Right Nice, Real Nice

"Alas, someone somewhere made skin porous in the outward direction whilst insisting mostly on inward impenetrability, so only our pores benefit and there’s no way of using French softwater to flush out those Gogonzola-lined blood vessels. Later, the very nature of skin stops us from becoming still-sitting sponges on gravel tracks, so thanks, I guess, to someone somewhere."

Now here’s the thing — we fly there on an aircraft. A British Airways branded one. It has wheels and an engine and seemingly infinitesimal bolts, settings and switches that render it capable of floating at high pace really high above the ground. The travel bands balance Georgie’s chi, despite the spluttering gentleman to our rear. I benefit from the window seat, and look out as a snow-tipped mountain range greets us and waves us on our way. Is that the Alps? (A woman asks us this three days later in Monaco, surely my question is more valid than hers? Is any question more ‘valid’ than another? Incongruous sidepoints, nothing more). Veins of red tie dye stain and accentuate sandy patchwork fields below. There are smatterings of settlements everywhere. No one will ever, ever visit all of them — this is the remarkable nature of our mortal shells, and a fabulous fact despite the disparate nature of human existence.

Nice airport is on a little peninsula, almost, and as you come in to land there’s more than a fraction of a moment in which you’re certain the captain’s opted to bail in the Riviera. Alas, it’s temperate if not windy as we step out, and the trams are easy to use, and you can bet your bottom Euro there’s minimal lingual overlap with the host of your first spot. Mireille opens cupboards and points to appliances and nods and smiles and you respond with similar gestures, but ultimately you just launch your bag on the sofa and take it all in, as you well should. It’s an absolutely delightful open plan affair at the north end of the Old Town (Vieux Nice, look at me go). The space is modern but subtle, clean, comprising blues and yellows and an open bath/shower at the end of the comfy double, and a wee balcony that offers little direct sunshine or grandiose views, but that matters less than zero percent and the whole shabang serves us in the finest fashion for the duration of our four-night tenure, despite returning from every extensive escapade to the smell of blocked sewage. Let that be enough for you.

We’re drinking beer and eating Socca — delicious savoury chickpea pancakes — before long. These are a Nice staple delicacy. There are some glorified chicken dippers to accompany. These are not. The first place we stop is popular, and I get it, but we’re not in the spirit of settling for too long. We walk around and get a few glasses of vino and step momentarily onto the famous Promenade des Anglais to witness the back end of that semi-familiar beauty-hue that’s resting on the horizon, marking the end of some vibe and gladly welcoming another. That post-golden-hour glory that lets you know you’ve arrived and that everything’s just fine. It got on a bit in this manner, and we don’t dine long before 10. We come by this place en route back to our abode — it’s got white and red checked tablecloths and a buzz about it, with a semi-sprawled but still concentrated outdoor seating area laying claim to many patrons that chortle and swing and gesticulate in the balmy late buzz. We share a right rich beef gnocchi stew and cheese board (with bread (I love bread (I’d set us the task of having at least one cheese course a day, and on that I think we failed, but I have no regrets, what we managed was swell))). Gobble it down, you two little piglets, and bear in your warm, loved up minds that this is just the start. Georgie says: ‘you are a baguette. Tall. Crusty on the outside, doughy in the middle’. We walk back with a gelato and I can’t seem to shift this image of myself as a baguette all knobbly and gaunt and gorgeous just sauntering around this Mediterranean dreamland. It is a very real concern that my middle, if not already doughy, is destined to head that way courtesy of a) my mindset, b) bread, and c) cheese. We’ve likely been in France for about 6 hours, and yet a precedent of decadence is set, and be damned if we’re to let it falter. Right Nice start, that.

It’s Tuesday morning and it’s a boulangerie, naturally. We get this optimally oily, perfectly soft and substantial knotted olive bread that captures our tastebuds, hearts and passions for the duration of the short walk down to the port, where we stop for a cafe au crème and read the skies. It’s shaping up sunny. Not that this is a surprise to us, given our compulsive and repeated subscription to the conspiratorial fallacy that is weather forecasts. We walk around to Le Plongenoir and rest on some rocky outcrops there, watching brave souls enter the mid-morning water. There’s a chunk of baguette floating and bobbing not too far from them. In fact, this happens more than once. Am I them? Is that me? The fish must be as taken by those fine sticks of dough as the people of France. There seems to always be some portion of baguette in patches of water we look at.

