Holiday Notebook

Sharing a plate of oysters with a three-year-old: where could this be but France, where children are brought up not to be faddish. The fads are for adults. It’s a relief to be away from Cambridge, where summer is bad for the soul. I find myself getting constantly annoyed: with suicidal cyclists, psychopathic taxi drivers, imbecilic pedestrians and double-decker buses allowed to hurtle through narrow streets belching diesel fumes. And hundreds of thousands of tourists trooping gormlessly up and down King’s Parade with not much to do. Here in Biarritz, the streets are calm, the traffic is regulated and people do not shout at each other in the street — a regular occurrence in Cambridge (and, mea culpa, one of the shouters is sometimes me). Biarritz is a town that lives by tourism and adapts to it. Cambridge has tourism dumped on it, and it fails to cope. Biarritz shows signs of having someone in charge.