Cannes; Friday, 12 December, 2014

From my Gold card discounted ticket operating the barriers at East Croydon on the dot of 10 without requiring going to the side gate and missing the train, through the cheerful guard on the train; the friendly lady on check-in; the on time departure and arrival and stepping out of Nice Airport straight onto the Cannes bus which then set off and missed all the traffic arriving in Cannes 20 minutes early it was clear that I was having a very good day for everything working. Which made me feel all the guiltier when I checked Twitter having checked in at the hotel to discover that a short while after I left London airspace it had been closed because of an air-traffic computer problem crippling services for the rest of the day and resulting in virtually all the rest of the days flights to Nice being cancelled.

From the hotel I wandered down into the old town and had a walk through the commercial centre of the locals bit of Cannes – Cheese shops, a Carrefour, fishmongers not a single sign of bling anywhere. I reached the Hôtel de Ville and then decided that I was feeling up to hiking up the side of the hill that the castle was on to take in the views over the city at sunset.

The castle itself was closed for the evening, but the views over the bay and to the Esterel Massif bathed in the orange glow of the setting sun were spectacular. What was equally spectacular were the number of what were clearly eye-wateringly expensive gin palaces moored up in the harbour.

From the castle I wandered back down into town and had a walk along the harbour side taking in the, at times, ridiculous yachts (though in some cases small cruise ship may have been a better name for the craft).

Beyond the harbour I found myself in the non-residents end of Cannes, with the five star hotels, Gucci and Louis Vuitton shops and jewellers who probably charge you just to look at the stuff you could never afford. Like the floating gin palaces it was all a bit tacky and expensively cheap.

Heading back into the sensible end of town I found a nice restaurant down a side street and had a very nice dinner with an eclectic mix of Corsican, Southern French and Northern Italian styles, all washed down with an exceptionally pleasant (but it turned out very strong) local red wine.

Stuffed, sated, and slightly sloshed, I wandered back from the restaurant to the hotel and turned in for the night.