Sarah Jane O’Neill – Page 2 – The Flâneuse Diaries

July 16, 2022July 16, 2022

Tour de France

These days, travel is a game of chance. An obstacle course of swerving strikes, illness and last-minute cancellation. Will your long-awaited escape from this mad island end in the bitter blow of disappointment at Gatwick airport? Will your bag end up adrift in a carpet of unattended luggage?

In a deviation from earlier plans, I decided to put the Aegean on hold and take the train to France, travelling from Paris to Bordeaux and onto Ille de Re. The last time I did anything like this I was 19, clueless and skint, lurching from disaster to disaster as is the rite of passage of all interrailers. This time there will be taxis, boutique hotels and not a whiff of a rucksack. Please. I’m fifty next year.

(A quick note on logistics. As anyone who has experienced them will concur, the French know how to do trains. Sleek, inexpensive and when they’re not striking, Mussolini could have set his watch by them. If you’re considering touring France by train like this, download the brilliant SNCF Connect app and plan your route in advance. The best site to consult for the latest status on all aspects of French travel can be found here)

The day I travel to Bordeaux from Paris, it is the midst of a blistering heatwave in south-western France. I awake from a sleep littered with anxiety dreams having dozed off in front of TF1 News, helpfully showing pictures of a train derailment that was finally having its day in court. It’s rumoured to be in the late thirties by midday and I have visions of melting tracks and rogue bush fires.

The best thing about train travel is you can see the country and your suitcase at the same time. I’m on a double decker train and it feels luxurious for forty quid. By the time I get to Bordeaux, it is a ridiculous 41 degrees, which if you need a translation is nearly 106 Fahrenheit. The last time I have known heat like this I was in a canoe on the Orange River in Namibia. I look at my phone and wonder if it will spontaneously combust.

I’m staying in what’s known as the Golden Triangle of Bordeaux at the Hotel Konti which truth be told is a bit fur coat and no knickers. They’ve upgraded me to a bigger room with an adjoining suite which I’m inexplicably not meant to use, but nobody would know if I did. I arrive with a snapped off suitcase handle after my taxi driver yanks it out of the boot with too much vigour. I really need to learn to travel lighter and decant my toiletries. It is my voyaging downfall.

Bordeaux

Sheltering under an awning near the hotel with an Aperol Spritz I watch my sweat-clad waiter stare up at the sky like the apocalypse is coming. The forecast is thunder and lightning at 8 pm followed by brilliant sunshine an hour later. I decide to escape to the Miroir D’Eau on the bank of the Garonne to cool off. It’s really a flâneuse’s dream here as the location of the river means it’s hard to ever get too lost and the Bordelaise are full of character and very watchable.

The city feels like the embodiment of old France. It’s got the classy vibe of Avignon, yet it’s so much grander and has a multi-cultural atmosphere that’s unusual in cities outside of Marseille. The ancient links between Bordeaux and England run deep, as after Eleanor of Aquitaine had finished with Louis V11, she married our Henry Plantagenet, resulting in three centuries of Anglo-French government in the city and a booming wine trade between the two nations.

There’s a smattering of largely empty English pubs and on my wanderings, I count The Charles Dickens, The Sweeney Todd, The Dick Turpin and, to bring things more up to date, Le Brixton. It also seems to be a city that attracts groups of British men in their fifties and sixties on gastronomy tours…. apart from this though we are very much en France.

A neighbourhood not to be missed is St Michel which is Bordeaux’s multi-cultural hub. There’s a big and bustling brocante in Les Puces de St Michel where I stop for coffee and seat myself opposite two grizzled antique dealers who are brazenly counting wads of cash whilst being brought occasional objets d’art for approval. One picks up a freakishly long and ancient hunting rifle and points it at the other, before laughing and camply sparking up a cocktail cigarette. Through the huge sash windows in the surrounding square there are all kinds of life peering out. I get the sense that whilst it looks grand on the outside, the reality within may tell a different story.

My main reason to visit this neighbourhood is for foodie’s haven Les Marché des Capucins and the legendary pintxos that are served on a Sunday lunchtime at La Maison du Pata Negra. It’s too cool to have a website, but get there at midday, grab a seat at the counter and choose from an array of delights which will give anything you may have had in San Sebastian a run for their euros. Just store up the colour coded cocktail sticks from each one and hand into the bar owner when you’ve fully gorged, and they will add up the bill.

