The fact that we both take a keen interest in the weather is not exactly unusual. It's a British predilection, one of those things we tend to chat about, a safe subject like traffic jams, Strictly, soaps, offspring, ailments and the state of the NHS - all inane topics we can share without giving too much of ourselves away.
However, I suspect we are now long past the chit-chat stage concerning the weather. We both have multiple weather apps on our phones and over recent months have become avid followers of the Met office's YouTube channel.
On Mondays they post a piece called 'the Deep Dive' where they explore meteorological phenomena in depth, report on interesting weather events happening elsewhere in the world and make a determined effort to educate the public about the science behind weather forecasting. It's complicated, geeky and packed full of arcane jargon. In other words - right up our street! The presenters have a name for their avid followers - 'Met Heads'. We both have been Met Heads for years, without realising it.
Perhaps the most important thing I have learned from watching the Deep Dive is the extent to which the UK's unsettled weather is controlled by the position of the jetstream, the blast fast moving westerlies high up in the stratosphere. It is these that drive Atlantic lows across the British Isles gifting us our changeable rainy climate. However, not always, sometimes the jetstream loops southwards driving unsettled weather across Western France and Iberia while the UK basks in heat drawn in from the continent. For the tabloids it's a 'Cor Wot a Scorcha' moment as they gleefully report that Manchester is five degrees warmer than Majorca. Something like this seems to be happening right now. We have had some sunny days on France's western coast, but quite a few dull and drizzly ones too, whereas our kids in London are quietly simmering in near tropical heat.
Today however dawned bright and sunny though not especially warm. We headed to a nearby beach. The light was fabulous and the sky deep blue, almost cloudless apart from one small fluffy cumulus afloat above the sea.
Immediately I regretted not bringing trunks and a towel. However, on closer inspection despite looking very inviting very few people had taken the plunge. There were a couple of people on the sea paddle boarding, but only one brave woman actually swimming in it. I concluded that the water was probably much colder than it looked. If you are used to swimming in the Med then a dip in the Atlantic even in summer can feel bone chilling.
We took a stroll a few hundred metres along the shore then decided to head back for lunch. We were unlocking our bikes by the dunes when beach bucket swimming lady wandered by. She must have overheard us because she exclaimed, "You're English! I love English, I am English, but I have never lived there."
From her accent that seemed to be the case, she spoke English perfectly but with a noticeable continental intonation as if habitually she used a different language. So we were instantly befriended by Marina. We learned soon enough that using a collapsible washing up bucket as a beach bag was the least eccentric thing about her.
"I am a Hollywood baby," she explained. "I was born there, my mother was English but moved to Cagnes-sur-Mer when I was two and I grew up there". She simply assumed we would know that Cagnes-sur-Mer was on the Cote d'Azur.
In the space of twenty minutes or so Marina recounted her life story, but in dribs and drabs interspersed with random opinions about this and that - the French were banal and uninteresting, English people were more creative and Irish people very funny...
"In my twenties I lived with an Irishman in Colliure, his friends would visit and we would get very drunk and laugh and laugh, but I am very old now, I was born in 1954..."
"I was born in 1954 too," Gill interjected."
"Then we are sisters!" Marina asserted, then turning her attention to me enquired, "And you?"
"1955," I mumbled.
"You are just a baby!" our new best buddy observed, somewhat dismissively.
From what she told us I would seem that Marina was the offspring of Hollywood minor royalty. "When I was a girl I spent most summers in Rome at my father's place. He married '#@*€ √π§{', but they were never happy." We didn't quite catch the Italian name of Marina's stepmother, but quite clearly she assumed we would have heard of her, so she must have been famous, an actress or a model perhaps.
However, if Marina had been a nepobaby when she was a girl, more recently she clearly had fallen on hard times. After we explained we were staying in a nearby campsite in our motorhome Marina explained she was sleeping in her car. "I used to have a little caravan, but the campsites are too expensive now, you must be very rich to have a motorhome and stay in campsites all the time," she mused.
As the conversation went on the more familiar Marina became, blithely ignoring our polite attempts to extricate ourselves and head back to the van for lunch. How did we end up talking about star signs? Maybe Marina had asked when our birthdays were. Gill, as a Scorpio was pronounced to be passionate and loyal. As for me, Marina seemed to be delighted to learn that I was born in May, "Ah! a Taurean, so earthly and attentive!" She gave me a long look and touched me gently on the chest, "You are both so well matched, you must have a great time in bed..."
There is a thin line between the flirtatious and the creepy, more often the person doing the flirting is blissfully unaware quite how 'creeped out' the recipient is feeling. Perhaps Marina sensed my discomfort and enquired if I minded her touching me. Though before I had a chance to respond she was recounting yet another anecdote, how recently she had been told to leave a public swimming pool "just because I touched the upper arm of the lifeguard..." "We live in sad times," she lamented, 'no longer can we be natural with one another."
Finally, somehow we managed to extricate ourselves from Marina's clutches - it felt as if we had just reenacted the final stanza of the The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'. We pedalled back to the campsite in stunned silence. Then part way through our cheese and biscottes Gill mused "how much of what Marina said do you think was true?"
An interesting question, but in the end I don't think she was a fantasist, just a little lonely and a somewhat bewildered by mores of the 21st century. It was the detail of what she recounted that convinced me that she telling the truth. 'Cagnes sur Mer' and Colliure are not places that would immediately spring to mind if you just spinning a yarn.
Also, I did push back a little at one point. Marina was recounting why she disliked her name because she had been teased about it as a girl when a 'horrible marina was built next to the town where I lived.' I decided to dig a bit, "I quite like the Marina de Baia des Anges," I ventured, "I think it's very striking. "Well, I suppose the way its outline mirrors the shape of the mountains is striking," she conceded. Would she have been a girl during its construction? When we first visited the Cote d'Azur in 1992 it was newly built - but the controversial project had taken over two decades from being first proposed in the late sixties to completion in the early nineties. So I guess Marina might have been a girl when the plans were first laid out. Marina was an eccentric undoubtedly, peculiar even, but I don't think she was a fantasist.
In that sense she was quite different to other odd bods we have come across on our travels. More usually we are assailed by individuals who have a much more tenuous grip on reality. In Castletown Beare, a pony-tailed Dutch guy asserted that the quayside parking lot we were overnighting in exuded positive energy from the layline emanating from a nearby prehistoric stone circle. We encountered an Austrian conspiracy theorist just after lockdown on the Via Verde de la Sierra in Andalusia who attempted to persuade us that the pandemic wasn't real but a plot by the luminati to assert global control. A the Swiss German chap talked at us for three hours solid on the ferry from Brindisi to Corfu - he was heading there to spend a couple hundred thousand euros on a sixty foot trimaran which he had only ever seen on-line, then learn how to sail it, first to Majorca to compete in an ironman competition, voyaging onwards single handed via the Panama canal to Hawaii, to compete in the 2024 ironman event. I am still left pondering if he ever made it out of the boatyard in Gouvia.
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