France

Provence A few days before my middle daughter’s Oxfordshire wedding this summer, my youngest announced that she and her fiancé, who’ve been together for years, were getting married within weeks. They’re moving abroad and bringing their wedding forward would help, she said. Two daughters married in less than a month. Mrs Bennet would be proud or envious. On hearing the news I panic-booked an easyJet flight to Edinburgh for the day before the youngest’s wedding, only to realise it got in at midnight, just 12 hours before the ceremony, and had to abandon that and rebook for the previous day. Usually the journey to Nice airport takes an hour and

There have been protests in 30 cities across France, people marching in outrage over the case of Dominique Pelicot who drugged his wife Gisèle and raped her and invited more than 70 other men – strangers – to come to his house and rape her too. Pelicot is a monster, a modern-day Bluebeard. But what has shocked France most is how very many normal Frenchmen he was able to find, in and around his Provencal village, who were up for having sex with an unconscious woman. If the feminists of France really want to stand with Gisèle, they’d educate their sons to abstain from porn A firefighter, a painter, several

There is always much to look forward to on a holiday with friends in France (the day one supermarket sweep, boules under plane trees, foie gras on demand); but, for me, one of the greatest joys is the hire car. That’s entirely due to my indulging in the niche pastime of driving around in the worst, most clapped out vehicle possible. You can do this quite easily in France using an Airbnb-style platform called Turo which allows you to go directly to the – usually bemused – owner and, for not very much money, drive off in whatever they have to offer you. And so it was that I found

Provence ‘What do you mean?’ I wanted to ask the man who told me last autumn it was time to move on. I hoped he didn’t mean find a new boyfriend. I like him and his wife a lot and it was meant kindly – so I kept quiet as we stood in their kitchen and they gave me instructions for my weekly visits to check the house after they left for winter. But it stung. Jeremy was still with me night and day in everything I did. I tried not to let my face fall a second time when the man told me he was paying someone else to

Can one have too many friends? I asked myself this question as we prepared yet another dinner party for ten people, at which I ate and drank far too much as usual. Forget bikini body – it’s kaftan time in Saint Tropez at the moment for me. We’ve been at our villa in the South of France for nearly three months this summer and during that time we have hosted 34 guests, who stayed anywhere between three days and two weeks. We’ve hosted two daughters, one son, in-laws and cousins, several dozen friends and one baby granddaughter, and they have kept Percy and me on our social toes. But we

When it was recently announced that 40,000 people, the great majority civilians, have been killed in the Gaza conflict, I checked the media coverage. Almost all – Sky, CNN, the Guardian etc – correctly reported that the figure came from the Hamas health ministry. All, however, implied acceptance of the figure’s accuracy by the prominence they gave it (except for the Guardian, preposterously plus royaliste que le roi, which said the Hamas figure ‘does not tell the full story of Palestinian losses’). The classic example was the BBC. The story led the six o’clock news on Radio 4, the serious programme with the bongs of Big Ben, always considered the gold

Provence My eldest daughter’s husband is from Como. In the early 2000s George Clooney caused a stir in the town when he bought a villa on the lakeside nearby, triggering what’s become known as the Clooney effect – a rise in house prices and the number of ‘bougie’ shops and restaurants catering for an increasing number of visitors. Rather than take a boat trip and gawp at the Villa Oleandra, visitors would be better heading to Gardone on Lake Garda and visiting Gabriele D’Annunzio’s insane Il Vittoriale. Unlike Clooney, D’Annunzio (1863-1938), whose motto was ‘Me ne frego’ (I don’t give a damn), was a short, ugly, almost blind, toothless early

A bout of global stock-market turmoil and an outbreak of UK street violence as adjacent news items gave an apocalyptic feel to the start of the week. But as rioting continued, markets appeared to steady, led by Tokyo with a 10 per cent Tuesday rebound. We know the ugly sentiments that animate the thugs – but do we understand the sudden nerviness of investors? Once media clamour about 1,000-point falls subsided, two strands emerged, both American. First, fear – driven by bad employment figures – that the US economy is weaker than previously thought, fuelling a conviction that the Federal Reserve should have cut interest rates at its late-July meeting