Ille de Ré

It’s Tuesday and France is still raking over the coals of Macron not getting a majority. Breakfast television is full of this and of the freak weather. A man is interviewed holding three white hailstones the size of billiard balls and the camera pans to the smashed windscreen of a car. I’ve tried to decipher what the political pundits are saying with their polo necks and their crossed arms, but here finally is a news item I can understand. My taxi driver on the way to Bordeaux St Jean seems concerned about the future of France, although I point out that compared to us, everyone seems completely sane. He’s too polite to disagree.

Other than googling beaches, I have done no research on Ille de Re, so on arrival at a deserted La Rochelle Ville I haven’t a clue where I’m going. I flag down a taxi wildly like I’m on 5^th Avenue and warn the driver to be gentle with my now new suitcase. We cross a long toll bridge onto the island and it is now feeling very rural and is peppered with vineyards. Sometimes it’s good not to have too many expectations because it turns out that Ille de Re is ridiculously beautiful. It’s how I would imagine Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard – only very Gallic – and it smells incredible. It’s fragrance of salty Atlantic breezes, pine forests and hollyhocks needs to be bottled.

Ille de Re – absolutely no riff raff here

My guesthouse (and you need to stay here – antiques, walled garden, amazing hospitality) is in the centre of a village called Le Bois Plage-en-Ré which is an ideal situation half way down the island. It’s less than ten minutes’ walk from the sandy, sweeping La Plage des Gollandieres and a ten minute bus ride from the main town of Saint Martin-de-Ré (be warned Line 3 turns up when it wants to). If you like laid back luxury this is the place for you. Lots of small dogs, a few Ralph Lauren look-a-likes in Breton tops and as much reasonably priced seafood as you can handle. It’s Midsummer’s Eve and there’s a disco band setting up in the square called Les Biscuit. There are stalls selling huge vats of mussels and there is absolutely no riffraff. I think I’m going to like it here.

I’m not sure you can write a guide to Ille de Ré as it’s simply a place you experience through your senses. As I’m walking back to the guesthouse, I chat to a man who tells me he is the unlikely combination of part time healer and part time local salt miner. I ask him what the residents do when it rains. ‘Nothing’ he shrugs. The island, which is full of cycling paths, is very much an outdoor destination. Its local population is around 20,000, swelling to 250,000 in August. Don’t come in August would be my tip.

If you need an injection of urban life, atmospheric La Rochelle is a one-hour bus ride away. My only knowledge of this city is through the 1980s Tricolore French textbook where sadly I also left my ability to speak the language. Sandrime and Pierre buy a ham baguette and it is good. I would like an Orangina, please. Je suis en rock star. Well, OK, not je suis en rock star, but you get the drift. The only downside of wandering around this lovely city was the sudden downpour that forced me into a insalubrious harbourside restaurant where I made the mistake of ordering ‘un piece du boucher’. It turns out that this is French for lucky dip of mystery meat and, whilst I’m not suggesting that this meal once won a race at The Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, I did have to send it back.

So, the love affair with France (and trains) continues. On my way back I found myself wandering the concourse at beautiful Gare du Lyon, staring up longingly at departure boards. The continent of Europe is so wide, Mein Herr…..

March 19, 2022March 19, 2022

We’ll Always Have Paris

So, it turned out that Greece wasn’t the word. But then neither was Malaga, Sicily, Nice or the West Coast of Ireland. Yet finally, finally I get to leave the UK, my quest for spontaneity, variety and gratuitous eating only a Eurostar away. Of course, it has to be Paris, the ultimate flâneuse city, where I will endeavour to get my groove back. As someone murders an Adele cover on Elton John’s piano, I look up at Tracey Emin’s neon I Want My Time With You and wonder what has taken me so long.

On the subject of Paris, I reside firmly in the camp of the late and much missed Anthony Bourdain. Eat loads of cheese and don’t make any f***ing plans. The last time I visited was during the bright, optimistic summer of 2006. I’d just ended an ill-advised and torrid affair with a theatrical agent and had decided to resume the recovery position in Paris and get down to the essential business of eating cheese without plans. (Well, this was not strictly true. My only other aim was to visit Versailles, arriving to find a sign draped across the Hall of Mirrors that said: ‘Closed for Refurbishment’).

Nearly two decades on and what is most noticeable is how warm and welcoming everyone is. This is not the Paris I recall. I’m expecting to be here under sufferance with my little backpack and my horrible French. So when did everyone become so charming and hospitable?

Notre Dame still standing. I know how it feels.

