Another Saturday Ramble...

Saturday 17th June 2006

Wake at 7:15 to such a gorgeous morning that I forego the usual Saturday snooze and get up straight away. Then it's on with my cycling shorts and out on the bike for a swift 8-miler around the quieter lanes outside town. Coming back down the final hill, I hit 38 mph ' a speed that hardly registers when you're in a car. On a bike, though ' with just 19 lbs of aluminium, steel, carbon fibre and rubber between you and the asphalt ' you notice it. It never fails to make me think: if a wheel came off now, or I hit a pot hole, I could lose a lot of skin. Possibly more than that.

After a shower, I nip out to the greengrocer's before the Saturday crowds arrive. Salad stuff for dinner and freshly-dug new potatoes to go with it. A big bag of apples and a punnet of strawberries, red and shiny as snooker balls. I slice some up with a banana on my breakfast muesli, then pour over half a carton of rice milk. The most important meal of the day, as my dad always used to say. Go without any other meal, but never go without breakfast ' advice I've always stuck to. He used to have a fry-up every morning, himself: bacon, eggs, mushrooms, sausages, tomatoes, fried slice. No cereal rubbish for him. All that, plus a few slices of bread and butter, and two mugs of tea with sugar measured out by the tablespoon. He drank and smoked heavily, too, and never took exercise. But it never worried him. He was completely relaxed about it. He actually used to take pride in his unhealthy lifestyle, making fun of his cough and his breathlessness. He always said he wanted to use it all up and go with everything completely knackered. Which he did do. He made it to 77, though. I'm sure there's a lesson there for muesli-munching, non-smoking, fry-up-free, diligently-exercising, whippet-thin me.

After breakfast, I walk into town for some cash and find myself joining in that familiar phenomenon of modern urban paranoia: the ATM Conga. I can understand giving some 'I'm not peeping at your PIN' space to the person currently using the machine. But the gap always seems to knock on to each subsequent person in the queue ' so you end up with a line of 6 people that stretches about 15 yards across the pavement. In that part of town, too, the machines are clustered so closely together that the queues intersect at certain points. From the sky, it must look like some kind of formation street theatre. It must be something to do with our traditional British reserve and stand-offishness. One for the social psychologists, perhaps.

Next stop is the bike shop to take back a tyre pressure gauge I'd bought. No matter how hard I pump up the tyres, the needle never goes above 50 psi ' though the info on the tyre wall recommends 70 minimum.

It's like a souk in there: now the sun's out and the temperature's up, everyone's looking at bikes. A good thing ' except it means I get landed with the Saturday boy. He's like a slacker version of Fido Dido: huge skateboarder T-shirt, huge knee-length shorts, Kurt Cobain hair, arms and legs like knotted string, and a gangling self-consciousness of pose that you often see in teenage boys: narcissism and gawkiness locked together so tightly that you can hardly tell one from the other. I explain the problem, and he nervously looks around for reassurance from somewhere. None being available, he offers to come and check it himself. He's either younger than he looks or he's a late developer, because his voice is only partly-broken.

"I'll try one of our pumps and see what the gauge on that says, he yodels as we head for the door.

Outside, he uses his thumb to test the firmness of my tyres. "They seem hard enough.

He attaches the end of his foot pump, pumps a few times, checks the pump gauge, thumbs the tyre again, then disconnects the pump and tries my gauge. It still registers 50.

"See, I say. "What did the gauge on the pump say?

He looks at it again, but he's already reset it.

"I can't remember, he says.

"It's got to be more than 50, though.

"It feels like it.

He rubs his chin.

"The best thing really is to pump it up until it feels hard enough.

I can see I'm not going to be getting my money back here.

"But that's what I've been doing. I bought the gauge to try to get it more accurate than that.

He gives the tyre a final squeeze.

"They feel hard enough now, though.

"But it says on the tyre¦

"I wouldn't worry too much about that, really. As long as it feels hard enough to you.

He picks up his pump and turns to go back into the shop, where sweating crowds await his help.

"Sorry, mate.

'Yeah,' I think, looking at the useless piece of equipment I'm left with. 'So am I.'

I go back home for a consoling cup of coffee. Then I head down to the seafront, where there's a 'Continental Market' today: lots of stalls, mainly from France, selling everything from smoked garlic and pots of Dijon mustard to Parma ham, foie gras, Breton biscuits and Calvados.

At a sausage stall, a wiry chap in wiry glasses ' I can't help thinking of the Dustin Hoffman character in Papillon ' offers up a dish with a selection of sausage slices on it.

