It's been a great year; mostly because I had a wonderful summer. You have to start your summer early and finish late – that’s the trick of it, I feel. I ended it in the Greek islands in November and I started it in June, by taking a very sweet and lovely acquaintance to Antibes. I can’t get away with my lover and I couldn’t take my family - so what do you do?
On this occasion, we were staying in a small, but luxurious, four-star hotel – a white stucco mansion, fronted by big palm trees, which had been built in the twenties by an English aristocrat as a place to over-winter on the edge of the Mediterranean. It was a cool and elegant building, full of glossed mahogany and dark wood panels, thick, mushroom-coloured carpeting and giant chandeliers. In the middle of the public rooms on the ground floor, a magnificent white marble staircase led upstairs. And in the centre of this staircase, there was a glass lift-shaft, which contained what I took to be the restored original lift; a quaint affair of wood and brass, with folding glazed doors.
Although it was early in the season, and you could feel a cool wind off the sea and see snow still dusting the peaks of the Alpes Maritimes, it had been very hot at the airport and we’d lengthened our journey by getting lost twice in the hired car; so, soon after arriving, I went down to have a cooling swim in the pool. This was a lozenge of white and black marble, set in the pleasant garden at the front of the hotel, and bordered by manicured shrubbery, with jasmine and bougainvillea climbing the old walls behind. A few other guests – mostly well-heeled Brits – read paperbacks and talked the usual bollocks from striped recliners lined up in pairs around the pool, while starched flunkies fetched them drinks.
I did a few lengths in the cold water and then found a couple of free loungers, with clean towels on them. After an uncertain start to the season in the UK, it was wonderful to begin summer proper at last; to luxuriate in the warm but mellow late afternoon sunshine. My companion, who I’m going to call Beata, joined me, after finishing her unpacking. She’d got a book with her, a visor like the peak of a baseball cap, which held her hair back, and flip-flops. A distinctive diamante piercing winked from the scoop of her belly, but that was more or less it – her bikini was of the next-to-nothing variety – three small yellow triangles, connected by black ribbon.
“Is that….how you came down?” I asked her, casually; concerned she hadn’t found the bathrobe they’d supplied.
She misheard me, or mistook me:
“Yes,” she replied, nonchalantly; “with the lift.”
“Oh, did you?”
She pointed behind us, through an archway in the hotel’s facade, to where big double glass doors led to the lobby, with its concierge’s desk and beyond that, Reception and the entrance to the lift.
“I came through there,” she said, puzzled by my curiosity.
On this occasion, we were staying in a small, but luxurious, four-star hotel – a white stucco mansion, fronted by big palm trees, which had been built in the twenties by an English aristocrat as a place to over-winter on the edge of the Mediterranean. It was a cool and elegant building, full of glossed mahogany and dark wood panels, thick, mushroom-coloured carpeting and giant chandeliers. In the middle of the public rooms on the ground floor, a magnificent white marble staircase led upstairs. And in the centre of this staircase, there was a glass lift-shaft, which contained what I took to be the restored original lift; a quaint affair of wood and brass, with folding glazed doors.
Although it was early in the season, and you could feel a cool wind off the sea and see snow still dusting the peaks of the Alpes Maritimes, it had been very hot at the airport and we’d lengthened our journey by getting lost twice in the hired car; so, soon after arriving, I went down to have a cooling swim in the pool. This was a lozenge of white and black marble, set in the pleasant garden at the front of the hotel, and bordered by manicured shrubbery, with jasmine and bougainvillea climbing the old walls behind. A few other guests – mostly well-heeled Brits – read paperbacks and talked the usual bollocks from striped recliners lined up in pairs around the pool, while starched flunkies fetched them drinks.
