Colin Randall goes from strength to strength

Personalities/blogging
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Glancing at the Independent today, I did a double-take, that was followed quickly by a sense of déjà vu.

The headline read "Provençal bar is two steps too close to God"

Now where have we read before about a vexatious proximity between wine pichet and communion cup (vexatious, at any rate, for the French, who, with their tidy minds, like to keep things in their separate compartments) ?

Was it not ex-Telegraph journalist Colin Randall, writing on his Salut! blog ?

Indeed it was, and he is now spreading his wings further as a freelance journalist, reporting for the Independent on the foibles of our occasionally perplexing French neighbour.

(He has other blogging interests too, notably Sunderland football club and folk music, but we'll come back to those another day - or, there again, maybe we won't).

I warmed to his opening paragraph:

"For tourists passing through the idyllic Provençal village of La Motte, the Bar des Cascades is a convenient watering hole on a drive round the spectacular Gorges du Verdon."

Why ? Because although Jane and I have still to visit La Motte we made our first visit recently to those Gorges du Verdon, the subject of a post. What a spectacular region that is, and so handy, as he says, for a day trip from the coast.

Anyway, it's good to see Colin continuing to establish himself as an independent with "un doigt en beaucoup de pies".

Operating as a freelance after the security of salaried employment is no easy task, as this writer (and fellow victim of Mammon) knows from his own experience.

Incidentally, visitors to his Salut! will find yours truly has posted Part 2 of his guest blog. It tells of our our recent mission to Tuscany in search of a strategically-sited location for a planned late-life "gap year".

Some may find the organization of my screed a little puzzling, not to say quirky.
Well, I freely admit to the latter. It is quirky, but I don't like my readers to be puzzled, so a brief word of explanation is in order.

Colin R has suffered in his career, no doubt, at the hands of editors wielding the blue pencil. The original script I sent him was prefaced with a warning that my script was organized as a "conversational Möbius strip", my having borrowed that term from a recent article by that clever and effortlessly (?) eloquent A.A.Gill.


I assumed that most folk would know what a Möbius strip was, but Colin, wearing his no-nonsense editorial hat, appeared to think otherwise.

Möbius strip

My script was originally organized as a long preamble, followed, finally, by the main thrust. Responding to faint praise from my wife, it was then re-organized as main body first, with the preamble as postscript, or should that be "prescript", with a jokey pointer at the end back to the main body.

Oi, wake up there, you in the back row !

By sheer coincidence, AA Gill was writing in the Times that day about that "conversational Möbius strip".

The Möbius strip, apart from being a one-sided loop (yes, one-sided, despite appearances to the contrary !), has some other remarkable properties.

If anyone wishes to know more, I'd be happy to do a short post on how you can make your own in a second or two, and then , with a pair of scissors, proceed to amaze your children or grandchildren .

A word of warning: their school teachers might not thank you for stealing their thunder on this vital part of their armoury, like how to keep 3B quiet on a wet Friday afternoon.

Anyway, to loop back to that initial subject ( that bloody strip again) : one hates to see talent go to waste, especially when it has a rare and fine writing style. So hats off to Colin for picking up the pieces and making the best of a bad situation, in so exemplary a style. His wife and family must be very proud of him We his devoted readers certainly are.

Links to Colin Randall's blogs to follow:

A quick swing round the Gorges du Verdon

Update Sunday 15th July

It's been most gratifying to see the number of hits on this post, most from the bungee jumping fraternity it would seem. In fact, entering gorges, verdon, bungee brings up Dreams and Daemons at the top of Google listings.

By way of saying thank you I have extracted two short video clips from the Berry YouTube archives. They are tacked on at the end. The first was taken at the launch point (?) and shows two young lads in harnesses getting ready to jump. the second was one where I captured a leap from a distance, but you'll find better ones than mine in YouTube archives under Artuby.

The renowned Gorges du Verdon are a mere 70 miles or so by road north-west of where we live (Antibes, French Riviera). We stayed two nights at the spectacularly-situated Hotel du Grand Canyon du Verdon.

