"IS no problem! Is all easy!" My cabbie, an excitable monsieur, would appear to have a tenuous grasp of the maze-like intricacies of suburban Cannes. I've just arrived, on the tightest of budgets, and we're looking for the campsite. Eventually, we stumble upon it, a glorified caravan park in the nearest Cannes has to a ghetto, a high-rise backwater whose grimy walls scream spray-painted support for Le Pen.
It's after midnight and the site is closed. After much screaming, I'm eventually let in, only to find that the tent - the only thing I'm pitching in Cannes this week - won't go up: the place is pitch-dark, I have no light and there's a gale blowing in off the bay. I quickly give up, wrap myself up in the groundsheet and, with bottom lip a-trembling, try to sleep. At this precise moment, an expressively Gallic couple in the next tent strikes up the music of love.
Things can only get better, and in the morning, they do. In cancer-strength sunshine, I bus it to La Croisette, the famous beach-front strip where traffic hums past in a neon confusion of blood-red Jags and electric-blue Mercs, flashes of scootering paparazzi nose the sultry air for the distinctive whiff of celebrity, wannabe starlets twitter past on the chubby arms of elderly industry big-wigs. I feel like a small boy from the Bog of Allen brought in to see the bright lights of Mullingar for the first time.
La Croisette is get-lost pricey and it's intriguing to discover the existence of a £42 crepe, which one would imagine must be a fierce pancake indeed. But if you stumble 300 yards up through the winding side-streets, you fall into a bubbling stew of dirt-cheap bistros. You can dine well in Cannes for a fiver, within sniping distance of the hyper-famous.
"Is no problem. Is all easy."
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