I did a few lengths in the cold water and then found a couple of free loungers, with clean towels on them. After an uncertain start to the season in the UK, it was wonderful to begin summer proper at last; to luxuriate in the warm but mellow late afternoon sunshine. My companion, who I’m going to call Beata, joined me, after finishing her unpacking. She’d got a book with her, a visor like the peak of a baseball cap, which held her hair back, and flip-flops. A distinctive diamante piercing winked from the scoop of her belly, but that was more or less it – her bikini was of the next-to-nothing variety – three small yellow triangles, connected by black ribbon.
“Is that….how you came down?” I asked her, casually; concerned she hadn’t found the bathrobe they’d supplied.
She misheard me, or mistook me:
“Yes,” she replied, nonchalantly; “with the lift.”
“Oh, did you?”
She pointed behind us, through an archway in the hotel’s facade, to where big double glass doors led to the lobby, with its concierge’s desk and beyond that, Reception and the entrance to the lift.
“I came through there,” she said, puzzled by my curiosity.
I didn’t clarify what I’d actually meant, overwhelmed as I was by the mental image of her, illuminated within the old lift as it slowly descended to the ground floor, then the swing of her glorious hips across the acres of carpeting; and, best of all, the contrast between the stiff, formal uniforms of the lobby staff and her near-nakedness, as they opened the glass doors to let her out into the garden. Priceless, as they say: she was only trying to get from our room to the pool and somehow she’d strayed into a Helmut Newton photo-shoot! (It made me think of that picture of Charlotte Rampling, taken in Arles, not far away).
It simply wasn’t the sort of hotel where people wandered about in swimwear - and her bikini barely earned that description, anyway. But I had to hand it to her: if she’d sensed a faux pas, she’d had the pluck to bottle it out. Gorgeous doesn’t make mistakes, I suppose: when you’re as young as her and you look as good as she does, you can probably get away with anything.
Although it was a stylish old building, I found it a rather pretentious place, under-resourced and over-priced (like the whole coast), and somehow smug about the chic, elegant ambience which was its main selling-point. So no surprise it was popular with a certain sort of English middle class punter, prepared to pay a little extra for its exclusive cachet, yet not rich enough to comfortably pay for the truly exclusive (because even more expensive) Hotel du Cap up the road, where Madonna and Tom Cruise stay. The men seemed stunned by their release from the corporate fortresses in which they spent their working days, pale and out of shape; their complacent wives looking either stringy or blubbery, (believe me, none of them were going to risk travelling in a glass lift and walking through the lobby in a miniscule two-piece). Perfectly pleasant people, I’m sure; providing you don’t try to stop them enjoying the first world comforts of living in the Home Counties, with a hand-built kitchen and a German car in the drive and children in private schools. If you do try, I’m afraid they’ll have to kill you.
One of the pleasures of being with pals from other countries (where do I begin? – if they’re women, it’s a very long list, so don’t get me started!), is that the boring Brits don’t know whether you’re “one of them” or not. The answer is yes-but, no-but. I won’t be sitting at the bar til all hours having a good old chin-wag with my compatriots about property prices in Surrey or Tuscany for holidays or the iniquities of capital gains tax, that’s for sure. I’ll be on a mission, deep inside Europa, I’ll be up and coming, my finger on her trigger, eyes squeezed shut. I’m English as they are, as it happens – but I’m not in the club – include me out. And I like euroland, I love it. I fell for it as a young fella, desperately in love with a girl from Burgundy, and I love it still. Drop me in it, anywhere, with a fistful of Euros and a rented car and I’m happy as a sand boy.
Although it was a stylish old building, I found it a rather pretentious place, under-resourced and over-priced (like the whole coast), and somehow smug about the chic, elegant ambience which was its main selling-point. So no surprise it was popular with a certain sort of English middle class punter, prepared to pay a little extra for its exclusive cachet, yet not rich enough to comfortably pay for the truly exclusive (because even more expensive) Hotel du Cap up the road, where Madonna and Tom Cruise stay. The men seemed stunned by their release from the corporate fortresses in which they spent their working days, pale and out of shape; their complacent wives looking either stringy or blubbery, (believe me, none of them were going to risk travelling in a glass lift and walking through the lobby in a miniscule two-piece). Perfectly pleasant people, I’m sure; providing you don’t try to stop them enjoying the first world comforts of living in the Home Counties, with a hand-built kitchen and a German car in the drive and children in private schools. If you do try, I’m afraid they’ll have to kill you.
