Provence: by the sea

 

The end of high summer in Provence means now is the time to set out for the beach. La Rentrée has seen off families with children who must return to school and soon the university students will be making for home too. Only the older or childless holidaymakers remain to share the sea and the sun with the locals.

 

Our preferred part of the coast stretches from Toulon to La Ciotat. Not the smartest on the French Riviera, but full of charm and the French themselves, which is always a recommendation. The photo shows Bandol, which has a line of beaches, each different in character. This is the seaward side of the sheltered Anse de Renecros, where the horseshoe bay is a perfect swimming lagoon.

 

 

There are plenty of cafés and restaurants serving fish and salads nicoises - and, of course, the famously good Bandol rosé wine is not to be missed.

 

I'm very fond of Sanary-sur-Mer, too, just along the coast towards Toulon. It has one of the prettiest seafront marinas and promenades of the whole of the south of France. Again, not conspicuously smart but friendly and relaxed, with plenty to do and see. 

 

 

And then there's lovely Cassis and La Ciotat, which looks so unpromising from a distance, with what seems to be an industrial zone where it butts up against the hills. The towering cranes turn out to be part of a yacht builders and chandlery and, again, it's a pretty town with good beaches.

 

 

If this has made you want to prolong summer with a spot of armchair travel to the sea, you might like 300 Days of Sun. You can find out more in this Q & A I wrote for Anne Bonny Book Reviews. 

  

Sanary - so not St Tropez

I've been away the past week, a working break on the Côte d'Azur, if that doesn't sound too implausible. An old fishing village on the shores of the Mediterranean is such an old cliché that these days it almost always means millionaires on yachts and bronzed stick insects dripping in bling. But not always. Sanary-sur-Mer is still a working fishing town as well as a jolly holiday place for the more down-to-earth French.

I really was working. The page proofs of the new novel, 300 Days of Sun, had to be painstakingly checked, mistakes hunted down and sentences forensically assessed. With the house full of visitors again, I couldn't see how it would get done, so this was my answer. Work in the morning, sun in the afternoon.

It was great! I've never been away specifically to work on my own before, and I like it. Rather too much, perhaps. Previous brief visits to Sanary had intrigued me. It seemed friendly, with a lovely atmosphere, and is pretty as a picture. It has some lively literary connections, too, which are always interesting. Thomas Mann lived here in the 1930s, and Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World just out of town along the coast. D H Lawrence found some easing of his tuberculosis here, and Sybille Bedford - a wonderful writer who deserves to be better known - wrote Jigsaw, her "unsentimental education" among the wild and eccentric bohemians in the twenties and thirties in Sanary.

 

A short walk down a tree-lined, almost suburban, street to the west of the port was the pretty Portissol beach, where the water can change colour from pale grey-green to deep blue.

 

 

I even took the train along the coast to La Ciotat one day, as I've had the glimmering of an idea for yet another novel and wanted to do some research. Another afternoon, I took a boat trip to the calanques at Cassis and beyond.

 

At night, there were unpretentious restaurants by the harbour where I felt perfectly happy eating on my own, watching the world go by and the night market being set up. After that, there were various bands and other free entertainments that sprang up along the esplanade. As I told the family when I got back, having completed my list of changes to the proofs and sent them off to New York yesterday morning before I left: it was a full week's work!