Snow at last

There has been no snow all season, which seemed to signal a relaxing non-skiing ski weekend of spas and bars for Handyman at beautiful Foux d’Allos, pictured, in the Var. So you can imagine his distress at reading the snow forecast last Thursday to discover it was due to blizzard from Friday lunchtime onwards. In the words of that old disco classic I Haven't Stopped Laughing Yet (or was it dancing?)

We left Bar sur Loup kitted out with snow socks(a treat for the Jeep,) leaving a huge vat of Thai chicken curry so the girls didn't starve as they opted to stay at home in the rain rather than join the oldies on the slopes. I filled the fridge with appealing foods and not so appealing oven chips and left strict instructions on walking the dogs, feeding the cats and dogs and refilling their water bowl. The last time we left the girls home alone, the dog bowls were bone dry, pardon the pun, when we arrived back and the poor mutts drank for five minutes without stopping. I'm more worried about the survival of the pets than the girls, who will languish in PJs, unwashed, snacking on pizza and chocolate and watching Celebrity Big Brother until we get home.

We arrived to find the sparsest snow in a decade but by Saturday morning, the white stuff was gently falling and it didn’t stop all weekend. Handyman was quietly gutted at the prospect of actually skiing. Some of the printable comments I heard muttered behind me on the slopes were: ‘I feel like I’ve just hiked up the Eiger with a Mini on my back,’ ‘Welcome to hell’, ‘My thighs feel like they have been smashed with giant mallets,’ and on spotting the bodies of powder virgins strewn across the piste below us, ‘It’s like a scene from Casualty.’

He only needs the tiniest incentive to quit skiing for a glass of red in front of a roaring fire at a bar. In fact as we ate pizza and drank wine (him) and champagne (me) at lunchtime, he confessed that if he was with his friends he wouldn't even venture out of the restaurant until closing time. But he was with me. And I came here to ski. At least he remembered his ski jacket this time.

We arrived back at the hotel pleasantly pooped to hear that there had been an earthquake in Liguria which measured 5.3 on the Richter scale and the tremors were felt as far afield as the Var, the Alpes Maritimes….and Fenelon School! Livvy rang to say that her building was shaking so much that a projector fell to the floor and smashed, causing major panic among the students. They evacuated the lycee but poor Issy, who is at the college building down the road, was forced to continue playing ping pong in the gym as everything shook around her! French teachers don’t get fazed by much. I wanted to laugh but given that I was 100 km away from my babies while they endured a minor earthquake, that would make me a very bad momma indeed.

We spent Saturday on un-groomed reds and perfect off-piste powder with virtually no visibility due to continuous snow and low cloud. It was like skiing with a black bag over your head but it was amazing nonetheless and although I was shattered by late afternoon, the hammam and steam room restored me in time for a scrummy supper at the Dahut in town.

The journey home was another story. Three and a half hours in blizzards along snow packed passes and narrow cols with sheer drops to be exact. I’ve experienced some dramatic journeys over the years – hanging off the edge of a sheer drop in Meribel with my precious 15 month old Livvy strapped into her car seat as we teetered precariously and navigating from the Grand Canyon to the Rockies in Colorado in an open top Porsche Carrera on the Bull Run are right up there – but this was something else.

The sat nav inexplicably bypassed snow-free Castellane to take us on am icy climb through medieval villages at the top of the world which would have been gloriously picturesque in the summer but in failing light and snow storms was anything but fun. As we slowed down to put the car back into four wheel drive mode near Greolieres, we started slipping backwards towards a snowy ditch. The signal on our phones went kaput and despite gentle acceleration, the car kept slipping backwards off the road. A very stressed Handyman had to get out and wrestle with the snow socks before we finally managed to get back on the road and creep along the scariest pass of all, some 1000 metres high in driving snow, with a sheer drop on skating rink style roads with not a snow plough in sight.

Fifteen minutes from home, the snow gave way to slush. I have never been so pleased to see rain in my life.