One of the pleasures of being with pals from other countries (where do I begin? – if they’re women, it’s a very long list, so don’t get me started!), is that the boring Brits don’t know whether you’re “one of them” or not. The answer is yes-but, no-but. I won’t be sitting at the bar til all hours having a good old chin-wag with my compatriots about property prices in Surrey or Tuscany for holidays or the iniquities of capital gains tax, that’s for sure. I’ll be on a mission, deep inside Europa, I’ll be up and coming, my finger on her trigger, eyes squeezed shut. I’m English as they are, as it happens – but I’m not in the club – include me out. And I like euroland, I love it. I fell for it as a young fella, desperately in love with a girl from Burgundy, and I love it still. Drop me in it, anywhere, with a fistful of Euros and a rented car and I’m happy as a sand boy.
I like to think I might have been equally happy at this prospect, even sixty years’ ago, when it was occupied territory. But then spying offers this same sort of ambivalence towards one’s national identity, doesn’t it? – the same opportunities to shrug off all the defining clobber of background and upbringing and slip your moorings a bit. It’s this slippage, this pick-and-mix approach to the subjectivities on offer, which I find so liberating about travel; while my two lovely euro-companions have their own interest in self-invention and masquerade. (Coincidentally, the espionage thrillers my fellow guests are reading by the poolside offer them this same pleasure - though vicariously – with iconic examples of the genre, such as Day of the Jackal and The Bourne Identity, even taking the uncertain construction of our identities as their theme.) As I say, having Beata with me is a big help – in the company of my wife, we’d be boxed and labelled in no time. And I really couldn’t expose my poor wife to these other British guests, anyway; to the sort of people you get in these hotels. To her credit, she wouldn’t stand a chance: she lacks the killer instinct, she hasn’t that particular kind of condescending confidence, she’s missing the competitive gene. But an intimidatingly attractive, exotic younger woman, who they can’t ‘place’ socially, pal up with or patronise, whose status is undecipherable, whose role is dubious, and whose language is unknown – bloody perfeck!
Smart as she is, our relations are not entirely intellectual, I must admit. What I find particularly gorgeous about Beata, is the length of her fingers and toes. They are just so beautiful. And here’s a curiosity – her nipples are really long and beautiful to match! Isn’t nature wonderful? Of course I enjoy getting the latter to full length. I have got to add that nature is really unfair, though: she’s got a beautiful face, beautiful hair, beautiful body (right down to the ends of her toes); but how did she get to have a beautiful fanny as well? It’s fantastic! It’s a while since I’ve had a cunt I’ve wanted to lick quite this much – to say nothing of her truly magnificent thighs and arse. And good girl that she is, her snatch is usually completely shaved. Oh joy unbounded! I look at her at the beach club and nearly every possible depravity in the world has to take a back seat - all I want to do is get my tongue around the edge of that tiny bikini and lick and nuzzle until she utters those lovely little moany noises she does.
Back at the hotel every day, she happily indulges this urge of mine. I try to explain to her how very exciting, but also how touching, I’m finding a tiny little curve she has at the very very top of her thighs, when she’s lying down; but unless she’s going to take up yoga, or use a mirror, she’ll never even see it the way I do, let alone appreciate its beauty. I take my time with the tonguing and try every trick in the book, gambling playfully on the plateaus along the way like a happy goatherd, but she’s not a big one for being teased, I’ve found. I can torment my lover to ecstasy; with her, pleasure deliberately withheld is pleasure bestowed. Beata, on the other hand, likes a nice, steady climb: big slow flat strokes, with a beat between, then firm but light lapping, sustained until we’re getting close; something circular, perhaps; then a thumb, stroking upwards just ahead of my mouth, as I take her clitoris between my lips, and finally letting the twinkle-toed tip of my tongue dance the light fantastic……. Tasting her excitement drives me crazy, and I cannot tell you what a delight it is to see this studious, composed and demure young woman losing control, fingers clawing and clutching at the sheet. We’ve got a massive bed in dark mahogany, with big square French pillows of crisp white cotton, and I glance up to see her long dark hair spilling across them as her head rolls from side to side.