As you can see in the picture above, it perches right on the rim of the gorge (point and click to enlarge). I took the picture further along the gorge from one of the places where one can stop the car and take in the view (sadly all too few).

A few words about our choice of route for initial exploration: we decided to go the long way round initially, approaching from the west. That meant we could use the fast autoroute as far as the Draguignan/St. Tropez turnoff, where we headed north, and had lunch at the delightful village of Aups. There we found our favourite kind of restaurant. Called the Auberge de la Tour it had a paved courtyard where you could choose between sun, shade and dappled shade. I went for the plat du jour, which was raviolis au saumon à la crème de basilic, superb flavour and value.

Moving on, we were then then greeted by a spectacular view of the Lac de Sainte-Croix, reputed to be France's largest artificial reservoir. It was created by damming the Verdon, thus drowning a village and Roman bridge into the bargain. Such is progress.

The water is a startling turquoise in colour, which is something to do with its fluoride content, although the claimed link with chemistry seems suspect. Maybe it's the microbiology that's affected - something I need to research. Just before the village of Aiguines we turned onto the road that twists its way round the rim of the Gorge (Canyon?) for some 15 kilometres, until finally one comes upon the amazing Hotel Grande Canyon du Verdon.

Approaching from the west meant we were on the safer side of the road. That was fine for a first encounter, but the downside (no pun intended) is that the few stopping places on the precipitous offside are difficult to access, especially as they tend to be hidden round bends where one sees them too late. Traffic was surprisingly light, given the time of year, but it was annoying and frustrating to find that most of the off-road parking spots tended to be taken already with camping cars and motorcycles.

Most of the guard rails, incidentally, are not corrugated steel, but made of slender tree trunks, of questionable impact-resistance.

I have a rule of thumb re the French- they never do things 100%, generally stopping, perversely, at 95% or thereabouts. The Gorges were no exception. One of the trickiest stretches of road is the approach to the Chalet de la Maline (see later), where the road is almost single track down a gradient towards a hairpin at the bottom. Yes, you have guessed correctly. That stretch has no protective barrier, perhaps on the assumption that if you went over there's a mere 50 foot of barrelling to the return leg of road below, and if you conserve momentum, as that tedious Newton decreed, then there are several tiers of small trees to further impede one's progress down to the river some 3000 feet below ! But don't let me put you off - you're far more likely to get run over on a pedestrian crossing in Antibes, especially when those pretty green lights tell you it's safe to step into the road !

This next picture is the view we get looking east along the Gorge, not from a roadside stop, but from the hotel balcony, just a few steps from our room (see video clip at end). Amazing wouldn't you agree? When you see it around the clock, it's interesting to see how the colour and contrast change with the time of day, or with the weather.

Through binoculars, we could see hikers picking their way along the trails at the bottom, and a couple of guys fly-fishing.




On day 2, we decided to do the complete circuit of the Gorge/Canyon.

NB: I'm still trying to locate a definitive and authoritative distinction between those two terms. The western end is labelled in our guide book as the Canyon du Verdon, the eastern end the Gorges du Verdon, but there's no obvious dfference in character between the two that one would notice, both being varied as regards width, depth, straightness or curvature. Are there any geomorphologists reading this who know the difference ?







These next two pictures are out of sequence. The one above is at the Route des Cretes, where the road crosses the Verdon and turns west along the Rive Droite (north bank). You can probably make out the guy with the head for heights, scaling the sheer rock face. (Point and click to enlarge this and other pix). Yeah, chacun à son goût .

For those with a different type of goût with perhaps a slighter lower risk of prematurely departing this mortal coil, there is this bridge just a few kilometres from the hotel. It's not over the Verdon, but the Artuby, a tributary of the Verdon that enters from the south. It's well known among the bungee jumping fraternity. This is how we saw it early on Saturday morning - almost totally deserted. Returning again on Sunday morning the jumpers were out in force. I did succeed in capturing a short video clip of a jumper doing his thing which I may post later, but uploading to YouTube is painfully slow right now.