Blue Monday

Well it's mid January, the most depressing month of the year, and today is officially the most depressing day of the year, which for some reason was designated the third Monday in January by someone who knows about these things.

As days go, I have had more depressing ones, particularly as I started today in bright sunshine with an almond croissant and a large full fat latte.

The past ten days, on the other hand, have been deeply depressing mainly due to the lack of honesty from people who say they are going to do a job for you. Back in October, we decided to have our pool renovated over the winter period ready for spring this year. Many back issues of Cote Sud later, I settled on the perfect look....refurbished dry stone walls, green tiles and lining and chalky white travertine terrace, as seen rather stylishly above.

The work was supposed to take a month...and three months later, we still have an empty pool surrounded by cement mixers, muddy trenches and building materials. The scenario seems to go like this. You engage a builder, he looks at the work, gives you a price and a start date. You part with some cash upfront to buy the materials, the start date comes and goes, no-one shows up, the mobile voicemail says, you can leave a message but I can't retrieve them so I can't call you back, and you are left high and dry until said tradesman decides he might put in an appearance after all.

I'm not sure what is so difficult about just turning up with a diary, checking the date you are free and writing it down and then turning up as arranged. My career has run really effectively on this premise for the last 25 years.

The work started, stopped, started, stopped and after a frustrating ten day hiatus a propos of absolutely nothing, finally restarted again on Saturday. Our pool liner man, the next domino in line, had to have a major operation last week. Coming hot on the heels of the builder who rarely showed up, he arrived on Saturday, ten days later than originally planned, in a neck brace and armed with his hospital scans. If this is a scam to complete another job on the side, it's pretty damn convincing.

As you can see from the photo, it's a long way off the contemporary oasis we envisaged last year. At this rate, we'll be lucky to get it finished by next October, and it's not even the fault of the weather. But when it is finished, the idea of sitting down there in warm sunshine on a lounger and looking across the valley with a glass of rose in hand is deeply comforting.

There is always a positive point of view when you flip it, and the upside is whenever Handyman moots the idea of buying a plot of land and building a house from scratch,which he does at least once a week, I simply laugh hysterically and aim a slap at his idealistic butt once I've picked myself up off the floor. I would rather poke rusty pins in my eyes than embark on a building project here unless we did all the work ourselves. Which is unlikely despite us having every back issue of Grand Designs ever published. It also means we won't be doing our usual, and finishing a house and then selling up before the paint is dry to move onto the next shack, I mean project. So maybe the lax, laidback, diary-free builders have done me a favour after all.

As first months of the year go, this one is pretty damn fine. The weather has been phenomenal, with blue skies and warm sunshine pretty much every day for the past six weeks. It's more like April, in fact it's drier and less windy than many Aprils I can remember here. All we need is some snow for Greolieres and January will be just perfect.

To ski or not to ski?

Christmas just isn't Christmas unless I see snow and given that we have had the driest, warmest winter since we arrived in France in 2008, there is a significant lack of the white stuff in our local resort Greolieres les Neiges. 

So we decided to head up to Isola 2000, a two hour drive away, for a day skiing in the sunshine with Karin and Paul and the boys. Handyman likes to get out of the door as quickly as possible, often waiting impatiently in the car glued to his watch while I 'faff about' checking that we all have gloves, hats, ski boots etc. 

So reader you will understand how much I laughed when on arriving at the car park by the ski pass desk yesterday morning, we got out of the car in minus 5 but sunny weather to discover that brainiac had left his ski jacket on the sofa at home in his haste to leave the house and get on the road. A couple of friends pointed out that this is the kind of behaviour one would expect from a teenage girl, who fancied her chances of snaring a new designer jacket at the resort's massively overpriced ski boutique. Indeed, Handyman shares quite a few qualities with the teen breed, chiefly an ability to drink his own bodyweight of whatever alcohol is on tap, throwing a strop if he can't watch the TV show of his choice, namely Top Gear, and an obsession with farting as loudly and as often as possible and exhibiting no shame at this spurious talent. 

