La Rentrée, The Return (to school (implied)) is a big deal in France. I guess it is elsewhere too, but here it has A Name with Capital Letters, special supermarket displays and Special Offers from everyone including Chanel.

This year for me it meant moving house, albeit slowly. I’m still doing it, in fact, as you read this (and a special welcome to all my new readers from Germany! No idea why I’ve suddenly become popular there but Guten Morgen!).

We got back from our excellent trip to England on Saturday and I spent Sunday sorting through stuff to take to the new apartment in Palavas, dining room pictured here (left). Then on Monday morning when I tried to start my car it decided that, on balance, that was not what it was going to do.

A tow truck and a lift meant that I did arrive in Palavas in the end, and I have started settling in.

A hire car later and now all I have to do is teach my first lesson this afternoon and then I have the rest of this week to finish moving in.

For the first time in a very long time I am going to have An Office (lots of capital letters today). It will also be Roxanne and/or Scarlett’s bedroom for the few days per month they’re here, but I haven’t really had a room that was just for officing in more than a decade, and even then it quickly became a temporary bedroom. Peckham was probably the last time I had a fixed space for office stuff, in fact, so I’m looking forward to that very much indeed.

This morning I had a nice long walk along the beach as the sun rose over Carnon Port, seen here from one of the long piers where the local fishermen are not very friendly. Beach walks are very good for me, I find, physically and mentally. Last year the apartment I had from February to June faced away from the beach, over the ‘Etang’, the inland lake behind Palavas. Whilst it had spectacular sunset views it didn’t face the beach and I felt less inclined to go for walks, with consequent reductions in my health; now, I step out of my French windows (which are not called that in France, they’re called ‘the door’), walk along my terrace, out through my private gate (see photo above) and onto the beach. Much healthier.

I wrote back in June about the coming holidays, and August was indeed a lovely break. I visited Paris twice, once with Roxanne and then again with Scarlett and her friend Calie to see the Disney 100 exhibition and the Hockney exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton; both very excellent, and if you’re someone who buys LV bags, please keep up the good work to sponsor my art habit.

We went to England for a couple of weeks at the end of the month staying with my splendid sister and brother in law, and thanks again to them for their always very generous welcome.

We visited Brighton for a few days and ate at the splendid Salt Room, where they made me a lovely turbot with beurre blanc. Everyone else, to their and above all my shame, ate beef or chicken. In the town’s premier fish restaurant, overlooking the sea. For shame.

We had a ‘Secrets of The Lanes’ guided tour of Brighton with Ric from Only In Brighton – very highly recommended indeed as a great introduction to the town and its history, and then my daughters spent all our money shopping there.

We had afternoon tea at Claridges which is something I’ve wanted to do for a VERY long time, more than a decade in fact. I used to teach a lesson on the luxury hotel industry at Vatel, and used Claridges and the BBC documentary from 2012 as a prime example of how things should be done, so it was delightful to finally be a recipient of their excellent service; Anthony our waiter – two months into his six month internship there – performed brilliantly and will go far in the industry, I’m sure.

Whilst in London we visited the London Museum’s ‘Secrets of the Thames’ Mudlark exhibition in Docklands, a really fascinating experience especially the firsthand accounts from mudlarks about why they do what they do. This is something that particularly interests Scarlett, combining free stuff, mud, and making things from stuff she’s found.

We also visited Kew Gardens for the day, a very lovely place to spend walking around for a few hours. Now, the work is centered around collecting and saving endangered species for plants, rather than the shameless outright plunder that went on throughout the entire Victorian era. Still, it did give us those magnificent greenhouses.

And Bletchley Park took a day to visit properly with a second visit coming up next year, I think; we arrived after four hours touring the huts at the last one to find that it was in fact a giant hanger full of long articles and huge amounts of information about Alan Turing but without the energy we needed to do it justice.

So, Christmas or Easter will see us returning there and visiting the National Museum of Computing next door as well.

The few items we did have time to check out were very moving, like this recreation of his desk and office. We watched The Imitation Game the night before our visit to Bletchley, and the whole experience was deeply moving. For a while there we had moved on a lot from those days of criminalizing homosexuality, and it’s deeply disheartening to see a move back towards those days. Disgraceful, even.

Our last day out was a river boat trip from Blackfriars down to Greenwich to visit the Cutty Sark and the Royal Observatory.

The entire Cutty Sark experience was very well done indeed, really bringing to life the history of the ship and the people who sailed on it. We were constantly impressed with the quality of the museums and exhibitions everywhere we went in England; art is very well done in France, but museums can be rather dry here.

The Royal Observatory at the top of the hill was another wonderful visit.

The chance to see John Harrison’s H4 timepiece was another moving moment; so much history is tied into this object which took him 20 years to create and then change the world completely. Without it, navigation was very much a hit (often hard!) and miss business; afterwards, the oceans were opened and we – Europeans, that is – could travel the world and know more or less exactly where we were.

We did the entire trip by train, with my kind sister and brother in law offering taxi service too; we had only one bad experience coming back from Greenwich on the notorious Thameslink service from Blackfriars. The TGVs and Eurostar from home and back again were wonderful and confirmed to me how much better they are than the truly horrible experience that flying has become these days.

And now, back to work.