We round the headland, rising the coastal road and setting our dilated eyeballs on some of the finest little abodes. Georgie decides she is going to live in at least four of them. There are rowers out there on the Riviera, moving at a leisurely pace in the same direction as we — Villefranches sur Mer. Imagine the most picturesque small coastal town. Ok, now keep imagining it but make it manifest. Give rise in your mind to the little balconies and the seafront eateries and narrow lanes. Now populate them with sleepy, shining people and perfect warm colours. Now spend a day there. That’s Tuesday. It is a pastel splendour, is Villefranches, and those oranges, yellows and pale reds are punctuated as they jut out into and sit pretty beneath the bluest sky. We settle on the beach. It can’t be beyond the high teens, but we are pale and British and the opportunity to unleash pale flesh on groaning eyes and suffocating sandgrains is most welcome. Likewise, around us, are other mallowed dumplings and bronzed sculptures on parallelogram blankets. All the richness of life on a little stretch. It’s not all that long before we’re venturing into those pretty, clear lapping waters, taking a sharp intake of breath each time their cool beads come into contact with a susceptible patch of skin. It's just about as worth it as anything has ever been. We float and splosh about this way for about 20 minutes probably, but who cares for time? We’re grateful.

There are outstanding flavours and portions of Parmesana artichoke, moules frites and salade Nicoise to be had at Lou Bantry, next to which swarms of small fish rise to the surface near the stagnant boats to nibble at the custom floating baguette. Look, I get it. It’s hot out. When it’s hot out and you’re having lunch in a setting this beautiful, it is illegal in 32 French municipalities to not get a Spritz, which renders me an outlaw and Georgie a most abiding citizen. I have just recognised my future as a designer of niche legislature. We sit here getting cooked for and getting a bit cooked ourselves, and then head for another heavenly horizontal episode on the beach. It’s not quite sand and it’s not not stone, but it’s entirely irrelevant all the same, because we’ve got tunes on and we’re both dozing a touch, and as I rouse and glance up I realise that all flights really do — as they dissect and leave trails in the blue blanket above — is unzip and then immediately shut off again that which is beyond. Or some nonsense I note down at this moment. The clouds start to render the entire metaphor obsolete, and we head back to Nice (via, may I add, a vastly less picturesque and grotesquely more hilly route than that by which we arrived). But we benefit from the vistas as we descend, and I probably fall off a curb at least once, and there’s warmth in our faces as we scramble to find shampoo or something.

There must be an hour thereafter that’s accounted for only by a glass of Rosé, a cigarette, a shower and a little lie down. The beauty of a travelogue is that you can fill the gaps with fanciful tales, and so it was in this period — between arriving back from Villefranches and heading out for our evening scran — that Georgie and I decided to source and raise a small lizard. We raised it genderless, named it Proo, and bought it bowties. Creative non-fiction is my calling, and Proo is my first smash hit.

On the scrappy, sporadically formed, small list of places to visit and dine was one called Bocca — small plates in a fanciful setting, or something of the sorts. We head there to eat after perusing the labyrinthine streets of Old Town once more, sourcing some semblance of hunger in our entirely satisfied stomachs. We find some, and then it’s fine son. The food is delicious, it truly is — we have ‘extra pork’, some tomato sardines, little arancini balls and raw fish accompanied by sweet little bursts of pomegranate. All fresh and tasty.. Safe to say, mind — and this is testament to the evening prior plus those that followed — Bocca probably settles near the bottom of the rank stack for golden scran. We spend a wee while in Shapko after this. It’s the most famous bar of Nice’s jazz scene, and there are some middle-aged folk vibing in there. The guitarist has a baseball cap and a big boogie muscle. The sax player bobs and closes her eyes as they give eachother the floor. Next to us is a couple of very strange composition. Georgie falls asleep in her chair. We rise from our stools, see off our vin rouge, and head back for a glorious kip, warmed by the remnants of a most sensational first full day.

