In life, timing is everything. Twenty-four hours earlier and thanks to a flooded tunnel in Kent, I could have been staring down the barrel of another New Year’s Eve in my flat. Instead, I am sitting at my favourite café in Rue Mouffetard, one of the oldest streets in Paris, and there is no one around except a few locals, vaping and cuddling small dogs for warmth. I’m less bothered by the expectant midnight chimes now, but I do want to know that what happens around that moment is memorable. For me, the train journey through France on New Year’s Day – at a price that wouldn’t get you from Waterloo to Winnersh Triangle – was the true start of 2024.
Vive La SNCF! I’ve trumpeted its virtues on here before but everything from the ease of purchase on the app to lounging in its double-decker comfort is a joy. Gare du Lyon is the jumping off point for the South and I finally manage to locate Le Train Bleu on the main concourse, with its gloriously over the top, baroque dining room. My schedule is too tight for a formal breakfast, so Pret it is and a jambon beurre. There is no buffet service on this train, so stock up on everything before you alight or, in the words of Victoria Wood, you will be snatching chocolate buttons off small children.
In terms of speed, this is a game of two halves. In three hours, I am already in the Le Pen heartland of Aix-en-Provence, an antiseptic place I didn’t care for when I visited. From here there is a much slower tour of the coastal towns – the graffitied outskirts of Marseilles, Toulon, St Raphaël, Antibes and the monied golf resorts around Cannes. The landscape becomes more mountainous, the soil redder and the trees more resinous and, if you’re me, you begin to come over a little Jean de Florette. Book the right-hand side of the carriage so you can see the Mediterranean as the train sporadically hugs the coast. On a five-and-a-half-hour journey, use the loos earlier rather than later as you may wish you had packed waders.
That’s the practical stuff out the way. Now let’s talk about Nice in the Winter. Basically, it’s a really good idea. Why be a package holiday arriviste, grappling with crowds, frizzy hair, and over inflated hotel rates, when you can channel your inner 19th century aristocrat wintering on the Riviera? True, you are not going to get a tan and not every shop or restaurant is open, but Nice is still buzzing and retains the unique luminosity for which its famed. Arriving before Epiphany also means the lights of Christmas are still on display and, even if you’ve had enough of it by then (always), it feels glamorous and cheering in the early dark month of the year.
My first stop is a sunset wander along the Promenade des Anglaise, so named after the British ex-pats who funded its construction in 1822, employing cheap labour from the vagrants flocking to the city to escape the cold weather. Plus ca change. From this elegant sweep of bay, you can navigate much of the city, starting from the Cours Saleya Market – which changes its offer daily with flowers, edible produce and brocante – and leads you into the labyrinth of Vieux Nice.
It takes me a while to hit my culinary stride here. This is largely because by 4 pm on New Years Day the only solids that have passed my lips in over twenty-four hours are three packets of sandwiches and a bag of salt and vinegar crisps. I am hangry and gratefully settle for a touristy galette. Vieux Nice, however, is the place for a gastronomic experience, and I find it accidentally the following day at a restaurant and olive oil shop called Oliviera at Bis Rue Du Collet.
I’m greeted by the charming Palestinian owner who acts as maître d’, speaks five languages, and personally farms and makes all the olive oil sold in the restaurant. The oils go on everything – even on the side of your tiramisu if you want it. And you really should. Today he is distressed because his usual boulanger is ‘en vacances’ for three weeks – the equivalent of a gallic catastrophe. He looks a little crestfallen when I politely turn down the rabbit (I struggle with the cooked bunny thing in France) but cheers up immeasurably when I order his mother’s small, stuffed aubergines with spiced mincemeat and pinenuts. It’s a triumph.
