Nice - A Familiar Accent, Danger Joe, Joe Brown And A Right Good Knees-Up

Meltdown narrowly averted, let's go back to the France story shall we? I know, I know it is a frightful bore having someone go on and on about how they went to a lovely paradise destination and you didn't but for once in my blogging life I would very much like to finish the story of one of my travelling escapades.

We left me arriving back at the port at Nice after a quite ridiculous journey back from Monaco. On that train back to Nice I met a woman from Eccleston. That's Eccleston in St.Helens just for clarification. The train was absolutely jam packed, probably dangerously so. A group of young Americans got on board and rudely stomped their way through everyone to find space. This had led to Emma ending up at the top of a flight of about three steps leading up to another seated area. She was soon surrounded by bodies, American and otherwise, to the point where I could not see her at all much less talk to her.

I was wearing a Saints shirt circa 2009, a largely boring year for rugby league which involved everyone running from dummy half ad nauseam, Saints beating everyone heavily but then losing the Grand Final to Leeds in soppy conditions at Old Trafford. The queue for the tram back to the city centre in Manchester that night was about as busy as this train between Monaco and Nice. Thankfully, both journeys are fairly short.

"Nice shirt." said a female voice from over my shoulder in what appeared to be a familiar accent. When you have spent a week hearing nothing but French spoken for the majority of the time you tend to do a bit of a double-take when you hear someone speaking your language in an accent which sounds suspiciously like your own. She never actually tells me her name and I don't ask. She's travelling with her daughter who is demonstrably also a Saints fanatic. We talk about our chances this season (which at the time we met were significantly slimmer than they are at the time I write), and obviously about how mental it is to meet someone from your own home town for the first time while on a train between Monaco and Nice. It reminded me of my first night in the student bar at Barnsley all those years ago when I met a lad who lived in my street and who had done so for years without ever crossing my path. Whether or not that was a deliberate act on his part was never established, but we got on pretty well all the same.

We meet on Monday. Saints are playing their first Super 8s fixture on the forthcoming Thursday at Warrington. We both fret about how on Earth we are going to be able to see the game in Nice, a place that is about as synonymous with rugby league as I am with action movies and Olympic high jumping. As yet neither of us have found anywhere reliable and we face the unenticing prospect of spending Thursday evening constantly looking at our phones for updates while simultaneously trying to hold conversations with our significant others. Don't hate us. Fanatics should be pitied. Go and read Fever Pitch and then come back to me on that.

Our Monday evening is spent in Akathor, the live music bar I was telling you a little bit about in a blog which now seems to reside a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. We get there about 9.15 to find that we are therefore 15 minutes too late to take advantage of happy hour. It's going to be another expensive one. Undeterred, we take a seat outside the bar on what is another spankingly wondrous evening weather-wise. If the weather was like this in Thatto Heath it wouldn't conjure up quite the same images of Shameless. The waitress, who must be over 18 but looks about 15, takes an eternity to get around to serving us but I don't mind so much. Outside the entrance to the pub we are being 'entertained' by a man calling himself Danger Joe. He's playing folk songs, Dylan and the like. But rather than Dylan, he physically reminds me of a crap 80's comedian called Joe Brown. I regret that I didn't take a photograph of Danger Joe now, but to give you an idea of the sort of thing we are dealing with here is a photograph of Joe Brown;

The weird thing about Akathor is that they don't serve halves. If you want lager then you have to have a full pint. For reasons that are not just financial I throw in a couple of cocktails in between pints. Four or five pints on the bounce will have my bladder screaming at me for a divorce and I am not hopeful that Akathor has a disabled toilet anywhere on the premises. Wherever we have been in Europe facilities for relieving my disabled bladder have always been notoriously poor. In much of Spain, for example, I can't even get my chair through the narrow toilet doors to even find out whether there are any steps or other inconveniences inside. The doors to public toilets in Spanish bars are, in my experience, so narrow that you don't even need to be a wheelchair user to have trouble using them. Anyone reasonably fat would also struggle to get through.

As 10.00 rolls around Danger Joe is replaced by a new musical act. This nameless duo take their talents inside, presumably due to some French law about noise pollution after a certain hour. We're curious to find out whether they are any better than Danger Joe, and we are sufficiently lubricated to fancy a bit of live music by now, so we take our drinks inside. It proves a wise choice. The set list is rather more modern and to our tastes. It's not that we don't like Dylan, although Emma does have trouble remembering his name, it's just that he's generally not much fun to listen to. He could be accused of being melancholy. Not these two, who strum and drum their way through several pearlers from Jason Mraz's "I'm Yours" to Lukas Graham's "7 Years" and all points in between.

