Is my phobia of upmarket restaurants misplaced?

Scotching my bright idea of a stiff gin for Dutch courage in the bar across the road, Catriona bounded straight for the door of the Colombe d’Or. My restaurant phobia was fast upon me and I followed her into the bourgeois holy of holies more slowly than a nudist climbing through a barbed wire fence.

We were half an hour early and directed to the bar. Here my plea for strong spirits was again denied and I had to make do with champagne. Speechless with ecstasy — this was her birthday treat — Catriona toddled off with her flute to cast her eye over the Miros, Matisses and Chagalls in the dining room. I sat alone on the windowsill in the bar where Picasso and Yves Montand and James Baldwin had once parked their famous arses and I mourned.

For all its art and famous clientele, the Colombe d’Or was no more than an upmarket canteen

A northern English couple came in and swapped serene platitudes over their champagne flutes. Another couple arrived, also English. He had the huge head and pendulous earlobes of a captain of industry. He rather thought champagne would be the thing, she gin. She gave way and they had champagne. Tuesday night, I thought, in a hilltop village restaurant above Cannes during a world pandemic and the place is full of English necking Tattinger.

Catriona, now solemn with reverence for the art she’d seen, returned to the bar for another glass. We could smoke by the pool, she had found out. So I followed her to a seat next to a green swimming pool and we sat and looked at the water and the surrounding artworks and silently smoked.