"Try some, monsieur? he smiles. His chin is smudged black with stubble, like he's rubbed it with newspaper print.

I want to say 'Je suis un vegetarien, but I'm too stupidly shy both of my proficiency in French and of my dietary predilection ' one that I know many French people find odd ' so I just say "No, thanks.

One stall has a sign up in curlicued Gallic handwriting: 'Hat's'. Some things, it seems, are never lost in translation.

At an olive stall, I'm tempted by some juicy-looking stuffed vine leaves ' until I notice how close the exposed tray is to the faces of the passing customers. Something tells me I might get more juices than I bargained for.

At the gallette stall, I watch with fascination at the proficiency of the cook as she oils the hot plate, pours on the batter, then 'squeegees' it out into a perfect circle. (I watch her with fascination for another reason too: she is stunningly beautiful). As the first side fries, she slices under it with the spatula to keep it from burning. Her quick, adept movements put me in mind of a scratch DJ on a hot night at the tables. She turns the pancake and sprinkles it with Grand Marnier. When the whole thing is done, she folds it in quarters, slips it on a napkin and hands it to a by-now drooling customer. It's pure theatre, and done with a pride and skill that you don't get at your average British fast-food stall (scrape, shovel, wallop ' here's your burger and chips, mate - help yourself to ketchup). She makes it look so easy, too. I bet if I tried it, I'd end up with shards of carbon in a paper bag and batter all over my shoes. Ah well¦ I could at least find an alternative use for the Grand Marnier.

I look around for something to buy, but the prices are quite steep on everything and I don't have much cash on me. A baguette for £1.50, £3.20 for a bottle of Normandy cider, a 100g pot of sun-dried tomatoes for £3.00, a quid for a bulb of garlic. The stuff's selling well, though, with holidaymakers digging deep. And the atmosphere is nice: a little corner of the foreign and exotic in this otherwise staid little seaside town. Some of the culture clash is blindingly obvious. The 'prahd' Brit guys with their Grade 2 haircuts, lurid tatts, bling-bling, England shirts, barrel bellies, jet-ski tans and Posh-Spice-clone wives. One or two of them are even drinking from cans of lager as they shop. It's all a bit of a lark and a distraction, really. Another holiday sideshow. But there are plenty of the more ' how can I put it? ' serious types, too. So for every smirking, piss-takey 'Ar much is them snails, Pedro?' there's a restraint-straining 'Have you tried that wuuuuunderful Gratinée de Coquille St Jacques yet? Ah, c'est trés trés bon!' The French people, though, all look different and all sound simply, unaffectedly, uninflectedly French ' not one of them playing up to anyone's idea of a cultural stereotype. No 'uniforms', no accents, no push to impress. It's like they're above all that petty crap. They just seem so laid back and casual ' in some ways, perhaps, aloof from it all. That aura of quiet, genial superiority that the French, with their formidable intellectual heritage, always seem to have about them. Some see it as arrogance ' but I'd sooner that kind than our kind.

At one corner, I pass a Rotisserie stall where the crowds are bustling and inquisitive. The chef looks exactly how a chef should look: barrel-chested, white apron and hat, moustache with Poirot-twirled ends, a sheen of sweat glistening on his forehead as he carves lovingly into the steaming meat. He even has an opera CD playing in the background. Exhausted with his effort, he hands over to an assistant and flumps down in a chair, fanning his face with a towel. He sings along to a few passages of the opera in a rumbling baritone, round and rich as a ballon of ruby port. He then leans forward and stirs at something that's obviously what's drawn the crowds in: a giant tureen of mushrooms, bubbling away in a fragrant liquor of passata, onions, garlic, basil and olive oil. £4 for a small bowl, but this is one thing I can't resist.

As I tuck in, I look around me and notice how several people seem to be naturally filtering out of the market and across the road to the more familiar settings of the chippy and the pub ' those earthing-rods of British life. A white convertible Rolls Royce sails by, driven by a man who could be 30 or 60. He looks on the younger side, though his face is flushed by more than the effects of the sun or the price of petrol. He's wearing a powder blue open-necked shirt, a straw trilby and a pair of brilliant white, pin-sharp slacks. Next to him, on the buffed red leather, sits a woman in her twenties in a dazzling orange and white print dress and a floppy-brimmed straw hat that she has to hold in place. A modern day Gatsby and his Daisy. They're driving slowly enough for everyone to take it in in full detail: the lifestyle, the consumption, the luxury¦ and the ease with which to enjoy them. It looks a tad out of place on the jangling Esplanade ' but is quintessentially British nonetheless.

The other half of it.