King of Naples and the fourth the German Emperor! Needless to say, Vence, although small, benefited from these royal marriages and became an important trading post.

Today, Vence is a prosperous, multi-cultural town with a wonderful geographic position sitting below the last vestiges of the Alps and overlooking the Mediterranean, only twenty minutes from Nice and the airport. By some reports, Vence is one of the most livable towns in Europe. It has wonderful views down to the coast and one of the Continent's best climates but, it is its history associated with art which brings in the visitors by the busload.

Many artists lived and worked in the area, in particular Monet, Chagall and Matisse. Matisse spent quite a few years in Vence being cared for by nuns in a local convent (the Rosarie Chapel) which he redesigned in his own particular style when he recovered from his illness, as a way of paying the order back for their kindness. A link to the Rosarie Chapel is below.

http://www.vence.fr/The-Rosaire-Chapel.html

 

In addition to the Chapel, which is like one big Matisse exhibition, the town itself has an exceptional art collection, among which, is a collection of Matisse lithographs.

It is the amazing light which attracted the impressionists, and today’s budding artists, who come from all over the world to paint the historic buildings, the fields of poppies and lavender, and the stunning coastal scenes.

So what is it about the light which is so special? I have to admit I didn’t understand it at first until I noticed that on some days, generally after it’s been windy, the side of the valley across from us seems incredibly close and the colours of the trees and the sky take on a particular vibrancy that’s just not there every day.

So the Americans, Germans, Italians and English flock to Vence to be welcomed by the friendly Venceois, the terrific restaurants and the Maisons de Presse ...the places where one buys newspapers... which sell the London Times, the International Herald Tribune and the Wall Street Journal as well as the leading newspapers from Frankfurt, Rome, Switzerland and Belgium.

So, we’re very lucky to have such a special place on our doorstep. It’s just a pity it’s not big enough to have a proper football team - then everything would be perfect!

And that last comment will have J calling me ‘a pathetic heathen’!

 

La Centre Administratif (The Prefecture)

I had to reregister Guy’s scooter yesterday and I wasn’t looking forward to it – one little bit!

I set off on my Honda scooter mid-morning, dropping Guy off at the train station so he could work in his dad’s office for the afternoon and then set about trying to find the Centre Administratif by the back roads – scooters with an engine slightly larger than a lawn mower are not allowed anywhere near the motorway. After a few u-turns I managed to find it and headed into the section which deals with all things to do with foreigners and vehicles.

The campus looks like the Drumchapel housing estate in Glasgow, which Billy Connelly once described as ‘a desert with windows’. It’s all anonymous, soulless, concrete blocks and it must be one of the worst postings for a French civil servant.

I’d last visited it six years ago to register my Alfa and on that occasion, it took some three hours to complete the process which was an improvement on the time I had to get a work permit, which took 3 visits totalling some 6 hours! C’est la vie en France!

It was noon when I arrived and any hope that all the Frenchies would be having lunch was misplaced when I got to the ‘Carte Grise’ section (grey card – registration document). Thankfully, they have the first booth manned (or even ladied) by a person who checks that you have the right paperwork – not that it’s completed correctly – just that you have the prerequisite number of documents. A quick glance at mine and all was in order – I was given my queue ticket. Number 607.

I rushed into the communal waiting area, looked at the electronic queue board and saw they were at number 571 – I was 36^th in the queue! Being a nerd, I worked out that the seven booths were handling cases at the rate of one every 10 minutes or so which meant about a 50 minute wait!

I wandered outside to see if I could have a quick lunch but apart from a coffee machine dispensing cups the size of a thimble, there was nothing – not even a chocolate vending machine. Billy Connelly was right – it was a desert! This wouldn’t do.

I wandered from office block to office block looking for the staff canteen (or restaurant as they call them in France) and found it in the 3^rd building. I got as far as the entrance, looked at the menu and was heading towards the stack of trays when I noticed that everybody was swinging their ID badges – foiled! I suppose that even if I’d got in, ordering my steak ‘bien cuit’ (well cooked) would have given the game away, so I trudged despondently back to the Carte Grise section.