During my last visit I stayed at the precarious Hotel Esmeralda opposite Notre Dame, run by a gruff, chain-smoking septuagenarian who was not imbued with charm. She had a black eye patch and exuded the air of a woman who’d spent the Occupation surreptitiously poisoning members of the Gestapo whilst also supplying them with girls. By contrast, the lovely man at the twinkling and highly recommended Hotel Henriette tells me how much he’s missed our accents, shuddering over having spent the past two years with no-one to entertain but French tourists. I sympathise wholeheartedly and secretly wonder how he’d fancy back-to-back seasons with ‘Jeanette and Dougie from Manchester’.

It seems we’ve all felt claustrophobic.

Saturday Evening

I have no inner compass, but I do have google maps and a vague recollection of the Ille St Louis. I want red checked tablecloths, proper grown-up waiters and beaucoup de produits animaux and I find it all in the Café St Regis. I realise that since 2020, whilst I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time alone, I’ve done it largely in the same two or three places. The stimulation of new sounds, smells, sights and tastes all happening at once is quite the thrill. I order another glass of Bordeaux and the last éclair and stare out the window at a chic woman promenading with a small dog.

Talking of things the size of small dogs, it is worth mentioning here that whilst Paris is the City of Light, it is also the City of Rats. I spot one hurtling towards me in the dark as I walk past Shakespeare and Company and get ready to boot it across the boulevard. Happily, it darts back into the park and this is my only encounter because I am not a fan. Oddly, they are less visible in the ritzier arrondissements.

Sunday

Paris early on a Sunday seems to me like London used to be in the 80s – quiet and taking a moment to reflect. I’m walking towards the Jardin du Luxembourg in the sunshine and there’s hardly anyone around, just a man hanging over a wrought iron balcony on the 6^th floor of a Haussmann block. He stretches and greets the day with a deep intake of (probably) Gauloise and is one of the few defiant smokers I see because Parisians now have better plans for their lungs and the Jardin du Luxembourg is a mecca for well-heeled joggers circling its fountains and manicured avenues. The daffodils are yellow and blousy, and the blossom is just on the cusp of bursting out of bud. I find myself humming April in Paris one month premature. It’s been a while since I’ve seen anything this beautiful.

I’m in the neighbourhood for the Pioneers exhibition at the Musee du Luxembourg which runs until July 2022, so if you like the idea of Paris in the 1920s and you’re interested in female artists, don’t queue up at The Louvre, just come straight here. The starry – but certainly not the only – highlight are three paintings by Tamara de Lempicka; notoriously difficult to acquire as they so often adorn the walls of Hollywood stars.

One giant plateau mixte and quick detour to the hotel later (because NOTHING says ‘glamourous mini break’ like having to return early when you’ve forgotten to take your HRT #middleagedparis) and I’m back flâneuring along the Seine. The department stores here are not to be missed. Forget the shopping, just go and gape in wonder at the Art Nouveau glory of the Galeries Lafayette or at La Samaritaine in the 1^st arrondissement where there is a bar on the top floor that is ideal for cocktails and people watching in a spectacular peacock themed setting.

Dinner in the evening at the literary Les Deux Magots in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. It’s a bit of a cliché but I feel the need to channel my inner Simone de Beauvoir and the food is delicious, if a little pricey. I’m feeling slightly sniffly and start to wonder whether I’m catching Covid before remembering the sheer quantity of red meat, wine and dairy I’ve been consuming in the past 24 hours. Oh, that’ll be it then.

Monday

I walk right across Paris to Montmatre, a place I haven’t seen since I was fourteen. There are lots of Americans in ill-fitting berets and one walks past my café table in the Place du Tertre clutching an obscenely large punnet of frites and talking loudly about Van Go. It’s the most touristy experience I’ve had since I’ve been here, but it is still a charming place and the thought of being lucky enough to sit in a café – in the sun – on a spring day – in Paris – with a glass of rose – well, you can’t complain. The artists, who look like salty old dogs, congregate in the square and try to sell you a portrait or a caricature, but they do take no for an answer and they will leave you to daydream. The air is noticeably fresher here, the backstreets are genteel and the view from the Sacre Coeur is worth knocking yourself out for on the climb.

Au Petite Montmatre opposite the famous Abbesses Metro specialises in Croque Monsieur done right, so I take a pit stop here before meandering down through sordid Pigalle and then onto the drama of the Paris Opera. The self-guided tour doesn’t allow you into the auditorium, but the main reception room more than makes up for it with its jaw-dropping beauty and gives the Hall of Mirrors I never got to see a run for its euros.

