Everything on Friday begins with C!!!
Les Calanques: are the mini-mountain ribs on either side of Marseille(s), where no one is allowed walk in August for fear of becoming lovely unrescued barbecue flavoured w.wild rosemary when they catch fire.
Cigales (aka cicadas): They are everywhere, chirring. Dr Vick tried to record them for her Animal Accents Project (= compare and contrast w.the cigales in the Paris Metro eg) but everything else (inc.me) made too much noise mostly.
Cassis can fuck off kinda. It is one east of Marseille(s) and v.wealthy and posh, and we were shouted at by a horrible millionaire in a merc w.a face like a hateful grey prune after we convinced ourselves that the one-way sign on his private road refers to some other (invisible) road, and not his.
Le Ciotat pt.1 is two east from Marseille(s), and an ordainry French seaside town with buckets and spades on sale, and (in August) heaving beaches. The teenage beachbums keep their motorcycle helmets on for maximum cool. We found a hotel called ‘Rose The’ – bizarre semantix 4 English-speakers – where the lady has an English boyf so wz plzd to find out abt the Normans (tho i forget exactly why they came up as we booked our room).
Coffee: she cheerfully denounced English coffee as ‘sockjuice’, which wz a bit cheeky considering (as noted), I didn’t have one drinkable cup in all the time I wz that side of the channel.
Citric Acid: In which Dr Vick finishes her Plate O’Shrimp, and tips the lemon juice left over her head to keep her hair nice and bleached and spiky.
Carrefours: is a giant French hypermarket of no great interest except i had left my plug Converter at Les Tuileries.
Le Ciotat pt.2 It’s the 60th anniversary of the American Liberation of Mediterranean France, and there’s a PARADE – mainly of ageing frenchfoax dressed as GIs or resistance guerillas – and also a fair!!
Chinese meal: We look for a fish restaurant Vick remembered from long ago (in a Cave = French for Cellar), but it?s full, so we have Vietnamese-Chinese instead, on a quiet streetcorner: enormous bowls of noodle soup which taste like the sea.
Counter-MonoculturalismMeanwhile a Japanese death-metal band seems to be setting on the opposite corner. Dressed as Sioux Warriors. And they play Peruvian panpipes, to backing tapes. Doing Cinemato-Celtic covers of Abba and Simon & Garfunkel! And sell millions of CDs, as Authentic Red Indian New Age Karaoke Instrumentals are v.the thing in coastal Provence this summer, it turns out. Nearby stands an elderly blonde woman: either their over-anxious manager-agent or their scariest stalker-fan. In the fair they have a stall, where a Native American-looking woman also sells teatowels featuring Che, Elvis, Geronimo, Bob Marley, the Zapatistas, cowboys AND indians (sometimes all at once). They are wearing war-paint (= why we can’t tell what continent they-re from); the show has surely been a coded call for an Uprising against the (Global) Man – only we leave before this starts.