Sunday 20^th June 2010

I’m known for my patience but this English summer grey and cold has gone too far. Let’s transport to blazing blue and pink Menton, on France’s Cote d’Azur (sorry no accents) where Robert Nevil, historian of the Pony Club, Blanche Spain, England’s leading wordswoman, and Joshua Baring, young, coming, knows all the restaurants, are lodged in a high-level villa for three weeks.

There are two kinds of PLRG holiday, one resembles full hospitalisation, the other is not so much a visit as a take-over.

The Menton party are having the other. You know from yesterday that they have been tidying graves. Now hear from Blanche Spain herself. Oh lucky readers, this is exclusive direct from the heights of English prose today:

‘Fancies of finochietto melted onto crostini over barely shivering flame for hours, exquisite tablescapes, fresh cut flowers; you cannot leave RN alone lest he find yet another way to render elegant the life, deadhead the pelargonia, capture the jacaranda’s deep blue tinge against the mouldering rosy buildings, meanwhile attired in an array of linens that would shame forever the holidaying Mandelson of last year at Corfu.’

You shall just have this glimpse for now. Come back tomorrow for more bold and glorious ventures in cuisine, rare, rare sight-seeing (the Lesbian Rothschild villa) and a pinch of light but loving sneering at petunias.

Blanche Spain's Specs Wrought into a Riviera Scene

Lovely Petunias at the Casino Municipale San Remo

A Riviera Look - But Do Not Mock. It is Its Own Thing