Before the end I'm singing at the top of my voice, and the only real singer in the house compliments me on my efforts. We get chatting and he tells us that he is from Australian Polynesia. Thinking he means Tonga, Fiji or Samoa or somewhere like that I ask him if he has any interest in rugby league but he just looks at me blankly as if I'd asked him if he has any interest in the history of pottery. As it turns out Australian Polynesia is his way of saying Tahiti, admittedly an island less well known for its blockbusting second rowers.

It gets late, and we are on the point of leaving when to my equal measures of surprise and delight I discover that there is a lift in the building which takes you to another floor where there is A Disabled Toilet. Wow. The Spanish can learn an awful lot from a place like Akathor. Bladder sorted, we order more beer and listen to our Tahitian friend some more. We stay so late that the 15 year-old who served us our first pint is sat next to us looking at her phone, having finished work and transformed herself into the young adult that she really is. The musicians try their luck but even our drinking powers have limits so we are not around long enough to find out how successful they have been.

A great night has been had by all, but Tuesday could be a slow day.

Once You Pop You Can't Stop

This is just a quick one for my Twitter followers. Anyone who has me on Facebook will already know about it as, during my blogging meltdown earlier in the week, I posted a status about it. A microblog if you will. Please yourself. Anyway the 140 character limit imposed by Twitter on its users meant that I couldn't do the story justice on that particular platform. So you get the extended version now.

I work at a well known university in Liverpool. I can't tell you which one it is because I never have anything nice to say about it and...well....saying nasty things about it apparently violates their social media policy. By which they mean their policy of controlling your thoughts. Across the road from said unnamed university is a small branch of Tesco's where most days I can be found purchasing my lunch. My last visit ended in the kind of ignominy that is reserved only for me, and here's why.

Having bought my lunch I was on my way out when my chair suddenly came to a complete stop. I pushed off again but it was going nowhere. Something was catching on my right hand side wheel. I looked down and noticed that my ruck sack, emblazoned with St Helens RLFC logo and available from the club store at a probably not very reasonable price (I wouldn't know, it was a present) had got tangled up in my wheel. One of the straps had got wrapped around the spindle to the point where it would be impossible to unwind it without removing the wheel. So in full view of Tesco's lunchtime customers I took the only course of action available to me and jumped out of my chair on to the shop floor. There I sat by the shelf stacked high with Pringles, unwinding my troublesome strap from my now one-wheeled chair.

I put the wheel back on and climbed back in. But not before two men asked me if they could help in any way. Usually, my misfortunes of this nature in the vicinity of work are witnessed only by female students under the age of 25, so it was a blessed relief to only get caught looking like a dickhead by two middle aged men. Still I declined their assistance. If you need help getting back into your chair then you should never get out of it on the shop floor at Tesco's by the Pringles or anywhere else. That's a basic rule among us Undateables.

The next day one of my colleagues, who had completely ignored the Facebook post on the subject, came back from her own visit to Tesco's and told me that she was considering buying me some Pringles. All of which caused her and other colleagues much merriment at my expense. But then what else is new in that barnyard? I wish she had bought me some Pringles anyway because a) I like Pringles and b) It would have been funny. What it does prove is that you never know who is reading the nonsense that you put out on social media, even if they don't join in with pillorying you for it online at the time.

The Superhumans

When I disappeared from the Bloggosphere the other day I reckoned without the one or two very kind souls who continue to read my work, but do so in total silence so that I don’t know they are there. One such reader lamented my decision to tank Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard over the head with a large brush, in particular because he had hoped that I might contribute something about the forthcoming Paralympic Games in Rio.

So being back and yet not being back at the same time, I now have the opportunity to do that without actually subjecting myself to the tough crowd that is my Facebook page. Anyone can view this but only a select few will. That’s fine. What’s worrying is when you look at your stats page and see that 70-100 people have visited your blog that day without ever having indicated that they were there. It’s like you’re so bad that they aren’t admitting to having wasted three minutes of their life on you. Stop it. Also, with Twitter the only people who follow me do so because they have a common interest in St Helens Rugby League Football Club and enjoy my work for Redvee.net and the18thman.com. Ninety-five per cent of them have never met me and as such are fairer judges. And when they don’t like my work I can either defend it in a hopefully highbrow debate with them, or I can shrug and consider that I don’t know the person having a pop at me anyway so maybe it isn’t a crisis. Facebook is full of real people who I have met several times and will meet again. Their rejection is hard to take. Even if they are fucking philistines.

