Cannes You Feel It?

www.paulcoia.com

The words “innocence” and “Paul Coia” haven’t appeared in the same sentence since my mum was told someone had entered hospital and swapped her new born baby for a rhesus monkey with a nose defect.But the innocence of a stranger really cheered me up this week as I travelled for work in France.

I was reminded of the last time I journeyed through the South of the country as an innocent seventeen year old adolescent, gawky, awkward, full of teenage hormones and never been kissed. The lack of lip action may have had something to do with a dodgy beard I was trying desperately to grow in tribute to Scooby Doo’s pal Shaggy.

However, I was full of thoughts back then of sophisticated madamoiselles who missed Quasimodo and were waiting expectantly as I stuffed my whole wardrobe in a backpack and hitched through France. I lucked out in meeting a fellow student who let me sleep in his tent for a few days. Unfortunately he was new to camping and pitched the tent on small hillocks so we woke up each morning in darkness as the canvas was completely covered in black ants. Not a great few days to invite girls back to “my place”.

Those were much easier and more innocent times, so I wondered how I’d feel going back this week as an almost mature adult. No more carefree student days. My beard has long gone, I no longer think that changing underwear every day is a sign of obsessive compulsive disorder, I don’t squeeze my spots – I have a wife to do that for me now - and I’ve stopped believing my pal Benjy who told me that “voulez vous coucher avec moi çe soir” was French for “nice to meet you”. So, would I have as much fun?

Driving through Cannes I was surprised by the street names which included English novelists and poets who, perhaps like me, had backpacked here in the past. I wondered if there was a street named after me from all those years ago but no luck, unless you count the Rue de la Gargoyle.

The whole place looked as I remembered it, and all that was missing was Roger Moore and Tony Curtis belting through town in a sports car with the Persuaders theme blaring out, driving past the wedding cake architectural style of The Grand Hotel, The Carlton and the Gucci and Cartier shops. I looked in the shop windows to see if I still felt as poor as in my student days and the only watch I found that I remotely liked cost twenty thousand euros. Of course I bought five of them.

As this was the Mip television festival, the place was full of all nationalities with laminated passes round their brass necks, careful not to be too animated lest the precariously perched sunglasses, on top of the carefully lacquered hair, fell off. Do these people have two more eyes on top of their heads that need protecting, even indoors?

Further along the coast, Nice was much quieter although it did have a Convention in town – The European Congress of Psychiatry. To watch these misfits wander through wearing their identical back packs with the convention dates and logo emblazoned on top was to seriously worry about ever being mentally ill. I stood behind four of them as they debated in a shop which sweets to take home for friends. “If you give him the strawberry one, that will say you find him frivolous yet the pineapple may say you believe him too earnest”. Twenty minutes of this and I’d decided that if I ever feel really depressed I will certainly cheer myself by visiting a psychiatrist. And shooting them.

As I headed back to the airport I wished I’d had more time to look around for memories of all those years ago - the place where I’d had my wallet stolen, the boarding house I’d sneaked out of without paying because it smelled worse than a village toilet after coachloads of football fans with dysentry had passed through, or the street cafe where I fell in love for the first time. I’ll never forget those croissants.

I had remembered Nice airport as being a bit like the end of the movie Casablanca with shiny propellers turning on planes riddled with rust as couples in raincoats and hats said their fond farewells quickly before the Germans invaded the Duty Free. Now the place is not only much bigger, it is in colour. The area where drivers drop off passengers is named in a way that Bogart and Bergman would have approved of wholeheartedly. They’ve adopted the American tag “Kiss and Fly” but I didn’t hang around long enough to see the difference a French kiss makes to traffic back up.

So, what of the stranger’s innocence that cheered me up this week? He was no more than seven or eight years old and he and his family stood in front of me waiting to check in their bags. His mum was arguing with his grandfather over security and carry on luggage and, as the arguing intensified, she wandered off in a huff. As they arrived at the front, the grandfather asked the desk lady a question and the answer made the little boy smile. He looked across to see his mother coming back.

“Mummy, Mummy”, he shouted so that even tourists in Cannes must have heard. “Don’t worry. The lady says you can take your electric razor in your handbag.”

Innocence. Don’t you just love it?