Birthday baked beautifulness. The highlight of the morning’s boulangerie run is an almond pastry that oozes a sauce so sensual and sickly that in 24 French municipalities it’s recommended by a board of medical professionals that you don’t have more than one each before 1pm. We head to Monaco by midday, on a train that’s ripe with life and that whizzes along the coastline in less than half an hour. I remember it here, only a little from that day trip many suns ups and suns downs ago, but some nonetheless. It is now inevitably even more of a husk. Despite its odd looming beauty, there is the very real sense of a form of wealth that purchases solely to sporadically occupy. In Monte Carlo, upper end stores line the streets around the casino, and eye-wateringly expensive vehicles roll in on the squeeky stone floor. There’s lots of prep going on for the F1, which is not too far round the sharp corner. We do a hell of a lot of walking. In old town there’s a more staunch sense of tourism mixed in with sweeter spots.

“What’s her birthday lunch!” I hear you cry from your oversized mahogany throne. Well, it’s a salami panini and a croque monsieur for well over the odds, and you wouldn’t have it any other way would you? The ceremonious guards clip and clop afront the castle whilst our own ambling takes us down a path where we share a juicy orange and look over a smaller harbour. Some equally grandiose boats sit dormant, and we endeavour to get there. Past the Oceanic museum, past hordes of snapping souls, and round to a small restaurant, where we have a glass of birthday Prosecco and shelter as the heavens open. I don’t know. Perhaps it’s not so vacuous. There is life here. There are doubtlessly tales and histories as tall as the quite remarkable hillside settlements. Who knows, perhaps we had already been spoilt by Nice and Villefranche. Maybe the clouds rolling through in their unyielding mood took away from what would otherwise have been entirely awe-inspiring. None of this is to say that we don’t have a bloody lovely time, because we do. It is every bit a holiday; we mooch and crack up, we comment on the lives of others, drink in a little harbourside spot and round the jetties to look on at the splendour of the high life (it later gets too high, and mighty comes to the party but he’s in a pretentious mood, so we sit, absorb, and subsequently depart the hotel next to the casino) — all in, it’s maybe suffice to say that it isn’t somewhere to rush back to, unless of course we come into many dollars of dispensable cash and feel that a day in the casino is a worthy plotpoint.

The evening meal is worth far far more of our pagetime. After the most chocka train of our time away — rubbing my knobbly hyperextended knees into the fella next to me aren’t I — we get back to the slight and manageable birthday stench of still standing shit. Mireille does not seem particularly interested in amending this slight flaw. Alrighty. Turn on taps to rid the space of it, and settle down for an hour or so. We take this time to tend to Proo’s grazed knees — our sweet little lizard has gotten into skateboarding and is still fresh in the game. Sometimes Proo slams their door and pretends to hate us, but we know we’re good guardians.

Onto the real clincher. Chez Acchiardo. Georgie wants authentic French food and I’ve not had all too much luck booking places, so we land on it and we head to it and we get lucky. Do we ever; there’s a little table for two in the corner ready in 15 or so minutes. The interior of this place feels quintessentially French, complete with city-history artwork and a wall of wine behind the bar. They’re hospitable and the space has a buzz, but it’s really rather all about the cuisine isn’t it. We toast a gorgeous glass and order foie gras, which is rich and silky and sits pretty on hunks of bread we pull from the basket. There’s two different types of jelly or chutney on the plate and we can’t convincingly decide which is better. This is a lovely problem to come across. For mains, Georgie orders duck breast in a fig sauce, accompanied by thick chickpea fries. She thinks it’s one of the best things she’s ever tried but I look over the table with my low eyebrows and kiss the fringes of my own grandiose climax, because this right here is something really stunning — filleted red mullet with red and black olive tapenade served with linguine in a cheese and basil sauce. It’s quite honestly one of the most beautiful pairings I can recall. We swap half way, and neither of us are mad about it. It’s time, after a short hiatus, for dessert. Quite naturally and quite rightly there’s a sparkler sizzling atop it as the good folk around sing Bon Anniversaire to this reddening beauty across the table. I can’t even remember what the sweet was. What was it? I think I had a couple of mouthfuls and recognised it as an (at this time) unsurprising continuation of culinary perfection. We’d stumbled into an all-time classic for a few fine evening hours. If you’re ever in Nice just go there. Chez Acchiardo. Its setting, ambience, and scran are off the charts.

