Good morning from the blue coast. This is my first-ever outside broadcast, coming to you direct from a poolside seat on the Cap d’Antibes. Writing is one of those activities that are most properly done behind closed doors. The three “ates” — defecate, fornicate and communicate — all demand maximum privacy, and there is something hubristically boastful about doing them alfresco. All those romantic poets wondering loony as clods in their season of must and mildewed furtiveness — they didn’t actually scribble all that on Westminster Bridge or Scafell or the Hellespont or Xanadu’s ring road. They were back home in the drawing room in Bloomsbury, with the countryside burning in the grate and the curtains drawn.
It’s an incontrovertible truth that everything worth doing in this life is better done indoors. I have a friend who was caught in flagrante alfresco, pleasuring a lady of scant acquaintance in the manner of the hound. A short, elderly woman of unsurpassing hideosity came upon them — or rather, stumbled over them. Instead of emitting a strangled scream and running off, she stood there, hands on hips (hers, not his), looked him in the eye and said: “Go on, then. If you think this is a proper and polite activity for public edification, let’s see what it is you do.” Well, of course, that was that. Withdrawal of stout party. Not only did he find it impossible to re-create the creature with 20 toes with this particular lady, he hasn’t been able to do so much as hold hands outside ever since.
The only thing better done outside than in is a holiday, which is why I’m here. People say: “My, but you’re lucky. You can work on vacation. All you need is a handful of prejudices, some secondhand opinions and 10 spare minutes.” And, of course, on paper they’re right. Or rather, anywhere except on paper. Working on holiday is a contradiction in terms. Even locked up in a damp padded cell with a Lancashire winter outside, writing is an unnatural torment, like trying to produce a sample for the doctor when you don’t need to go.
Bernard Levin, late of this parish, said that he’d eaten more than a million digestive biscuits in the course of his professional career, because eating a digestive was invariably preferable to sitting down to a typewriter — and Levin was famous for typing faster than Woody Woodpecker could knock up Mrs Woodpecker.
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No, if there’s only one thing worse than having to work inside on a sunny day, it’s working outside on a sunny day. Oh, look, a dolphin just swam past. Cute. And there’s a seal, a turtle, a dalmatian, and a dragon thing. Don’t you find there’s something rather sinister about inflatable pool animals? Why don’t they make floating fish and chips? Why can’t you buy floating cowpat? Or Bernard Levin? Or inflatable Jordan? I suppose nobody could be bothered to blow it up.
One of the rituals of holiday, if you come from the dark north, is eating outside. Along with extreme nudism and handbell-ringing, eating outside is desperately overrated. It’s possible to view the whole march of human civilisation as the struggle to get dinner indoors. Despite that, sweaty ham in the open air is as much part of the Mediterranean holiday experience as jellyfish stings and strap marks.
Last night, I went to a restaurant, Tétou, that only serves one thing: bouillabaisse. This is one of those dishes that has mythological culinary status. Cassoulet is another. And salad dressing. And the bloody mary. The orthodoxy of their preparation can make or break friendships, and I have actually seen chefs coming to shoving and slapping over the correct recipe. The problem, and the joy, of bouillabaisse is that it has so many moving parts: do you put chilli in the rouille? Do you add gruyère? Are there potatoes? My feeling has always been that potatoes make it a bourride and that tomato purée is de trop. But the one thing I hope we’re all agreed on is that it must contain that indigenous Mediterranean fish, the rascasse.
Tétou sells hundreds of gallons of the stuff for five months of the year, and you can barely get a table — so this is probably as close to a Vatican encyclical as we’re going to get. And they serve the intense fish broth separately from the fish, which includes rascasse, rouget, langouste and tiny little crabs. The rouille has vicious garlic, psychopathic chilli and sweet-talking saffron. There’s no cheese at all, which I think is probably correct; save the gruyère for your French onion. Controversially, they offer waxy yellow potatoes for you to add separately. I must say, the whole performance is pretty sensational. Bouillabaisse is still, for me, geographically specific. I can only eat it here in the south of France. Anywhere else, it just makes me sad. The price was about £50 a bowl, give or take bits and bobs. Cash only, of course. Service included. But not the tip.
Hamburgers are another of those morsels that can get people all riled and puce. Actually, maybe they’re not, but they get me to Harlem, in Notting Hill. This is an American restaurant — more Hoboken, in fact, than Harlem — selling hamburgers, crab cakes, chicken wings, clam chowder, steaks, onion rings, banana splits and key-lime pie. It’s a dark, cramped restaurant that’s packed with social Hill climbers.
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The basement is a nightclub, which, viewed from the top of the stairs, has all the elegance and excitement of a long-distance meat container full of assorted refugees. I’m told the place was started by a music chap who wanted to listen to pop and eat the culinary equivalent. Restaurants that are started as hobbies are rarely successful. Would you wear a suit made by an accountant who did tailoring at the weekends? But if you want to eat the munchie dreams of a hip rap mogul, then this is it. And I must say it’s pretty authentic, the sort of food you’ll find everywhere in the great expanses of America that vote Republican: poor, unloved ingredients and infantile, insistent flavours, replete with fat and fart. The only inauthentic bits are the prices — steak and four prawns £24.50, blackened fish of the day £14.50. What was most memorable about Harlem was the waitress, who flirted with concentrated, wilful intensity, a sort of Mata Hari with a tray. Any stars I give this place are solely down to her.
But it all seems such a long way away now. I can’t re-create a decent ire while the cicadas strum and there’s the smell of the parasol pines and a lithe hardbody has just slid past, beckoning from the back of a crocodile.