My Sort of City

I will be sorry to leave Marseille. I have resonated with the place. Raw, contradictory, syncretic. Restaurants full of books, a Black Madonna, good café coffee, the stepped streets of Les Panier. My sort of city.

Surprisingly given that I am the most moon-white Englishman man you can find, even the weather agreed with me. Marseille in July is hot and dry, tempered to my taste by sea breeze and fag-end Mistral. I feel my body recovering in this climate. The asthmatic miasma in my chest evaporates. My hay fever stops. Old wounds of flesh and spirit begin drying out after years behind dampened bandages. Even the deep rooted arthritis in my left foot responds. The 154 metre climb to the Notre Dame de la Garde makes it throb like buggery, but two minutes sitting on the steps of the gaudy basilica and it is back to a dull ache that lets me walk on for hours.

There is a tradition of praying to the Black Madonna of the abbey of Saint-Victor for the recovery of lost memories. In this healing climate, I can even believe that the black spots in my grey matter and the damaged nerve paths could repair. Whether I would want to recall everything misplaced in the wreckage left behind by the TIAs is another matter.

Beyond its curative properties, Marseille is a place I know I could write it. We all have our blue sky dreams, but if some publisher would advance me the funds, I could easily transplant for six months to a small room in Vieux Port or Le Panier, returning home with my überwork. Being divorced from hearing English often makes it easier to put in black and white, especially if every evening promises an apéritif break to be taken on Rue Sainte.

Unprepared for History

Tonight, as we try to slipstream into the final Vieux-Port Metro crowds, the police stop me. I had pushed it too far. They ask to see my camera, order me to delete all my pictures of people holding machine guns. I could protest, but I have learnt not to argue with anyone armed with an automatic weapon.

Through sheer dumb luck, the police miss my big prize. Two clear shots of a renowned Corsican Mafioso. Although travelling in the traditional armour of pinstripe and handmade shoes, I catch him at ease, eating and then wiping away the remains of a snatched snack of pissaladières. This is how I like my gangster photographs. Human. Unprepared for history. Anchovy and onion juice dribbling from the mouth.

Les Arcenaulx

Dining in good restaurants in France can be tricky. There are rituals to be observed, menus littered with untranslatable phrases to navigate. On top of this, there is the food.

Much modern French cuisine is ruined by one extra ingredient syndrome. Think of a plate of great food, perfectly balanced and deep with flavour and then overload it to point of collapse with one more thing. Even worse, like a vast raft of food served at English dining establishments, French fare is often burdened by more pretension than is even seen in an aspiring poet haunting the Left Bank.

However, tonight at Les Arcenaulx, I enjoyed one best meals of my life. The food was delicious, the setting joyous. A former 16th Century arsenal, restored to make the most of its high stone ceilings and beams. Good linen, candles, elegant leather chairs. Gilt mirrors and just the right amount of greenery. A smattering of antique artefacts. An air of luxury without descending towards ostentation.

The exposed stone walls are backdrop to more bookcases than you would find in the average small town library. One of the pleasure of Les Arcenaulx is there are books everywhere you look. Shelves heave with battered, resilient hardbacks that share space alongside graceful paperbacks and leather-bound tomes. Harmonic collections in each case mix the new and old, obscure and commonplace – just as you want a great menu to do. As an author I have never felt more at home in a restaurant. The fact it is called ‘The Arsenal’ just added an extra layer of delightful personal appropriateness.

To honour one of my grandfather’s last wishes, we have Dubonnet as an apéritif. Then the food starts. It is triumphant. Artichokes cooked with white wine and bacon, fish soup. The most perfect beefsteak. Every dish delivers fantastic taste by starting with good seasonal, local ingredients, cooked with flair and bone-deep skill. By the time my Essex accent mangled the phrase ‘L’addition, s’il vous plaît’, both my body and soul felt nourished.

We left Les Arcenaulx before its usual cast of actors, academics and politicians arrived. Drifting in Vieux Port as sunset approached, there was no problem more pressing than what flavour gelato to buy. If there is one lesson, one reflection for the fading week it is this: you celebrate your ancestors best not by trying to remember them, but by living your life well. Tonight, I feel as if I did that.

The City Announces Itself

Before I arrived ysrerday, I only knew Marseille from text and image. The works of Pagnol and William Friedkin; research on the Corsican Mafia, Mad Jacky, Black Maddonas and a certain class of Russian émigré for my own books. Interviews with policemen, fixers and sanctioned historians of the Catholic Church are not always the best way to form an opinion of the place. Even Rick Stein might prove a more reliable source, managing as he does to be both wonderfully correct and disastrously misleading about the city.