In his defence, it also has to be said that he is always up at the crack of dawn, tackling any number of household maintenance tasks (he is currently redesigning and renovating the pool) he always brings me my glass of water and lemon and cayenne in bed each morning, he cooks a mean curry and he generally does all of this with a smile on his face. 

Off he trotted to the aforementioned rip off joint to be sold their most stylish budget ski jacket at a mere 250 euros (it is replacing the electric drill he covets as an early birthday present) and to complete a successful morning, he also got fleeced spending over 100 euros on a ski helmet for Issy, who took advantage of the incumbent stress to choose the most designer crash helmet on offer. It came in handy when she fell off the steepest part of the drag lift just as I was watching her ascent and thinking 'God I really hope she doesn't fall off.' She rolled down the hill on her butt, with both skis whacking her in the head, later telling me 'Mum I will never ever moan again about wearing a helmet.' Luckily the Raybans that she had 'borrowed' from Livvy without permission also stayed intact, although on seeing photographic evidence of Issy sporting the shades in a photo I bbmed Liv in London to try and elicit some envy, it's questionable whether Issy will remain intact having been threatened with strangulation for the dawn raid on her stuff.

As we got on the first lift of the day, Handyman's observation that we had already spent the equivalent of a return flight to the Caribbean and we hadn't even had lunch yet could not be argued with. Moreover,he added, 'I'd rather be lying on a sun lounger in Barbados than sitting on this bloody lift freezing my tits off. I HATE skiing.' So the new jacket was a great investment. I think my idea of buying a ski lodge in the mountains for winter getaways with the proceeds from my first book needs some more work.

All there is to add is that I had a good time, enjoyed a delicious lunch and a couple of pre New Year glasses of bubbly at the Cow Club, which has set me up perfectly for preparing our New Year's Eve curry extravaganza with friends tonight. 

Happy New Year and may 2012 be a healthy, happy fruitful for year for us all.

Christmas cheer

Festive fact of the day...six people a year die after eating Christmas decorations they mistakenly thought were chocolate. Is this is a case of fatal tinselitis?

Having tried denial on the whole yuletide festivities front, I failed miserably, realising that even though the teen and tween no longer believe in Santa, this doesn't get you off the hook in any way whatsoever. They forced me to ditch the Sunday papers to watch The Santa Clause, which I secretly enjoyed and so began the decking of the house.

The eco tree from Botanic and the LED Habitat tree have been dug out, but still this isn't enough for one member of the family, who berates me every day over the fact that I still haven't bought a real Christmas tree. The fact the last ten days has been a frenzy of socialising in London on our annual pre-Christmas visit followed by entertaining London friends here is lost on her. All that matters is we still haven't bought a tree and it's now December 20th. No matter also that I have no idea where the tree decorations are and given the festive fact above, am not so sure its a good idea to even try and find them. I think the tasteful little number pictured above should be enough.

So far it has been a far less stressful preamble to the big day than usual. I think I may have come up with a blueprint for how to do it minus the grief while also enjoying basking in a eco glow of smugness. Any resemblance to a certain Dickens character is purely coincidental.

1. Instead of buying gazillions of presents for the rugrats to open under the tree, rely on the generosity of other present givers and just buy one big present each. This equals five minutes wrapping and only one tree branch worth of Christmas paper as opposed to five days and a South American rainforest.

2. Tell everyone you are donating to charity instead of sending out Christmas cards to people you no longer see or even realise are still friends until you check last years dog-eared Christmas card list. Alleviates all guilt of receiving a card from someone you thought was dead on Christmas Eve when it's too late to send one back. Moving to another country works quite well too although it is a bit extreme.