If I have one complaint about the Riviera trip, it’s that I didn’t have any dope. I really like sex when I’m high; especially late at night. Vigorous, urgent sex definitely has its place and you don’t need it for that – though I still think you acquire a few thousand extra nerve cells at the end of your knob when stoned – but when you’re going to luxuriate in a couple of languorous hours exploring every nook and cranny of someone who looks, smells and tastes simply wonderful, then it’s a winner - the textures and flavours and scents are all enhanced. Sometimes, it’s quite incredible – feeling this lovely big lively woman, panting and trembling as you take her there – and all of your energies and concentration, and all her excitement, her whole complicated being – it all seems to be focussed on this tiny, tiny point of contact; as if you’re holding her up in the air with just a few millimetres of finger-tip or tongue and you’re going to keep her there and not let her fall…….
I think I spent every afternoon of that holiday with my tongue in Beata’s slit, so it didn’t ruin my fun; but I’ve no doubt such lascivious carryings-on would certainly have been enhanced by a toke or two before the proceedings. As per usual, I started out with some in the UK, intending to bring it; but then I ran into a drugs check-point in Scotland, just before leaving! Can you believe that? They’re dead by their mid-sixties, for fuck’s sake. They deep-fry pizzas and Mars bars. They put about 2lbs of salt on any food before giving it to you. It’s freezing there and rains the whole time, so you get arthritis and rheumatism and pneumonia. They smoke too much and they’re always poisoning one another with salmonella sandwiches. And on top of all this, according to the powers that be, we stand a very good chance of being blown to smithereens every time we travel by plane, bus or tube. And yet, incredibly, they actually worry you might have a wee spliff with your dram of a weekend, by way of relaxation. They apparently worry so much, they’ve found the resources to put half the Borders and Lothian Constabulary and sniffer dogs on the station platform! And not to seize drugs barons, or inconvenience the City slickers who get through a shed load of A-class charlie per diam - oh no - just to hassle ordinary law-abiding folk like me, by checking trains going to local beauty-spots for the weekend!
I come out of the ticket office and of course I instinctively keep on walking towards the train. I’ve seen this whole posse of plods in day-glo waistcoats by the barrier, but in this era of global jihad, I’m so used to bomb screening, I can’t seriously believe they’re doing something as old-fashioned (and unsporting) as a drugs check. And even when I get closer and spot the spaniels and start to wonder whether it could be drugs - even then, I remain curiously calm. After all, I’m thinking, I’m sort of middle-aged, middle-class, middle England, me - I’m wearing a fucking five hundred pound suit, for God’s sake – they’re surely only after young scamps, with their meth and crack, so why should I worry. It’s almost legal, isn’t it, nowadays? I’ve only got a ‘personal use’ quantity and anyway it’s well-hidden. Then it suddenly hits me – wake up, you muppet! - you’re in Edinburgh, not Amsterdam. You won’t get through - they’ve got dogs - they don’t have a sense of humour here at the best of times and there are twenty woodentops hanging about without having had the benefit of a single collar, by the look of it. At the very least, I’d miss my plane…...
