Down South

.....is where I haven't been for a while (with the exception of the trip to Barcelona).  Today though we stopped in the land of my adolescence albeit with with 16 adolescents from school (God was I really like them at their age?).

At their age I took a train from London to Dover with my bro and my Da. We crossed on the night ferry then sat for several hours on a French train which had been shunted into a siding (strikes? obvs yes).  Chris Green had made me a compilation cassette, featuring Jackson Browne, Dire Straits and Elton John.  I listened to it on the Walkman he also gave me and shared smarties with Ju. 

At some point we got to Paris, but too late for our train South, so we walked all day around the city checking out the spit and sawdust bars (Bobby's request).  

We booked a couchette on the south bound train which we shared with a nun. Bobby woke me up at dawn and took me into the corridor where the rising sun was hitting the étangs and making the flamingos pinker than a bad Photoshop filter.  I'd never seen a flamingo, I'd never seen red roofed houses, I'd never seen the Mediterranean. I thought I'd found paradise.

And so it started for me. Here was a second home so far removed from the windy beaches of Devon and the wet beaches of Wales. Here the sun rarely went in and you were heat stoned when you shlepped home in the evening to wash the salt off you before going to a bar for a cold beer and a sneaky fag.

And it was because of there that I end up here - a couple of hours inland at the foot of the mountains.

Nico spent his childhood on the long Atlantic beach between the Gironde and Biarritz where you're south enough to get decent weather.  I spent my childhood at Saunton and Poppit Sands where the warmest place to be was in the sea. Lunch was yeast cake and thermos coffee in the back seat of the car before our parents turfed us back out into the roil of the waves while they went to the pub.  (This is a lie, they went to the pub later in the day, on the way home.)  On the beach Lizzie, who hates water and loves the sun, huddled behind a cheap windbreak with a book and got miraculously tanned while Bobby stopped the dogs worrying sheep on the cliff tops. 

This is why I fell for the Med.  It was so far removed from what I'd ever known. And, ironically, since Brexit, all I want is the windy coast of Britain and Ireland.

So here I am, back in my adolescent second home with a bunch of adolescents.

We visit le musée du Retirada in Argeles.  We go down to the beach of buried babies in Argeles.  An amazing old lady tells the story of her father and her grandfather.  We hook up with a group of Spanish pupils who whip out violins and cellos and sing Machado's poems, we go to Machado's grave in Collioure where the children read poems in Spanish, French and English.
I lean over the remparts of the chateau to take this photo and remember the times we swam across the bay and watched the storm hunters wind up the hills.
At some point in that chaotic afternoon I found myself alone at Café Sola.  The old patron has gone, but it's the same place.  The café Bobby loved being in.  I used to ring him from here and say 'guess where I am?' and he'd say 'you bitch!'

A saxophonist was playing beneath the wall of the chateau.  His feet were in the water and the Sound of Blue hit the cliff of the wall and rebounded back across the bay.