3. For the tricky dilemma of what to buy the person who already has eveything, head to Selfridges and buy a gift card which comes in a smart box with ribbon and a glossy yellow bag wrapped by a man who makes Rowan Atkinson's sales assistant in Love Actually look slapdash. I spent 15 minutes Christmas shopping for tricky to buy people this year, the rest of the time can be spent at the Champagne bar celebrating how easy it was.

4. For food shopping, forget braving the traffic and queues of angry motorists huntng for car parking at some ungodly hour of the morning and head instead to Leclerc (or Waitrose) at lunchtime on Christmas Eve when every other shopper has vacated the area to start their Christmas shenanigans....no queues, freshly stocked shelves and a speedy exit via the empty tills. You may even bag a bargain as the stores try and offload everything they fear they'll be stuck with.

5. Failing all of this, you could just come to my house where Handyman will be dominating the kitchen and the port supply on Christmas morning while I unwrap pressies with the girls, get stuck into the Ruinart that is quietly chilling in the wine fridge and singalong to Cliff, Wham and Kirsty and the Pogues on a never ending loop.

Merry Christmas tout le monde.

The Street of Shame

So Fleet Street’s finest rolled into town and it’s fair to say I have not stopped laughing since they arrived, or since they left, at the ridiculous antics. Being former Sun journalists, albeit before mobile phones had even been invented lest anyone tars us with the same brush as the hacks who are currently hanging their heads in shame, we held our own Leveson inquiry chez moi, fuelled with Champagne rather than tap water. Forget phone hacking, you would be amazed at how many money grabbing family members sell their own celebrity sons and daughters, brothers and sisters down the river for a sheckle from Mr Murdoch and others.

Handyman said it was just like having his mates to stay, except mine are louder, drunker, more coarse and vulgar than any of his friends. Life chez Hockney has resumed to its normal, serene state...yoga in the sunshine, green tea, peace, cleanliness...and is all the more boring for it.

Here are the heavily edited highlights from the Street of Shame, which temporarily located to the sleepy rural backwater of Bar sur Loup for three nights only, not nearly long enough. Names have been changed to protect the guilty.


* Angela announcing to anyone in earshot that she 'doesn’t really drink anymore' and was 'really dreading that first glass of red wine as I just don’t fancy drinking.' Akin to the Pope saying he doesn’t really pray much these days. Then slamming her glass down on the kitchen bar empty with alarming regularity and feigning distress as I refilled it, only for it to be slugged with gusto.

* Clara guffing and burping like a navvy, blaming the dogs for any errant smell, refusing to move off the sofa, and cadging a refill off anyone who was on their way to the fridge, and showing no shame at requesting wine top ups from both the (underage) girls.

* Clara insisting on kissing me and Sazzle goodnight despite the fact we had been puking for hours in the hope she might catch food poisoning and proclaiming that it was 'unfair' that we were the lucky bitches with a bug while she was just going to have to keep all her calories and not dispel them down the toilet.

* Clara sitting on the stairwell on Sunday night while tending to the sick, and reassuring Iain that the only reason she wasn’t joining him downstairs was so she was on hand to change our sick buckets. She later confessed to one patient that she daren't go downstairs because her gastronomic wind was making even her feel sick.

* The girls eschewing the lovely French boulangeries and trying to sabotage my gluten free sugar free cupboards with a supermarket-bought preservative-filled E number savvy long-life chocolate cake while rebelliously proclaiming 'Long live Mr Kipling'. Even the sugar addicted junk food loving teens won’t go near it.

Three cheers for bad behaviour.

Never trust a man in lycra

After a week of rain, and not just rain but biblical, wash-everything-away rain, the sun returned as did the warm spring like temperatures and we decided to go to the beach for lunch. We took the hounds with us now that the beach ban on dogs is over for winter, and started the coast walk from la Napoule to Port de la Rague.