A look at the queue board – number 577! They’d managed to process precisely six people in the 15 minutes I’d been away looking for some grub.

I managed to find a seat and started reading the registration documents and then I read them again and again. I studied my water bill (you need a utility bill to prove your address) and then my mobile telephone bill (just in case they didn’t believe the water bill). I was just about to start reading my UK driving licence when the TV in the room burst into life. But why start it half way through a film?

It didn’t need sound. It was obviously about a bank robber who had managed to escape from a prison van and who had taken a female hostage in her own home. He then ‘persuaded’ her to drive him through the police cordons but as he hid in the back seats with a gun pointed at her and she winked vigorously and nodded backwards when the police stopped her, they obviously thought she had a severe case of Tourrettes syndrome and waved her through.

It was just getting to the exciting part when my number flashed up – booth number three.

Well – the face on the woman could have stopped a runaway bus but she had the most enormous pair of boob-a-loobs (just in case the kids read this) and the lowest neckline I’ve seen for years. Where to look? Look at her face and she’d be upset. Look at her chest and she’d be even more upset so I handed my sheaf of papers over and looked at the ceiling.

After a few minutes she handed me a slip of paper which said ‘bon operation’ which means everything was in order and ordered me to the ‘caisse’ – the payment desk.

Off I went and was called up almost immediately. 30 seconds passed and the lady burst into a monologue, not a word of which I understood. She saw my puzzlement and asked if I understood. I said, ‘a little’. So she started again – same words only slower this time. It was something about the new Carte Grise being in the reservoir (printing queue maybe?) and said it would be posted to me. I offered her the requisite 22 euros and she replied that it was free and wished me a good day.

Now at this point, I got a trifle worried. You are supposed to get a new carte grise on the day. In my blog of 24^th April, I told the story of buying Guy’s scooter in what appeared to be a rather shady deal and said it ‘was all too good to be true’. At that precise moment I could see me wandering outside, being surrounded by gun-wielding riot police, thrown to the ground, handcuffed and dragged off to Grasse prison for possessing a less than legal PGO Big Max.

No sooner had I reached home and told J the story and said the police were no doubt on their way, a police siren sounded on the road below.

Watch this space!

Pigs At The Trough

I had a blog posting written about something French but it’ll keep. It’s another political bloggit today I’m afraid, but hang in there – there’s quite a good ditty at the end, if I say so myself.

It’s a laugh a minute in UK politics at the moment. Well, it would be if it wasn’t costing us UK taxpayers a fortune for all these things the average MP (of all denominations) racks up on his or her expenses.

I often wondered why people gave up normal, everyday lives to become a politician at Westminster. Was it the dream of helping people by passing good laws and making a difference? Or, was it that duty called and they simply wanted to serve their country?

Not a bit of it. It was the huge amount of dosh they could rake in by fiddling the ultra-loose House of Commons expense and allowance system. 

Think I’m being a bit all-encompassing or generalistic here, especially to the newer MPs?  Forget it – there have been dozens of reports of new MP’s, only through Black Rod’s door a couple of months, racking up thousands of pounds for ridiculous items which their poor constituents would just love to have someone pay for. The ironic thing is that it’s the constituents who are paying.

Anyway – not wishing to labour the point (get it – ha ha !), I thought I’d finish with this little ditty (dreamt up by your’s truly) which can be sung, or at least recited, to that lovely song, sung by Julie Andrews in the Sound of Music. …….. My Favourite Things. 

Here's the original so you can recall the tune.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dw2VX5wQYQg

 

Bath plugs and porn films, kit-kats and comics

Light bulbs and loo rolls and things alcoholic

Moat cleaning done at the start of the Spring

These are a few of my favourite things

Painting of ceilings and TVs and dresses

Artex removed and replaced without stresses

Bags of manure at the other house in Tring

These are a few of my favourite things

Tampons and Hi-FIs and mortgage relief

Cleaning and pressing without any grief

Porticos built with a doorbell that rings

These are a few of my favourite things

When Sky News calls

When the polls drop

When I’m feeling sad

I simply expense all my favourite things

And then I don’t feeeeeeel soooooo bad

All this came to me as I ripped my hunky body to shreds down in the jungle. I toiled and sweated (yes I did) as I tried to regain control of my land back from the Japanese Bind Weed and the brambles, and all the while I knew that somewhere in a rural idyll on the Sussex Downs, some greedy git of an MP (probably Tory cause they’ve got all the land) was actually getting a team of gardeners to do the same to his overgrown acres back in the UK …… and I’m paying for it through my taxes. It’s a bloody scandal!