A cautionary tale if you do go to this fantastic restaurant, the staircase up to the toilet is dark and rickety and the door back into the dining room is very stiff. Once you’ve visited the loo, which is helpfully decorated with a poster of the human digestive system in case you need to know what your meal is doing, don’t do what I do and start shouting ‘how do I get out of here?’ when you eventually find the bottom of the stairs. When the door creaks open and my genial host hands me out like an 18-century dowager duchess descending from a carriage, every single pair of bemused eyes in the dining room is on me. I style it out, but the truth is I’m scared of the dark and have an innate horror of being trapped behind a door. There is a light switch, so do use it.
More on food shortly, but no trip to Nice is complete without a visit to the Musée National Marc Chagall and its huge, dreamlike canvases. By 3 January, there is a distinct ‘back to work’ feel – as far as that ever goes in France – and the galleries are beginning to open. I walk via the Basilique Notre Dame de l’Assumption located in a neighbourhood where all the Nicoise who aren’t completely loaded live. I can tell this as I’m greeted by a seagull standing cavalierly on the corner with a dirty chicken bone recently scavenged from a pile of uncleared refuge in its beak. Here, no-one is swathed in mink and wearing dark glasses and designer trainers, the uniform of the out of season local who’s just popped out to get some bits.
For a museum so steeped in romanticism, it is ironic that it’s accessed via a traffic-choked fly-over, but on arrival it does not disappoint, and I am greeted with the kind of images I could happily climb into. For more art, keep walking further up the hill, past ridiculous apartments, and Gatsby sized villas, and you’ll find Musée Matisse. It’s a thirty-minute walk to Vieux Nice from here, but I zigzag my way down the hill, buoyed up by the promise of my first taste of socca at Chez Theresa. This is a traditional crispy pancake made of chickpea flour that looks and tastes nothing like the Findus we had in the 80s. It is likely to have originated from neighbouring Italy and may have begun life as something cooked on a Roman soldier’s shield.
At Chez Theresa, I am brusquely told there is a half hour wait at the hatch, as a man labours over a wood fired oven and a huge iron platter. If you also have a hatred of walking whilst eating, there is a humble seating area that you can frequent on the understanding you buy a drink. The wine’s a bit rough and beer is a better, traditional match, but the verdict on the socca is I’ve never eaten anything like it. Slightly soggy, slightly crispy, slightly charred, slightly salty – it looks hellishly un-Instagramable, but tastes great and is probably addictive.
On my penultimate day, I finally get the weather the BBC promised and take the crowded commuter train early to Villefranche-Sur-Mer. If you want a stunning, sandy beach that’s only two stops away from Nice Ville, you’ll find it here, although it may well be a seething mass of humanity in July. Today, however, there is hardly anyone around and at 9 am, watching bags of mussels being unloaded into the kitchens of harbour restaurants and drinking coffee in the sun, I’m grateful not to be at home amongst the ravages of the ridiculously named Storm Henk. Tomorrow, il pleut, but today I will bask like it’s 4 January on the Riviera. I sit on the beach in my biker boots, whilst around me some are whipping out their bikinis. Jeez, it’s not THAT warm, people.
If you come here in the winter, it’s just beach walking and eating, as many of the shops in the tiny old town are closed, but with food and views this good, it shouldn’t matter. It may be early doors, but the lunch I have at Lou Bantry could be one of the stellar meals of ’24. Sea bass, provencal vegetables, sauce vierge, parmesan crisp, extra chips, glass of rose, table by the water. The waiting staff are all in Breton tops and gilets and really care about the details, so you get the vibe. Don’t go anywhere else on the harbour front, although there is plenty of choice. Just sit back and watch it all happen around you.
I fly back from Nice in the driving rain and attempt to dry my socks underneath the hand dryer in the deserted airport loo. Le glamour! Le trench-foot! Increasingly, I am wanting to reduce air travel as I find the end-to-end experience stressful and unedifying, let alone environmentally questionable. From the small bottle situation at check in (which always trips me up no matter how much I pair back the liquids) to the turbulence onboard, if other modes of travel are practical, I’d much prefer them.
Having said this, I am getting on another plane in about seven weeks’ time. Clue: capital city where they like flamenco and are allergic to early nights.
A Bientôt!