On Thursday we only really half-wake, and even when the half becomes a whole someone takes a slice off the top and I soon take another bite at the cherry of horizontality, proceeding to lounge around this way for a short while. Eventually we leave, but that’s because we’ve both exited the sweet whispers of somnambulance for long enough to realise that we simply must get ourselves to a boulangerie. Can’t remember the menu that morning. Can’t remember loads from the day to be honest. I know that we go and get chalky at the plage straight down from Old Town, throwing stones at other stones until someone’s the hero. Beyond the crashing segment of sea there is water so unruffled so as to resemble blue skin, for as far as the eye. En route to this scene we do three things:

We flicker about for altogether too long trying to find a cash point. It becomes rather comical, but really it is a waste of valuable eating minutes.
We stop at Cours Saleya to spend some hard-earned, hard-to-withdraw cash. There is a classic Nice delicacy that takes the shape of a piece of focaccia with lashings of grilled and/or caramelised onions on it, plus either an olive or an anchovy, and apparently it is acceptable to purchase and consume this delicacy at literally any hour of the day. I am here for this. We also buy Socca from the market, but it’s not quite as soft and scintillatingly salty as that plastic plateful on our first night. Then there’s some juicy strawberries to cleanse the pallet.
We bask in an absolutely delectable period of what we’ll call ‘surpriseshine’, whereupon we find a cafe next to the market that's doused in the bright warm stuff and sip coffees until it goes in again.

So after the Socca, the onions, the strawbs, the surpriseshine, the chalk, the raucous lapping waves, the blue skin and the short period of commentary on how fucking annoying children are, we rise and head down to that patch of headland that separates the Promenade from the Port. You know it? There’s a big bit of machinery pinching things and lowering them to some prime, beachside real estate. Another udder on the cash cow of this glorious city. Then we walk, without really knowing where to, but that’s the fine joy of this otherwise very pointed existence, no? And thankfully that laissez faire affair takes us right to this place with outside seating that sells 5 euro Mojitos. There we stay, sipping and watching the world go by for how long? Does it matter? Some American tells us in their really unendearing accent ‘oh guys, guuuuiiiys, just so you kneow, the worterfool isn’t working up theiirrree, I don’t kneow if that chaynjez your decision to go up or not’. Get stuffed mate we’re three mojitos deep nothing can stop us on this aimless amble. We go up and there’s a stunning view over the Riviera and all of terracotta Nice, which sprawls down there, all the way over to the precariously placed airport. It is windy as anything. There’s a graveyard with a pleasant orange building next to it but Georgie can’t find the toilet, and of course those two points are deserving of separate sentences given that there’s no link between them other than proximity in time and space. Something to note: everything here — and rightly so — is Feu de Bois. I’ve just looked it up and apparently it translates to ‘wood fire’. This is an interesting fact, but not one that warrants further analysis.

The evening meal went all in on beating out the seemingly unbeatable night prior. Lavomatique! Slippery little spot. Tried booking it a few times to no avail, but lo! We secure a space at the bar, which means we’ve got the good camaraderie of one of the prominent staff members, and full sight of the open kitchen tweakings. We enjoy every single god-given or evolutionarily driven or semi-serendipitous moment. The wine is unreal. The food is sensational through and through, prepared with care and efficiency. It’s small plates but not agonisingly so, which is an accusation you could very nearly point at Bocca. We order a plate of cured ham, some falafels and tahini, grilled artichoke hearts with a cushion of whipped feta and cream, around which sit these little recurring pebbles of rich-pink beauty. Pomegranates. I refer to pomegranates. Then we get a big giant rib which we saw go in the green egg and out again. It’s fatty but crisp, succulent, and ever so tasty. After this there’s a sliced giant sausage, also barbied and smoked, with an indiscernible wasabi-textured, much-more-subtle-tasting paste beneath it, and some walnuts and rich sauce to match. Do we get a desert? I don’t know if I could tell you. This is problematic but I am a patron saint of savouries. I am not sure, either, what we do next, but again it does not matter, because time moves forwards and there are always new places, things, people and tastes peering their head over that proverbial horizon.