Low Cost Airlines and the Cup Final

As soon as Manchester United made it through to the European Champions League final in Rome on Wednesday 27^th May, Easyjet started its rip-off programme.

It’s likely that the airline had already upped its prices prior to the game last Tuesday on the basis that even if Arsenal had won, there would have been a huge demand from London-based fans to get to Rome, but the price hikes were simply eye watering. 

I’m sure most of you know that Easyjet are supposed to operate a fares policy which has a number of cheap seats, some not-quite-so-cheap seats and lastly, expensive seats for the last-minute travellers. As the cheap seats are taken, the fares move up and up so, by the time the last few seats are available, the fares for these seats can be several times the price paid by the people who booked several months in advance. It’s a good model, operated by most of the so-called low-cost airlines and encourages early booking and basically ‘punishes’ those last-minute flyers. 

Now I’m a fan of Easyjet. I probably wouldn’t have been able to move down to the South of France quite so quickly as I did in 1999 if Easyjet had not been operating the Nice-Luton route. Their customer service is, unusually for a low-cost airline, quite good, and in the ‘old days’ it was actually quite fun to fly with the guy who owned the airline – good old Stelios.

But, I’m afraid their money-grabbing exercise last week left a very bad taste in the mouth. Let me give you some examples.

Easyjet don’t fly from either Manchester or Liverpool to Rome. Probably the best routes then are for the Man Utd fans to get to London and then fly from there.

Flying out on the 26^th and returning on the 28^th (the game is on the 27^th) costs a staggering £700+ return – London-Rome.

Flying out on the 12^th May and returning the following day costs only £150.

Assuming these last-minute flights are pretty full and therefore the fares shown are at the top end of the scale, Easyjet are basically ripping off passengers for £550 each!

OK – so they’re a commercial enterprise and need to make a profit but they already make a reasonable profit at the lower fares so raising them is just penalising the poor old football fan.

Ryanair was at it as well although it was difficult to work out their fare hike as the planes on the selected dates were full, but flights on the 25^th and 29^th May were about £400 return whilst a return fare for earlier in the month was about £60!

Good old BA’s price was about £450 return but at least they’ve always been expensive. They hadn’t actually changed their outward fares from Manchester but the return leg had been increased by about 200%.

If it was up to me I reckon I would take a cheap flight to Nice  or Genoa and then hire a car and make a week of it.         

Yup - Him Again

Sorry folks - busy weekend so I'm going to resort to a bit of plagerism today by reprinting a poem I saw somewhere last week. It's about my favourite person whom you've no doubt recognised by the picture. I did actually think about doing my own poem on the political 'snouts in the trough' and I may think about one when I'm down clearing my jungle - it's very theraputic down there and some of my most creative moments come to me when I'm ripping out bushes and getting covered in scratches.

Anywhere - here is the short poem and the You Tube version of G Brown addressing the nation on the expenses scandal. It all seeems so futile now we know old Brownie was not quite as clean as he could be with his brother's cleaner - pun intended!

Gordon Brown is my shepherd, I shall not work on occasions
He leadeth me beside the still factories.

He restoreth my faith in the political opposition.

He guideth me in the path of unemployment.

Yea, though I wait for my dole,
I own the bank that refuses me.

He has annointed my income with taxes,
My expenses runneth over my pay.

Surely poverty and hard times will follow me all the days of his term.

From hence forth, we will live all the days of our lives in a rented home with an overseas landlord.

I am glad I am British,
I am glad I am free,

But I wish I were a dog, and our Prime Minister were a tree.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dS37nnFYzZ0