We Water-Joust at Sète «

We Water-Joust at Sète

Tuesday 16th April 2013

The first day on board the Krystal Quest I underwent a Press Conference with Randy Azurental, CEO of Completely Fantastic Club Cruises. Val, meanwhile, lay down in the state room. After that we were destination emersed in Sète, which is a remote fishing village on the Camargue’s edge with a sea-water canal running through its middle.

Canal through town – so Venice, Venice naturally. Sète another Venice!

Val and I made a bee-line for the cemetery, half-way up a hill on the town’s edge. Many tombs with own front door, shrunken chapels crammed, where last member of the family alive, should money have run out, might conveniently lodge until the final call. Some famous dead present. We hunt for hours for grave of Paul Valèry, much signalled, but apparently end of the rainbow effect, signs just took us round and round in a loop. At last we said, ‘Who was Paul Valèry anyway?’ A famous crooner also buried. Sasha Distell? No, Georges Brassons. But we gave up hope. Val v. up with Georges Brassons, me, Adrian Edge, not.

Many tombs in interesting state of decay.

In the evening we huddled on a specially erected luxury seating stand beside that canal I mentioned before – in the Venice part of Sète. Some local men and boys, mostly quite fat, were taking their clothes off in the street. The Mayor was present. It was far from warm but not raining. Cruising greatnesses had come ashore. There were even New York Greatnessess in good black wool capes, looking sixty, only the true ninety when moving, rather like the latter-day Nancy Reagan, who at her husband’s funeral looked years younger than as First Lady twenty years before – except when in motion.

Strange row-boats were on the water. The stout men and boys, now changed into nautical white, were on board. On the extended raised stern of each vessel stood one of the men or boys armed with a long pole. Suddenly the opposing boats were being rowed violently towards each other to the accompaniment of reedy medieval drum-rolls produced by onboard musicians. The two aloft with their poles prepared for action, stood square, with knees bent and pole horizontal. As the argosies were upon one another, the boys at the rear veered their poles, with metal ends, directly at one another. Flimsy wooden shields were their only protection against being run through entirely. But how easy to miss and take out an eye? Or a brain? Death was not the object, however, merely to push. The pole was to push against only the left side of the wooden shield, the right was against the rules. Rules! He who pushed the hardest biffed the other into the water. Within seconds it was over. What an ejaculation! Either both still standing or one plunged into the freezing water. Then a limp period while they re-grouped for another bout, ten seconds of drama, poles wavering, man in the water or not and so it went on.

This is the water-jousting of Sète, unique to that town.

My nerves couldn’t stand it. Thank God it was over. I thought to see blood in the water, catastrophe at any moment. But the cruisers were reeling at the hilarity and quaintness. Returning to the ship via a champagne reception in the dockyard, the New York Greatness said, ‘You don’t see anything like that in New York.’

Recovered in the state room, though, Val and I took a different view. This was the real thing, oddly enough. The slight drear of the town contributed. The men and boys of Sète showed their water-jousting, with no japes or carry-on for tourists but just as it is. It’s their sport.