…St Tropez also has traffic jams. Lots of big ones, or rather one gigantic big one which just fills the town from end to end.
I’m just back home now in Avignon after a long Ascension weekend there cooking for a private French family in their villa overlooking the town; mum, dad and a handful of kids, two other members of staff and a few visitors popping in here and there. Including the lady who’s now nanny to the children of Picasso’s grandson’s children. Which was kinda cool.
They wanted, and obviously I cooked, simple Provencal food: an escabeche of supions (baby cuttlefish. Very baby, in fact, little finger sized and a real pain to clean a kilo of them), roast poulets de Bresse (served with mache and home-made crisps), grilled sardines, Jean-Remi’s famous ‘Trilogies’ of tomates confites, goat cheese and aubergine caviar. I’ve been working on my own version of this and am quite please with my Millefeuilles Provencaux. A steel ring with a layer of goat cheese, then some dried tomato paste, then thinly-sliced, olive oil-fried aubergines and courgettes built up in layers, topped with some roast red peppers and a drizzle of pesto round the outside. His is easer to serve in a restaurant environment – mine takes a while to do and it’s not that easy to keep overnight. But it looks pretty and it’s all mine.
Shopping twice a day; prices in St Tropez are simply horrendous; rougets I’ve refused to buy in Avignon on the grounds that they cost EUR19 a kilo come for EUR32 a kilo here; parma ham at EUR90 a kilo; cups of espresso for EUR2.50. It goes on.
And being the long Ascension weekend the world and its dog came to town, all by car. An hour to shop, an hour to drive back the three kilometres to the villa.
I came home by bus and train which took seven hours, partly because the bus driver was busy chatting on her batphone and we left five minutes late, arriving 30 seconds after the train had pulled out of the St Raphael station (there’s no train station in St Tropez).
Many of the summer jobs I’m looking at are in St Tropez, but it’s a nightmare to get to; Delphine and I spent enough time apart this winter, and we’re not keen to do it all over again this summer.
Still.

Well, four days with the possibility of more to come. Working for a French family in Saint Tropez up in the Parcs de Saint Tropez, cooking for a dozen of them over the forthcoming Ascension weekend. I like Saint Tropez, we went there a few years ago and I cooked in exchange for accommodation with a friend from the UK.
Unfortunately I get another bloody Land Rover Defender to drive. What is it with rich people, why do they buy these crap cars?

14.5 out of 20 for my exam at the end of last term, which I was very pleased with indeed, third in the class behind David, who’s a waiter-turned-cook working in a posh restaurant north-east of Avignon, and Beatrice, the Belgian owner of a local very smart chambre d’hôte bed-and-breakfast. And then Philippe our teacher let slip that he’s marked us down ‘very severely’ and that for our proper CAP exam we could expect to do a few marks better than the scores he’d given us. Result indeed, that’s gotta be a good 18 or 19 out of 20 for the real thing. I was let down my my ‘commercial presentation’ – talking about the dish I’d prepared. I misunderstood the question asked, and chatted about the ingredients and techniques I’d used as if I were talking about it to my chef de cuisine. In fact, I’d been asked to present it to a customer who would want only general details and to be told how delicious the dish is. Lesson learned.
But that’s the only good news today because I’m feeling very, very poorly indeed and got Delphine to drive me to school this morning because I was feeling so bad. It’s a flare-up of a condition I’ve been suffering from on and off since 1997, when we first started looking for a house in France (we being me and my ex-wife). Then, we were staying in a B&B just west of Nimes and I was feeling fluey, which I put down to a long drive from London and just general tiredness. I woke up at about three in the morning dying of thirst and completely disorientated, and fell out of bed. I was trying to get up and go to the bathroom but was so badly disoriented and confused that I actually couldn’t work out which way was ‘down’ in order to push myself upright, and my ex had to physically drag me back into bed.
By the time the doctor came in the morning I wasn’t feeling too bad, and he took blood samples and sent them off for tests but couldn’t find anything. I was worried I’d been bitten by something – the day before we’d been to the Camargue and I was worried that a malaria-laden mosquito had bitten and infected me. Which is rubbish, of course, the Camarguais mosquitos live a few thousand kilometres north of their malarial cousins in Africa. Still. There are poisonous spiders in the vines, everyone said. Scorpions. And I was definitely suffering a bite, my leg had swollen up to three times its normal size and hurt like mad.
So this morning at school I can feel the symptoms recurring, as they have done just about every year since 1997: flu-like feelings, leg swelling and soon I’ll get the shivers and shakes so violent that I can’t stand up, so I excuse myself and go home for a lie down.
Before I leave Chef gives me the recipes for today, black forest gateau and paupiettes of merlan (whiting) which I promise to do later this week.
And then I go home and spend 24 hours in bed, shivering and shaking, before the doctor comes to see me. She does lots of tests which, I tell her, will be useless; I’ve seen lots of doctors and specialists over the past nine years and none has ever found a solution. She comes back in 24 hours and tells me I have an erisipel, blood poisoning from streptococcal bacteria which apparently got in through my foot which has been infected with athlete’s foot bacteria since for ever. She wants me to go to hospital but that seems an over-reaction to me; instead, a nurse comes and gives me injections in my stomach every day to counter the infection, and I have to have complete bed-rest. This isn’t difficult, I’m so exhausted that I even have to sit down while brushing my teeth – I really am that fatigued. So I don’t get round to cooking that cake and fish after all. Sorry, chef.