So only twenty yards short of the barrier, I put the brakes on - apparently in response to a sudden call on my mobile which for some unknown reason requires a violent change of direction – and then I swiftly back-track to the toilets. I’ve gone straight from completely blasé to blind panic – so much for my career in SOE. What if they have someone inside? I’m wondering. If not, I imagine there’ll be lots of young back-packers already there, emptying their pockets. But no – stone me, there’s only yours truly, the silly sod - squashed into a cubicle with my luggage, scrabbling desperately in my case. All the hale and hearty young Scots going camping for the Bank Holiday weekend, they’re carrying nothing stronger than cans of McEwan’s; while the well-heeled bloke, the sassenach in the suit, has to dump his tiny stash like some bloody schoolboy. It’s not dignified at my age, is it, know what I mean?
But then, this is true of so much of my behaviour, in recent years, that I’ve stopped worrying about it. There I am, panting with the effort of manoeuvring and rifling my case in the cramped cubicle, suddenly energised by a surge of adrenalin (I’ll say this for the old Bill, they know how to give you a natural high!), and I can feel my heart still thumping as I find my way out again into the daylight of the concourse. And then at that very moment I really do get a call, from my lover B, wanting to wish me a safe journey, and who now chides me when I tell her about my close shave, but I laugh it off, I start to laugh like a maniac, in fact, and I realise that, no, it may not be good behaviour, or appropriate behaviour, or sensible, or dignified – any of it - but here I am anyway, pursuing my idea of fun here on planet Earth - and at least I know I really am alive, alive-o………………………….
Smart as she is, our relations are not entirely intellectual, I must admit. What I find particularly gorgeous about Beata, is the length of her fingers and toes. They are just so beautiful. And here’s a curiosity – her nipples are really long and beautiful to match! Isn’t nature wonderful? Of course I enjoy getting the latter to full length. I have got to add that nature is really unfair, though: she’s got a beautiful face, beautiful hair, beautiful body (right down to the ends of her toes); but how did she get to have a beautiful fanny as well? It’s fantastic! It’s a while since I’ve had a cunt I’ve wanted to lick quite this much – to say nothing of her truly magnificent thighs and arse. And good girl that she is, her snatch is usually completely shaved. Oh joy unbounded! I look at her at the beach club and nearly every possible depravity in the world has to take a back seat - all I want to do is get my tongue around the edge of that tiny bikini and lick and nuzzle until she utters those lovely little moany noises she does.
Back at the hotel every day, she happily indulges this urge of mine. I try to explain to her how very exciting, but also how touching, I’m finding a tiny little curve she has at the very very top of her thighs, when she’s lying down; but unless she’s going to take up yoga, or use a mirror, she’ll never even see it the way I do, let alone appreciate its beauty. I take my time with the tonguing and try every trick in the book, gambling playfully on the plateaus along the way like a happy goatherd, but she’s not a big one for being teased, I’ve found. I can torment my lover to ecstasy; with her, pleasure deliberately withheld is pleasure bestowed. Beata, on the other hand, likes a nice, steady climb: big slow flat strokes, with a beat between, then firm but light lapping, sustained until we’re getting close; something circular, perhaps; then a thumb, stroking upwards just ahead of my mouth, as I take her clitoris between my lips, and finally letting the twinkle-toed tip of my tongue dance the light fantastic……. Tasting her excitement drives me crazy, and I cannot tell you what a delight it is to see this studious, composed and demure young woman losing control, fingers clawing and clutching at the sheet. We’ve got a massive bed in dark mahogany, with big square French pillows of crisp white cotton, and I glance up to see her long dark hair spilling across them as her head rolls from side to side.
If I have one complaint about the Riviera trip, it’s that I didn’t have any dope. I really like sex when I’m high; especially late at night. Vigorous, urgent sex definitely has its place and you don’t need it for that – though I still think you acquire a few thousand extra nerve cells at the end of your knob when stoned – but when you’re going to luxuriate in a couple of languorous hours exploring every nook and cranny of someone who looks, smells and tastes simply wonderful, then it’s a winner - the textures and flavours and scents are all enhanced. Sometimes, it’s quite incredible – feeling this lovely big lively woman, panting and trembling as you take her there – and all of your energies and concentration, and all her excitement, her whole complicated being – it all seems to be focussed on this tiny, tiny point of contact; as if you’re holding her up in the air with just a few millimetres of finger-tip or tongue and you’re going to keep her there and not let her fall…….