On to the matter in hand. The Paralympic Games get underway in Rio in just 15 days time. Presumably the downtime between the start of the Paralympic Games and the end of the Olympic Games is to give the people on 20% of what we would call a minimum wage enough time to clear up all the shit left behind by Ryan Lochte and his mates. At the time of writing the event is threatened by the prospect of financial difficulties making it impossible for some smaller nations to attend. There has also been talk that not all of the venues used in the Olympic Games will be available for the Paralympic Games due to financial jiggery-pokery. All of which is a major concern at best and a bloody outrage at worst as it was my understanding that any host city bidding for the Olympic Games would not be successful unless they could put on what my nan used to call a full spread. You have to be able to fully stage the Paralympic Games also.

Whether we see a slightly scaled down version of the games or not, it won’t stop Channel Four in their relentless crusade to promote disability sport while driving an enormous wedge between elite athletes and people who work in….say…..universities at the same time. Channel Four’s insistence on referring to the competing athletes as ‘The Superhumans’ in the promos is something way beyond hyperbole. It has left hyperbole at the door and gone out on the lash to a strip club with Inspiration Porn. Paralympic athletes are not Superhuman at all. Rather, they are elite athletes who have devoted their recent history to mastering their chosen sport in the pursuit of glory. I don’t know, because the closest I ever got to Paralympic sport was being benched in the Great Britain under 23 team for a bloke who had ambled in from the athletics track outside, but knowing a few people who are or have been Paralympic athletes I wouldn’t mind betting that they would prefer to be seen as athletes rather than a group of bionic superheroes recently bitten by spiders or blasted off dying planets towards Earth by Marlon Brando. Ask your dad.

Look, don’t take this the wrong way. I’m all for the promotion of disability sport and will be as hooked as the next person when the live coverage gets underway in September. I just think that more and more now, in the eyes of the media a disabled person is either an all-conquering superhero or they are an undateable sub-species who, bless them, need that extra £30 per week that IDS is using to pay for his second home because they can’t be expected to earn their own living. There is no in between with labelling of this nature and it is utterly unhelpful for those of us who are just ordinary members of the public who happen to have a disability.

Not that we don’t get a taste of what it feels like to be seriously over-rated also. Inspiration Porn is part of life for us all. There are people who don’t mind telling you that your getting out of bed that morning and managing to avoid a trip to Dignitas is an act of heroism deserving of a day out at the palace with Her Maj. It’s brilliant what we do, you know, that breathing in and out 24 hours a day thing? Yet in many ways this Inspiration Porn serves only to illustrate to us normal crips out there what little is expected of us. If only we could be more like that David Weir, a photograph of whose dinner once amassed 635 Facebook likes. But we can’t because he’s Superhuman.

Never Meet Your Heroes (or find out what they read)

I shouldn’t be here. This used to be Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard. Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard was basically a travel blog with a disability slant which would often extend to blazing rants about disability access or lack thereof, as well as about the still appalling and lazy prejudices of the able bodied population in regards to disability. But then since a failed experiment at publishing elsewhere has persuaded me to come back to Blogger, you could just trawl through any of the posts on the front page and you would know all that.

Me and my partner Emma travel a lot. We have just come back from the south of France (Marseille, Nice, Monaco, Cannes, Toulon, Antibes) but down the years we have been to Tenerife, Salou, Orlando, Las Vegas, Benidorm, Barcelona, Vilamoura (Portugal), New York and Rhodes as well as cities all over the UK from York to Bath, Stratford to London, Leicester to Manchester, Nottingham to Sheffield.

The reason I say I shouldn’t be here is that on Tuesday night I decided to banish Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard, to consign it to history. This was mostly due to reading a disability-related travel blog by another writer which, although very good, was not spectacular or special or what you might reasonably suggest as being written to a professional standard. I am not a professional myself but I know one when I see one. I have a degree in journalism from the University of Leeds and as well as Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard I have written for FourFourTwo magazine, the Huddersfield Daily Examiner, St Helens Star as well as the now defunct London Football Review. For the latter I interviewed former QPR striker Kevin Gallen who seemed to get quite offended when I asked whether he would accept that he never really fulfilled his potential.

The blog in question was hugely and deservedly well received. There were scores of comments and something like 50 likes on Facebook. In seven years writing Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard, across 260 articles, I have received 67 comments and never more than 10 likes. This led my admittedly depressive mind down a dark path which could only end with a total and utter loss of self regard and motivation to continue. Yes yes, I know. Writing is its own reward (why do you think I’m doing this for nobody in particular?) but after a while a lack of interaction starts to wear you down. My work on my recent trip to France has been completely ignored by the few people I considered my readership, which means either that it is shite or that I am very unpopular personally. Either way, Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard had to die.

