'Betty Blue Ville'- the Gruissan diaries

Day one

I am sure many readers will remember the opening scene of Betty Blue (en francais: 37.2 C le matin)– the sex scene that goes on for almost twenty minutes - so long that it’s embarrassing to watch with your mother (though I never did). And, perhaps, you will remember the next scene, where Betty goes into a fit of rage and throws everything not fixed to the floor out of the window and the proprietor strolls over to see what’s wrong and tells her that her (his) beach house is now ‘very Zen’: well that was shot here in Gruissan – my home for the coming month. Unfortunately I’ve not got one of the stilt houses (or perhaps fortunately if one has issues with noisy neighbours) but a pied á terre in the centre of the village – in a pedestrianized street. The only sounds for most of the day are those of the church clock which - bizarrely - chimes the hour twice, once three minutes after the hour, children playing, bicycles going past and people licking ice-creams (if you listen very closely). Many people who come here are apparently ‘movie tourists’, perhaps in search of their muse. My greeter assumed I was one of them - after all Betty Blue is one of the most iconic, and globally successful, French films from the past fifty years.

But most are attracted by the sun, sea, sand and the windsurfing and sailing opportunities. In the words of Rough Guide this coastline is ‘buffeted by wind that could flay the shell off of a tortoise’ (I didn’t research that bit very thoroughly before booking). Serendipity plays a big role in my life: I am not (consciously) a movie tourist and certainly not a windsurfer or yachter. I just came here because (to paraphrase Colour Blind James Experience singing about Memphis): ‘I just like the way that it sits there on the map’. And it certainly sits well on the map: surrounded by lagoons (used to produce eels but which occasionally attract flamingos migrating to or from the Carmague), salt pans and with distant views of the Pyrenées Occidentales , you couldn’t imagine a more idyllic spot. But did I mention the wind? It could flay the hind off of a rhinoceros. And unlike anywhere else I have ever been, it doesn’t blow off the sea onto the land but in the reverse direction, from the Pyrenées onto the Mediterranean and the shapes of the trees and shrubs bear witness to this being a long term phenomenon, not a seasonal aberration.

Day 2
Forty eight hours after arriving in Gruissan I finally get away from my work, get back to my van, put the wheels back on my bike (yeah I packed the van full of kit - even a printer for my work) and head to the real ‘Betty Blue-ville’, some 2-3 k east of my new lodgings. It’s an enormous disappointment. Instead of a few isolated bungalows on stilts, it feels more like a well-heeled banlieu, lacking manicured lawns (because of the wind and salt) but otherwise packed with state of the art cars, bo-bo wind chimes and ‘smiling happy people’ everywhere. Alas, there seems to be an absence of highly-vocal multi-orgasmic French women throwing their worldly possessions out of the window. Borth is actually far cooler (if you can live with listening to Brummie accents most of the day) although probably doesn’t rank as high on the ‘hours of sunshine per year’ index. I wrote yesterday about the strange reality inversion here . Nearly every beach resort I have been too (and I am no expert on these matters) has wind blowing in off the sea. Here, it blows off the mountains (the Pyrenees) towards the sea. The 3 k cycle ride back from the beach felt like a one-in-three hill, although it was perfectly flat.

Days 3 and 4
My legs were barely strong enough to carry me up the stairs the past two days, I wondered if it was the effects of the wind from yesterday but it lasted all day and the next so must have been something viral (though jokingly I told myself it was just internet access withdrawal symptoms) . So I just stayed at home with my books (and heated up a tin of cassoulet when I got hungry): the new Murakami (which sold a million in Japan in its first week of release) and Patrick Leigh Fermour’s Caribbean travel odyssey ‘The traveller’s tree’. PLF certainly had a knack for good timing. He walked across Europe in 1934, just before it ignited into a cauldron of hatred and later war. He visited the Caribbean in the 1950s just after the war and just before most of the islands got their independence. He is certainly sympathetic to the history of the islands and plight of the slaves on whose sweat and suffering the island’s wealth was built, but didn’t see the independence movement that would soon after arise – although if I am not mistaken with my history it was considerably more peaceful than the first Caribbean state independence (Haiti in the 1850s, which was an absolute bloodbath) or the inter-communal holocaust that accompanied India’s independence.

I like PLF’s work. He has a good pen for describing places, people and incidents along the route. I think every budding travel writer should read him. But sometimes I find him a bit too much of a historian and classicist, assuming the reader has an equally encyclopaedic knowledge (or indeed interest in) the fortunes of, sometimes quite minor, European dynasties and he does throw in some rather overwrought pages of description of buildings or landscapes. Perhaps his writing style is just a bit dated to my eyes. He did enjoy a rather privileged position: segments like (these are not quotes but could easily be) ‘we had a letter of introduction to the Governor-General’s son and spent a pleasant week at his plantation, delving into his library’: or ‘at the end of our hike a meal had been prepared in the shade of the trees by the bearers who had caught the fish just an hour before’ are all too common, suggesting access to a way of travelling that hardly exists these days.