On Friday we have a change of scene, leaving our fine little apartment for another pleasant one, if a bit smaller, but with a more substantial balcony. More on this later. First, we lob all of our belongings into our bags and go for a boulangerie tour. It starts with a ham and cheese croissant, which places us right on track for another day of saturates. But what’s going on here? During this self-guided tour, we enter a few spots and feel just short of entirely satisfied, so we hedge our bets and scuttle onto the next. A bit of time passes this way. At one point, internet ratings — those persistent pests — lead us a bit away from the hub of our endeavours, but we find a lovely little spot for a coffee next to a park, where folk of all ages play balls and kids skittle about in their semi-endearing semi-exhausting way. Eventually we think: if it’s not broken, don’t try to dress the wound with alternative pastries, and so it’s another olive knot. God what a bloody highlight. I wish I could paint a picture of it with flavours through the screen. Can’t be far off that kind of technology, surely?

The new place is west, away a bit from the narrow streets and bustled eateries of old town, but closer to wide open squares, long commercial stretches, and a more modern feel, with bars that evidently cater more to the needs of both bougie and debaucherous visitation. The city’s bigger than we perhaps thought. We drop our bags, chill on the balcony for a minute (not a second longer!), and proceed to walk much of the length of the Promenade in the sidewinds and relative chill. Down on the stony crops of the beach there are empty loungers and restaurants and kayak rental spots. The beachfront (that is to say, the other side of the road) is lined with hotels whose flagpoles clatter and sway wildly. One of them — Hotel Negresco — is quite beautiful, if not a little beat up. It's light pink and has a dome and we see a gentleman in a funny uniform who’s probably a bell boy or has otherwise pandered to opulence. In the aftermath of that rancid truck attack back in 2016, Negresco was a site of triage and refuge.

We’re heading back to our savoured spots near Cours Saleya now, but there’s time for G to get a delicious sweet treat and for me to get a slice of pizza. Something about just getting a giant slice of pizza isn’t there? Crispy and wood oven heated (Feu de Bois!) and just there, in your hand, ready for it, pleading for it. There’s also time for a short beer in this picture of France, where one woman chats to patrons and smokes cigarettes out of the door ajar, and every table around us is evidence of both its popularity and her solitude. We land ourselves right in the artful heart of another bout of surpriseshine, where we have a few Spritz’s (remember — it’s law, it’s not our fault. My hands are too precious for the shackles) and look at the palimpsest walls of the Old Town’s frontward fortification. One gent is there doing what the good lord intended for us all. Grandiose, Sam, what on earth is that?! Well — reading a book, smoking, and sipping on a small glass of wine in the sun.

It’s not heaps of time until we go buy heaps of cheese from this fromagerie where the guy reads us like that book that other gent was reading just a wee sentence ago, and sells us plenty of the good stuff in that subtle, kind way you actually don’t mind at all. He was formerly the Master of Cheese at Harrods for a few years, or something akin. He confirms that the French don’t ordinarily utilise crackers, which is a right headscratcher to be honest, but we move on. To Gorgonzola. To a soft blue. To a hard creamy cheddar like cheese that is oh so much better than cheddar. To a little chunk of goats cheese covered in chives. We stop ourselves from getting completely carried away, and carry ourselves away to get some charcuterie (!), baguettes (!!) aubergine tapenade (!!!) and wine (!!!!) en route our newly baptised neck of the woods, where we spend some time in the bar next to 5 Rue de France. It’s happy hour and it’s bustling. At one point my travel companion very aptly summarises the state of proceedings: ‘Who needs New Balance when you’ve got cheese’. And so it went. The rest of daylight’s divine hours, and many of those post, are spent listening to Khruangbin, Ocean, Richter, Ziggy Alberts, and more on the balcony, working our way through this spread of unrivalled pasteurised beauty, slowing, finding second wind, grazing, slowing once more, stepping inside, relaxing, getting horizontal, getting another bottle, grazing…you get the picture. It’s a rather sublime state of being.

Saturday is our final day. It’s a washout, but only in terms of the patterns of hot and cold air circulating overhead, and the lashings of beady water they give rise to, or rather the opposite — cause to descend. We probably rouse stodgily and slowly, because of all the cheese, you see, and each of us takes a shower in an attempt to cleanse pores and unblock arteries. Alas, someone somewhere made skin porous in the outward direction whilst insisting on mostly inward impenetrability, so only our pores benefit and there’s no way of using French softwater to flush out those Gogonzola-lined blood vessels. Later, the very nature of skin stops us from becoming still-sitting sponges on gravel tracks, so thanks, I guess, to someone somewhere.