I was interested to see the launch point close up. I had always imagined that the elasticated rope was simply attached to the parapet, but it's not, and on reflection it's not difficult to see why. It's all highly organized, with a bit of heavy equipment, painted bright blue, with a winding winch, parked up against the side. The jumpers were wearing a full body harness around the torso, which seems a lot more sensible than merely attaching around the ankles, as I think was the case when two of my own children did that rite of passage (leaving one of them I regret to say with a permanent fear of heights !). OK, so the New Hebridean islanders manage with a creeper round the ankles, but they probably have a different view from ours on the trifling matter of life and death.

This splendid salad was served up at the Chalet de la Maline restaurant which is almost opposite our hotel, but on the other side of the gorge. It takes hours to drive round. It's a centre for hikers who wish to take the trails down to the bottom of the gorge, or along various scenic footpath at various levels above the river. We decided we'd keep that for our next visit !

Here finally is a a video clip, starting in our room, and going out onto the balcony for that million dollar view. Switch off your speakers if you don't want to hear me doing my Bill Oddy impression, aka senile burbling, and, towards the end, confusing pan with zoom.

One final word: the canyon/gorge is dramatic enough, and fully deserves its reputation as one of the natural wonders of Europe. But there's more to it than that. It lies in a vast natural park, essentially a lightly wooded limestone plateau that stretches off to distant peaks and vast horizons, with scarcely a dwelling to be seen, and virtually no pylons, mobile phone masts etc. In other words, the environment has been remarkably well protected from any man-made intrusions, whether useful or otherwise. The few villages en route are typically Provençal, full of ancient stone, steep gradients and flowers in abundance - all in all a truly amazing and delightful part of the world, and one which we hope to explore again soon.

On the way back, we called in at Gourdon, perched on the limestone escarpment about 10 miles north of Antibes. It was this year's venue for the Antiboulenc Society picnic. Jane, in her capacity as Secretary, did as much transacting of society business as nibbling and quaffing - everyone brings along something different for the communal foodfest.

Later, we had a guided tour of an amazing collection of art déco in the Gourdon Chateau, accumulated over many years at great expense by the owner. How strange it all seems, some 80 years on, at once so modern, yet so dated, putting me in mind of one of the local cinemas in my home town that I attended for Saturday matinée "flicks", gazing in wonder at all that avant garde chrome, glass and mirror.

Video clips of bungee jumping at Pont d'Artuby, late addition (Sunday July 15th)

The wanderlust returns

If all goes according to plan, J and I expect to be on that balcony tomorrow afternoon or evening. It's at a hotel/restaurant about halfway along the world famous corniche sublime that runs along the southern lip of the Gorges du Verdon. For those not au fait with Provençal geography, I'm referring to Europe's very own Grand Canyon. It's not on the scale of Arizona's, of course, but is still hugely impressive, we're told.

We've been living in this part of the world for some 5 years now, and been visiting rather longer, but have somehow never got round to visiting this natural marvel. Tomorrow we set off in a small hired car, which is probably better for negotiating those switchback roads, given there's likely to be a succession of tourist coaches coming in the opposite direction.

The last few days have been spent surrounded by stacks of camping car magazines. We were 90% decided to splash out on a Ford Transit based profile, and were mentally imagining trips to the south of Spain, Norway's north Cape, Croatia, Sicily etc. But there's a formidable problem to overcome - garaging. There are virtually no garages available to rent in Antibes. Buying one would probably double the cost, it would have to be high (close on 3 metres), and most of the garages I see around Antibes have their access blocked by parked cars, which I suspect in most cases do not belong to the garage owner. Who needs all the hassle ?

Provisionally, we've decided to hire a camping car for a week or two, probably in the autumn, and go and explore somewhere new for us - probably Tuscany. That will give us an opportunity to experience the motorhome in practice - warts and all- and decide whether the benefits of occasional gypsy-like freedom outweigh the costs.

Expect a welter of holiday pix in the next post, with limestone scenery very much in evidence.