You can see from the photos that the beach did not look its usual pristine style. The storms have battered the coast to such an extent that the usually fine golden sand was completely invisible under a barrage of driftwood, bamboo, flotsam and jetsam and even the odd fridge and armchair. It looked a bit like a riot scene from London last summer minus those naughty looters. We’ve had some storms here but I’ve never seen anything like this. I even saw surfers at Sainte-Maxime three weeks ago, which means handyman and I may have to retire there with a surfboard at some point in the future.

Lunch at le Repere was fantastic; sitting on the deck in warm November sunshine with a glass of champagne, a beautiful sea bass with tabouleh, rounded off by a crisp chocolate ganache, can a Sunday get any better?

As well as the bizarre weather, we have also had some classic one-liners from the youngest member of the house. The other day she finished her chat with Livvy with the cruel and cutting: ‘I’m so much taller than you, I could just step on you like road kill.’ Thankfully we are all very thick-skinned, a necessity when you live with the female equivalent of Peter Kay.

We had a Premier Mardi meeting last Tuesday at the new deli and cafe in Valbonne, La Pomme Rouge. Kate Adams has given the place a fabulous facelift and it’s simply furnished, serving coffee and tea as well as breakfast, lunch and occasional evening tapas. Always good to see someone do something different, especially in Valbonne. Le Kashmir Indian restaurant is going great guns, packed to the rafters throughout the week with as many French diners as spice hungry ex-pats so hopefully Kate will also find a niche and a regular flow of customers.

My fellow blogger extraordinaire Chris France has just published his first book, Summer in the Cote d’Azur. If sales are anything like as successful as the recent launch party in Valbonne, then Chris looks set to clean up where Peter Mayle left off.

One of the most memorable meals for some time was at Shan and Tony’s glorious pad last Thursday. We gave the Kashmir a run for their money with a dazzling array of home cooked curries but the talking point was the Piste 2 Plage bike ride next year in aid of Help for Heroes, which Al and Susie are gamely organising. It’s a 450k journey through some of the highest cols in Europe, a couple of which are previous Tour de France routes ridden by the likes of Lance Armstrong. We are going to scale heights as high as Everest, which means some serious training from next spring onwards.

Tony has been talked into taking part. Let me tell those of you who have the misfortune not to know Tony what makes him tick. Tony is a man who spent a fortune transforming an outbuilding into a beautiful, state of the art gym complex complete with cinema size plasma screen right next to his pool but cannot remember the last time he went in there. Or indeed the first time either. In his Hong Kong apartment, he christened his spare room the Pointless Purchase room and used it for storing running machines, rowing machines, juicers and other spontaneously bought gadgets that never made it out of the packaging. The other day, we put the world to rights on health, fitness and the dangers of too much alcohol while I drank green tea and he supped beer with red wine chasers. I think you get the picture.

Suffice it to say, he was furiously back peddling as he knocked back the red and started talking of lending his support to the support vehicles rather than taking part in the challenge. When he was shouted down by Al, Susie and the rest of us, many of whom have also signed up, he disappeared, only to reappear in a skin-tight lycra cycling suit, which along with his brand spanking new mountain bike has never yet seen the light of day.

I wish I had a photo but you will just have to trust me when I say that it was a sight to behold, especially the lengthy zip that he kept whizzing up and down rather alarmingly. I laughed so hard my mascara ran down my face, which was also an attractive sight and second only to Lycra Larry. It was decided that if only for laughter and entertainment value, Tony has to take part, and to hell with his high blood pressure and all the other ailments he keeps trying to use as valid excuses. I for one will be making sure I cycle slow enough to enjoy his company and his zip prowess.

My next project is to make Oscar a YouTube star and us millionaires. People are raking in the bucks putting on home-made video clips of Charlie bit my finger. It sounds pretty boring to me, you can come and watch the girls in a violent bitch slapping catfight any night of the week chez moi, but it has been watched 386 million times. How successful would my Oscar video be if I filmed him head-butting the TV screen and barking rabidly at black people, gays, the disabled, wheelchair users and bald men, in fact any individual who is not a WASP? He's even started having a go at Fatima Whitbread on I'm a Celebrity, who probably fits a couple of the criteria above. I’m calling it Reservoir Dogs. The money is already in the bank.