What to do? Cannes is on the cards, but it’s just a big city, and we’ve done a couple of them. Antibes is also westwards, and takes less time, and as it’s something of a washout it doesn’t matter all too much where we go does it? So it’s to Antibes. Unfortunately, my good friend Marta has already headed to Barcelona for the weekend, and we’ve not managed to liaise, and that is poor form on my part but the sun will continue to rise. Apart, of course, from over the Southern tip of France on this particular Saturday.

Antibes is a beautiful little spot between Nice and Cannes. It’s a harbour town, acclaimed for its sailing, and offers the kind of thin trailways we’ve come to know and love. Approximately three minutes after we disembark the train we are fully saturated. Our clothes, that is, of course, you see, and our hair, and eyebrows, which is also hair, and maybe Georgie’s ill-elected Birkenstocks, but not our broader being, you see, because of the nature of skin. So we do what any sane duo would do amidst the sog — we find a boulangerie and we buy some bread-based products. I am certain that across the course of this day we see a baguette floating in the water somewhere, but I’ll be damned and thrown into the food recycling if it’s come from my hand. It is a crime punishable by death in every single French municipality to waste bread, which means, by extension, that feeding the fish with it is not considered waste by the high court, and that’s something I can make my peace with.

Anyway in the undulating downpour we walk around the harbour, up the gravel track upon which we are not sponges, to circumnavigate an imposing, high-walled fort that is absolutely closed. Then we spend a few hours drinking and eating in establishments offering shelter. The second one offers a heater, which goes perhaps 37% of the way to drying our most sodden garments. Let’s do some culture, shall we?

Picasso spent 6 months in a grand workshop in Antibes, very closeby to which now stands a museum that exhibits his work, and other artistic flourishes from the town. Art exhibitions are a funny kind of experience for people that are merely aesthetes, and don’t really ‘understand it’. Some of it is mere crude scribbles of semi-human forms. Other bits are stunning tapestries and cubist portraits. We spend an hour or so rounding the network of progressively weirder pieces, commenting and laughing as we go about it. Then we settle for a few glasses of vino next to some expats — one is a pig, one is in the yacht business and wants me to write some itineraries for her, and the other doesn’t want to have sex with any man, especially not the pig, because, well, she just doesn’t. They are entertaining companions for the most part, but it’s time to get the train back, still fully saturated, if not more so, which would mean that earlier on we were in fact not fully saturated at all, and had wildly underestimated the nature of a true washout.

In the evening we head back to Old Town because we’re narrow-minded comfort creatures and also fuck you why can’t we go back there?! It’s the best. We get a little bit pissed to be fair. Is that an oxymoron? We’re sipping sangria and ploughing through punch. We’re nibbling on these highly garlicky snails which are in their shells (or is it pasta?) that have been softened but give a bit of substance; each morsel a treat. Then it’s delicious paella / beef stew that frankly I think we over-order but I escape the tiz because Georgie has a stomach of steel. “But where is all this happening” you cry through a megaphone at the parade for cancelled Disney characters. Well, at a place called La Pachamama , no less, where two elderly plodding women endear themselves to the thankful patrons, where there are good tunes on and menus are in the sleeves of old records (Animals), and portions are plentiful, and everything just seems like it might be ok or better than ok, and that’s why we get away, right? — despite impending wars and the cost-of-living crisis and both sleeves of both my outerlayers slacking into small puddles on the floor, these jovial, bouncing women flitter hither and thither serving singsongs and sensational scran, making it all alright. Shapko again, isn’t it. Very very very Nice. We actually have the latest night of our trip on its last, and swerve home by 1am. Corker.

Is the start of a piece the most important? The hook, as it is. Or the body, to stop you piling it and letting it pass over you. Or is the ending the rightful crux? There must be a claim for that. Some conglomeration of findings. Some overarching sentiment or touching summary. I find conclusions arduous tasks. Let’s just say that the tram is without trouble, that we eat the remainder of our cheese and beef stew with bread at the airport, that blue breaks out from clouds as we glance across the Promenade, that we love eachother, that the flight is non-eventful, and that I have just one incongruous note further; this has not made it into the body of the log given its grandiosity and right to a postscript:

‘What happens if the meringue gets deflated’.

I guess that’s the real question we have to ponder as a species, isn’t it. And don’t worry — Proo’s doin’ fine.