EUROPE NEWS

TUPNews recently visited Cannes, on the southeast coast of France. It was my last business trip of the year.

It’s not as swish as I imagined; in fact the approach from Nice airport called to mind Weymouth. The landmark hotels look pretty ordinary, and the seafront is mostly touristy fish restaurants and private beaches. In fairness, all of my preconceptions about Cannes were based on the video for Elton John’s I’m Still Standing, so it had a lot to live up to. And the nightlife was not bad: I ate a fantastic steak in a restaurant that had apparently been interior-decorated by a five-year-old girl, and then paid £10 for a tumbler of single malt in a try-hard Turkish-themed bar.

I was in town to attend a conference, but I wasn’t much in the mood for it. Instead, I headed down to the municipal beach, about a five-minute walk from my hotel on Rue d’Antibes, one of the flashier shopping streets. Well-attired Eurotrash regarded me with a mixture of confusion, disgust and fear as I walked down the street: among the distressed denim and designer sunglasses, I cut a fine figure in my no-name jumper, black trunks and sockless brown trainers. Hotel-logo’d beach towel slung over my shoulder and the Alan Clark diaries tucked under my arm, I was a strange mix of beach bum and English eccentric. What with it being mid-October, the beach was quiet, but the sky was bright and the water was warm. “I like Cannes,” I thought, floating on my back.

That night I attended a lavish banquet at a grand chateau a little ways out of the city. The host, a major French energy company, will shortly float on the stock exchange, so this was something of a last hurrah. The champagne flows less freely when there are shareholders involved, unfortunately. So we got stuck in while we still could.

I sat next to a charming French girl (is there any other kind?) and argued about British and French attitudes to food. The British have no clue, she said – having recently attended an excellent cheese festival in Cheltenham, I put her straight on the quality of British produce. “Just eat this fish,” she said, pointing her fork at me, “and you will see that I am right.”

She also told me that English men speaking French in English accents is attractive in the same way that French women speaking English in French accents is. I was very pleased to learn this.