There are so many things to see and do in Paris but focus on a few arrondissements and follow the food and you won’t go wrong. By Tuesday I am nine parts dairy and feeling infinitely more relaxed than I have for a long time. The Eurostar gets me home in under three and a half hours and for the first time in two years I feel I’ve finally had that thing that’s been the holy grail of the pandemic – a new experience.

La Flâneuse is back.

February 14, 2021February 14, 2021

Please Say Greece is the Word

With the sap slowly rising, I’m starting to think about rejuvenation and the faint beckoning of foreign lands. It is only a tantalising whisper because hey, who am I kidding? W1 is another country to me right now. Having not opened a travel magazine or gratuitously googled a flight for months, I’m beginning to have thoughts. I blame this reawakened flânerie on an excess of French subtitles having blitzed four seasons of Call My Agent in under a week and revelled in its Gallic glory. I don’t want to be in ‘locked down’ suburbia I heckle at the TV. I want to be on the back of Gabriel’s scooter weaving through the Parisian boulevards.

Small wonder I have cabin fever. It took over six months of pandemic for me to venture out on my one and only staycation, or as I like to call it, holidaying in the UK. We chose Norfolk, the Kirstie Allsopp of the outer home counties (smug, jolly sensible boot room, probably drives a Porsche at weekends), in which to celebrate Mamma Flâneuse’s birthday. My solitary holiday goal had been to emerge reborn on Holkham beach like a radiant Gwyneth Paltrow at the end of Twelfth Night, but even that small dream was thwarted. Instead I looked more like a dying duck in a hurricane as Storm Odette battered us all into submission. Even a visit to Cromer pier to buy a stick of rock seemed ill-advised.

Mamma F, delighted as she was by her gifts of rainbow umbrella, Doris Day DVD and three nights in a luxury B&B run by Andy and Steve, flicked through her BBC weather app on the morning of her birthday trilling ‘London, sunshine, Hampshire, sunshine, Cornwall, sunshine…..’. I began a blog entitled ‘Very Wet, Norfolk’, but abandoned it when I realised that having been confined to our room due to the howling gales, I didn’t actually have anything to say. To be fair, we were just thrilled by the change of scene and the opportunity to eat someone else’s food.

Since then my first foray back into the world of armchair travel began recently when I moved my 6^th flight in a year. Having realised that – quelle domage – I would most definitely not be revelling in the aforementioned Gallic glory of the Cote d’Azur this Easter, it was now time to face the inevitable facts. I would not be visiting the Musée National Marc Chagall nor would I be nibbling on socca from a swarthy street vendor or channelling Leslie Caron at some charming bistro. For god’s sake, can I not make a plan? Can I not even make a plan to make a plan?

With booking holidays now like a craps game, I rolled the dice and came up with Santorini in early autumn. Why not? Weather still good, kids in school (fingers crossed), fewer seasonal crowds (again, fingers crossed), best track record for containing COVID-19 in Europe and odds for middle agers like me being vaccinated, more than fair. This is how we decide our travel for now, through a series of calculations we hope will get us to our destination.

I first went to Santorini ten years ago and stayed in Oia in a tiny studio apartment built into the cliff that was reached by going down nearly 200 enormous stone steps – a nightmare for luggage and heels. It had no air conditioning, only windows that opened straight out into the sea and one night I watched a total eclipse from my bed because the holiday was that kind of magical. Below me, a Susan Sarandon-like dance professor from Texas was staying with her teenage daughter in one of the stunning troglodyte houses for which the island is famed. I don’t remember their names, but I still recall our conversations vividly (‘It’s not ‘get into shape’, it’s ‘get into condition’, let’s get the terminology right!’ and ‘Darling, the only reason I agreed to live in Texas, was so I could save up enough money NOT to be in Texas’). I remember how we clutched our mojitos when volcanic tremors rippled through the bar one night and how the waiter gave us an insouciant shrug as we looked expectantly across the caldera. All these moments are inextricably woven into that glorious trip.

Holidays are like strings of jewels. They are made up of people we’ve met, food we’ve tasted, art we’ve gazed upon, snatches of songs we’ve heard and sunsets we’ve watched. These are the things we are missing and the things we need to get back to when it is safe. Until I can dive into the Aegean again and hear the applause as the sun sets, I can feast on these memories. Just as well because when I looked in my Santorini notebook, I was too busy being awed to write much.

I will remedy that next time.