Letting the days go by and St. Tropez

One of the great pleasures in France is to find a café with outdoor seating on a lovely sunny day, order your drink of choice - perhaps a pastis, or a pernod, or a coffee, then, depending on your language skills, pretend to read a local paper or something with more English in it, like the International Herald Tribune or (God forbid) USA Today.

What you should really be doing, is to observe the passing parade as it goes about its daily business.

There is something delightfully furtive about observing normal people and speculating about what is happening in their lives. I have often found myself writing down these speculations and creating a story about real people that is a complete work of fiction. My imagination is usually assisted by the fact that I am waiting for my partner who has gone window shopping or more realistically - bargain hunting.

Then again, if the people are boring or there is not much action taking place - you can actually spend the time reading the paper and enjoyig the sunshine and your drink.

Speaking of leting the days go by, it is simply impossible to visit the Riviera without at least sampling St. Tropez.

The villas that you see on the way into the town of St Tropez are sumptuous and nice. The town conjures up pictures of the elegant jet set and the advertising suggests a town filled with the "joie de vivre" of the well dressed socialites flitting their way from one beautiful location to the next.

Reality alas is not nearly as wonderful as the scene that has been painted. It’s actually a small town on the south side of a bay. We think the action goes on in and around the villas. The actual town is merely for the people who provide the services to those who own the villas and their guests.

St Tropez has an enormous marina and some quaint houses, but most of what we saw was geared to servicing the huge yachts which were moored there, capable of being owned only by the super-rich. Million plus dollar boats and all competing with one another for attention. The owners were not readily visible, but their live on crews were doing the necessary work to keep these behemoths shiny and the centre of everyone’s attention. If you wanted to advertise that you had money to burn—this was the place.