Even Marseille’s own official brochures call it turbulent. The city is raw. Untidy. An unedited anthology. Turn a page and you move from the poverty of Africa in Europe to glitterati enclaves and Mafiya holiday homes. Sporadic patches of regeneration and gentrification rub shoulders with slums. Old French money bunkered in the hills is surrounded by places drowning in years of municipal neglect. Parts of Marseille display the embedded deprivation you found in Sicily or Sardinia, parts are Lichtenstein-on-Sea.

Driving to Marseille through the type of fierce limestone hills the English would exaggerate into mountains, the city announces itself miles out. Before you to to the dissonant border where shattered housing towers and bewildered post-industrial estates clash with Provençal countryside, the graffiti starts. Motorway signs are retooled with Arabic hip-hop tags. Speeding down a calligraphic battlefield, your 20km from Marseille and on the patch of someone called D’arbo. Territorial pissing rituals converted into spray paint politics.

It seems as if every wave of immigration in the last 2,600 years of Marseille’s history is fighting for a bridge over the road or a wall to announce itself. Every likely location surrounding and even on the motorway is burnt and bombed with block and bubble writing or a fill-in. Trying to even guess at the translations for the procession of French, Spanish, Kreyòl Ayisyen, Arabic, Yoruban and Italian names and phrases makes my head spin.

It is no surprise to discover later in the evening I am adrift in a city so rich in symbols even the tourist gift shops push the Tarot de Marseille.

Above Essex Nowhere

I hate cliché. Hate writing it, hate living it. This morning I walk out at 8am through London drab. A tired grey sky makes it seasonless. No rumour of summer. Cool drizzle beads on my face. By the time I turn off of Oxford Street 40 minutes later I am damp and rheumatic.

I work for three hours. Basement publishing. More cliché. Wrestling with an index; trying to impose order surrounded by dunes of dust, forgotten books and dozens of broken Apple Macs. A dripping track soundtrack only broken by the feet clacking over the skylight.

At 12, two lines into ‘T’, I down my pencil, straighten my manuscript and make my way back to Oxford Street. The 23 I catch crawls towards its destination. Iain Sinclair to cushion the passage along painful places of The Strand, the Law Courts and Bell Yard.

Even when London is left, the grey continues. It bleeds into the aborted futurism of Stansted airport. A back of the lorry fake Antonio Sant’Elia design, blighted by Essex weather, has become a temple of dull paranoia. The two hour security lines and machine gun police create concentrated fear. The same instructions to comply are broadcast over and over in assorted languages including German. Close your eyes and you are in a parallel universe where the Nazis won the war.

It is raining by the time I walk across the tarmac to climb the steps to the plane. The wind, buoyant from the easy journey across Essex flatlands, whoops in my face like ugly football supporter from a rival team high on victory. The grey sky keeps everything in low definition. Cold, wet and oppressive, I am living the line by Luke Haines that helped name this blog.

Sitting between strangers, my aircraft terror begins to coalesce. The black hole in my brain – the injury from my last flight with Anne-Marie – exerts an awful gravity. Fears are sucked from the chasms of memory, ghosts ripped from slumber. The old language of dread reasserts itself. The smoothed down acronym TIA regrows its teeth, glorying in power regained as transient ischaemic attack. Ryanair roulette. Every time I fly, I know it could happen again.

Noise builds. The thumping, expectant power you feel building as you taxi becomes a purposeful, concentrated roar. A sudden skip in the stomach and then flight. Above Essex nowhere. A flattened quilt of fields in dark greens, browns and colours so tired they have given up and become exhausted shades of yellow are stitched by hedgerows, trimmed with ribbons of black tarmac.

For a few seconds it all goes white. When detail returns, we are cruising above a landscape straight out of the adventures of Rupert the Bear as drawn by Roger Dean. Mountain ranges of atmospheric water vapour come complete with secluded valleys that could house the palace of the Bird King, a mist village or floating island. When the continents of cloud eventually begin to fail and become hydrosphere archipelagos, the fields below are French.

Even from thousands of feet up, you can see the difference between England and southern France immediately. A landscape drawn from a divergent colour palette, sun-whipped soil scrapped thinly over limestone. No hedgerow enclosures. Arid peaks and dry valleys. Scattered vineyards. A flash of the Rhône. When we make the Mediterranean, the sun bends the wings of the plane, turns the water below into a blinding expanse of gold. Turning over Marseilles, I struggle to understand how a city of little more than a million and a half people could stretch itself across over such a wide area.

I land in another cliché. Blue sky. Technicolour movie blue. Total absence of cloud. A palpable hit of lavender carried on the warm air. Sunlight so strong my automatic English reaction is that it needs watering down like pastis. My phone’s loyalty morphs from T-Mobile to Orange F. For once there are no problems at the border. Smooth transition from one state to another. Everything is blue skies.

Normally I hate cliché, but this one, exchanging grey for blue, this is one that I can hack.