Wintry weather

One of the things I really love about living in the South of France is there are no half measures with the weather. If it’s hot, it’s immensely hot, with clear blue skies and relentless sunshine for months on end. And when it rains, it doesn’t just drizzle or half heartedly shower here and there, it really comes down like the end of the world is nigh. We have had three days of relentless stair rod style rain, where the prospect of even stepping out of the door feels you with dread.

I remember reading once that Nice has as much rainfall annually as London. I pooh poohed this idea, especially when we lived in the UK, but now realise it's true. I just didn't grasp that it all falls in the space of about two weekends a year.

My grip on weather patterns causes much hilarity in our house. When I check the weather forecast, I always tap in 'Cannes' which is 35 minutes away, rather than 'Grasse' which is a mere 10 minute drive from our house, because the forecast for Cannes is always better. I call it keeping the glass half full. Handyman calls it delusional. Yet, nine times out of 10, I'm right.

I do like to dress up the facts. This is something I never did when working at The Sun, obviously, but when we left the UK, I made a poster for our leaving party which declared 'Au revoir Potters Bar, bienvenue Bar sur Loup.' I spent weeks smugly taking photos of my wellies outside the back door, queues of traffic in rain drenched Darkes Lane and Tallullah soaking wet after yet another weekend soaking in Northaw Great Wood to illustrate the Potters Bar end of the deal.

Contrast this with the pictures of the Gorges de Loup view from Mas St Michel, vistas of snow capped mountains, skiers enjoying a chocolat chaud in sunny Greolieres and wide open Atlantic beaches drenched in sunshine (ok, this pic was a touch wide of accuracy as Biarritz is not exactly the Riviera, although it is still technically the South of France, a mere six hour drive west) and funnily enough, not one partygoer asked why we were leaving, they merely asked if they could come too.

More than 800 people have been evacuated this weekend for fear of landslides, making our leak upstairs seem not very traumatic by comparison. The only sensible thing to do was stay in, light the candles, watch old movies and cook a huge roast chicken and bake lovely sugar free cookies and apple and pear crumble with my new natural sugar substitute Xylitol, which looks and tastes just like naughty refined white sugar and hence like it should be incredibly bad for you but is made from the bark of the birch tree so could almost be counted as one of your five a day. It's licence to eat all the stuff you usually feel guilty about.

We did try and venture out with the dogs to the Valmasque forest for a walk, but even they couldn't believe we were making them trek through six inch puddles in torrential storms. At one point, Tallulah stopped dead and refused to take one more step. Oscar stood beside her, piggy tail uncurled which always signifies despondency, shaking with cold. So the proposed ramble was cut short to 15 minutes and we all raced back to the car. They looked much happier once we got home and Oscar was able to settle down and watch David Attenborough in the warm.

The downside of such violent storms is not being able to go out for a run. I had to wait until today, when the warm sunshine finally returned, to put on my trainers. I did half an hour on the flat, and after a slothful summer am aiming to build up to three 40 minute runs a week. I let my iPod play on shuffle and ended up listening to great tunes that all had their own memories.

Calvin Harris’s Ready for the Weekend and Eric Prydz’s Pjanoo remind me of Sarah and I getting ready for a mad night clubbing at Le Palais in Cannes (the anticipation was actually better than the reality, which was hundreds of 17 year olds getting wasted on vodka and Red Bull to a soundtrack of pumping electro dance music...naturally we left them to it) The Ting Ting’s That’s Not My Name recalled the Parker and Kershaw clans having a pizza night chez nous and dancing round the house to the amusement of all the teens and Kings of Leon made me smile at the thought of zipping around Lake Maggiore in a speedboat, stopping at Stresa for prosecco and proper Italian ice cream.