I had no professional reason to be at the 2015 Cannes film festival, unless dropping off daughter, who did have a raison d'être, counts.
It was good to see the place again and we might have stopped for lunch had the car parks not all been so full.
So onwards, instead, to Antibes ...
We have sometimes wondered about moving there. Ryanair's for-the-moment desertion of the admirable Toulon airport makes somewhere closer to Nice seem more attractive. Marseille might suit one of us but not the other, however much it is argued that the règlements de comptes - gangland feud killings - are really just for the participants and don't affect proper people.
But in reality, Antibes is not a better place than Le Lavandou, just a bit bigger and livelier. Its marché Provençal has the edge on ours but that is hardly a reason to up sticks.
We both love Nice. It has just about everything: beauty, atmosphere, life, airport, closeness to Italy. Its only fault is to be a big city and we already live in one so are unlikely to have a pied-a-terre in another.
From our friends' balcony, or somewhere else in the same regal building, Queen Victoria once looked out at something resembling this view.
There was, oddly enough, no airport then visible in the top right hand corner. Nor would there have been there the sound, from behind Victoria's balcony, of a cardiologist practising on his drumkit. Would she have been amused? I was certainly entertained by clips of Patrice and his mates playing Tainted Love and Sympathy for the Devil.
I'd suggested Patrice's band should be called Deuxième Vague since its various members had all pursued active, successful working lives away from music.
From memory, there's another doc, a health visitor on lead vocals, a royal pilot (guess where, given that Nice is in republic), a woman in sales, an engineer, a retired teacher and - um, er - a couple of others. They flatly rejected my idea - "quite right too, it's so corny," said Cannes-bound daughter - and went for Night for Fun.
"What do you think?" Patrice asked.
- "A bit like those bits of gibberish-speak you get as slogans on Eurotrash T-shirts, but otherwise OK," I said, humouring him.
And back along the Corniche to Le Lavandou and that evening's edition of nature's wonderful nightly spectacular as viewed from the house ... another decent reason to stay put.
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