Cities of the coast

In the days when English counties were untouched by the dead hand of central government rationalisation, odd little chunks of them used to fetch up in neighbouring shires, appearing as little green or brown blobs, defiantly labelled ‘part of Leicestershire’ or ‘part of Somerset’. The Mediterranean sometimes seems like a larger version of this topographical oddity. Officially it is part of the Atlantic, an awkward remnant of what was formerly a vast marine depression stretching far into central Asia. But who beside its shores has felt depressed for very long? The Atlantic is where we go for granite and fog, grey waves and annihilating icebergs, to be overwhelmed by ‘l’immense démence de la mer’, as Victor Hugo called it. The Mediterranean, on the other hand, as we sidle into it through the Straits of Gibraltar, persuades us, by its millennial evidence of human creativity, imagination and ingenuity, that we are little less than gods.

Most popular

Druin Burch

Lucy Letby and the killer nurse I worked with

Nicholas Woodsworth is a Canadian journalist married to a Frenchwoman and living in Aix-en-Provence, not exactly beside the great inland sea but sufficiently vulnerable to what he terms the goat’s-cheese-and-lavender school of writing about maritime Provence.