I think I spent every afternoon of that holiday with my tongue in Beata’s slit, so it didn’t ruin my fun; but I’ve no doubt such lascivious carryings-on would certainly have been enhanced by a toke or two before the proceedings. As per usual, I started out with some in the UK, intending to bring it; but then I ran into a drugs check-point in Scotland, just before leaving! Can you believe that? They’re dead by their mid-sixties, for fuck’s sake. They deep-fry pizzas and Mars bars. They put about 2lbs of salt on any food before giving it to you. It’s freezing there and rains the whole time, so you get arthritis and rheumatism and pneumonia. They smoke too much and they’re always poisoning one another with salmonella sandwiches. And on top of all this, according to the powers that be, we stand a very good chance of being blown to smithereens every time we travel by plane, bus or tube. And yet, incredibly, they actually worry you might have a wee spliff with your dram of a weekend, by way of relaxation. They apparently worry so much, they’ve found the resources to put half the Borders and Lothian Constabulary and sniffer dogs on the station platform! And not to seize drugs barons, or inconvenience the City slickers who get through a shed load of A-class charlie per diam - oh no - just to hassle ordinary law-abiding folk like me, by checking trains going to local beauty-spots for the weekend!
I come out of the ticket office and of course I instinctively keep on walking towards the train. I’ve seen this whole posse of plods in day-glo waistcoats by the barrier, but in this era of global jihad, I’m so used to bomb screening, I can’t seriously believe they’re doing something as old-fashioned (and unsporting) as a drugs check. And even when I get closer and spot the spaniels and start to wonder whether it could be drugs - even then, I remain curiously calm. After all, I’m thinking, I’m sort of middle-aged, middle-class, middle England, me - I’m wearing a fucking five hundred pound suit, for God’s sake – they’re surely only after young scamps, with their meth and crack, so why should I worry. It’s almost legal, isn’t it, nowadays? I’ve only got a ‘personal use’ quantity and anyway it’s well-hidden. Then it suddenly hits me – wake up, you muppet! - you’re in Edinburgh, not Amsterdam. You won’t get through - they’ve got dogs - they don’t have a sense of humour here at the best of times and there are twenty woodentops hanging about without having had the benefit of a single collar, by the look of it. At the very least, I’d miss my plane…...
So only twenty yards short of the barrier, I put the brakes on - apparently in response to a sudden call on my mobile which for some unknown reason requires a violent change of direction – and then I swiftly back-track to the toilets. I’ve gone straight from completely blasé to blind panic – so much for my career in SOE. What if they have someone inside? I’m wondering. If not, I imagine there’ll be lots of young back-packers already there, emptying their pockets. But no – stone me, there’s only yours truly, the silly sod - squashed into a cubicle with my luggage, scrabbling desperately in my case. All the hale and hearty young Scots going camping for the Bank Holiday weekend, they’re carrying nothing stronger than cans of McEwan’s; while the well-heeled bloke, the sassenach in the suit, has to dump his tiny stash like some bloody schoolboy. It’s not dignified at my age, is it, know what I mean?
But then, this is true of so much of my behaviour, in recent years, that I’ve stopped worrying about it. There I am, panting with the effort of manoeuvring and rifling my case in the cramped cubicle, suddenly energised by a surge of adrenalin (I’ll say this for the old Bill, they know how to give you a natural high!), and I can feel my heart still thumping as I find my way out again into the daylight of the concourse. And then at that very moment I really do get a call, from my lover B, wanting to wish me a safe journey, and who now chides me when I tell her about my close shave, but I laugh it off, I start to laugh like a maniac, in fact, and I realise that, no, it may not be good behaviour, or appropriate behaviour, or sensible, or dignified – any of it - but here I am anyway, pursuing my idea of fun here on planet Earth - and at least I know I really am alive, alive-o………………………….