Yet the urge to write hasn’t left. Or at least it has reappeared less than two days after this crushing realisation hit me. So here I am. What I really wanted to talk to you about was Victoria Coren-Mitchell. I absolutely love Victoria Coren-Mitchell. She’s clever, sexy and funny. And very likely wealthy. What’s not to like? I’ll tell you what in a minute. First I have to mention her quiz show Only Connect. It’s a modern marvel. That rarity among the genre that is both entertaining and fiendishly difficult. But not in a University Challenge sort of way where your lack of knowledge of 15th century artists leaves you out of the game and disinterested. Only Connect requires some depth of knowledge but is more of an IQ test also. It’s not enough to know facts, you have to be able to identify connections between the things you know. If you haven’t seen it do so this Monday night at 8.30pm on BBC2. It’s a team competition, the format for which is in keeping with the mind-boggling questions, so hard is it to understand.

I’ve been trying to tweet Victoria. Every week I tweet her with some hopefully witty quip about something that happened in the show, or something relating to her Sunday column in The Observer. She has never tweeted me back. The only famous people who have ever tweeted me back are Rod Studd, voice or rugby league and darts on Sky Sports, and Bobbie Goulding, former Saints scrum-half, part legend, part nutcase. Yet I remain encouraged to do this because I see from her feed that Victoria tweets people back all the time. Like Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard, my tweets just haven’t been good enough to elicit a response just yet. Unlike Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard, I haven’t given up.

Last week’s Observer column concerned Sir Ian Botham volunteering to have fertility treatment while remaining at pains to point out that he does not need said treatment. This is when I discovered that there is something not to like about Victoria. In the normally witty preamble to the point of her story, she happened to mention that she had been sifting through the Sunday papers to find an article about Botham and his absolutely not faltering penis. One such paper, appallingly, was The Sun.

Now coming from the Merseyside area The Sun is obviously going to be on the dislike list. It is Room 101 fodder. The disgusting and vile way they reported on the 1989 Hillsborough disaster will never be forgiven. It was a Tory rag before then, but since then it has been nothing but toilet paper. To find that Victoria is among its readership was a cruel blow, a shock to the system. They say you should never meet your heroes. You should never find out what papers they read either.

So of course I tweeted Victoria to ask her to please say it wasn’t so. Her non-response, though predictable and entirely what would have happened had I been tweeting her to tell her that she should be made Queen of England, was still telling. She’s clearly ashamed of her dubious reading habits but doesn’t want to discuss it with a failed blogger who just won’t leave her the fuck alone. It probably won’t take many more tweets before I’m blocked completely.

Monaco - An Episode Of Lost, Too Far Fetched To Make The Cut

What better way to start August than with a trip to Monaco? Happily it is just a 20-minute train ride from Nice to the principality. I have been there before when I was about seven years old but unfortunately, rather like my last year at university, I don't remember an awful lot about it. I mention my university days because I have just found out today that Hedonism, the old nightclub we used to frequent on Monday nights (student nights, beer prices that would make the residents of Nice and Marseille's eyes water) has been damaged by a fire. I don't think it was a nightclub anyway, but now it looks like it won't be very much of anything. It's virtual gutting is....well....gutting as the place has so many humorous and frankly unprintably embarrassing memories. Still it has put me back in touch with a couple of old friends via Facebook. But there we go......

Back even further in the mists of time and to my 1980's trip to Monaco then. My dad tells a story about how he carried me and my chair up 4,875 steps to get to somewhere or other only to find that there was a lift that he could have used. I have some sympathy with him about how this could have happened as we will see later. For now I'll just explain that there are a series of lifts which help people with mobility problems get around Monaco, which is not so much hilly as utterly mountainous. You might think that this is rather more fun on the way down to the marina than it might be on the way back up to the train station. Not necessarily. Stopping yourself careering down the steep hills is an equal physical challenge and a good deal tougher on the hands. I do have brakes, but as most wheelchair users know using brakes isn't an option if you want to keep all of your digits in place. Which is especially important if your legs aren't doing their job.

We share a pizza for lunch in a café bar half way down one Everestian mountain. It's all very pleasant except for one tiny terrier shrieking its head off at everything and everyone in its path. Then we crack on down the burn and blister inducing paths toward the marina. We pass through the famous tunnel which makes up part of the famous race track where the Formula One Grand Prix takes place. I have to be honest and confess that I don't watch Formula One. If there was some grass growing or paint drying on another channel, of an endless loop of old Keith Chegwin quiz shows, I would opt for that over the latest endeavours of entitled rich boys fucking around in their over-sized penis extension go-karts. Yet as you see the traffic pass under the tunnel in both direction it does leave the mind to boggle somewhat at how they go about racing down here at 180mph. Overtaking must be an adventure to say the least.

Having almost but not completely worked out the system of lifts we reach the end of the tunnel and find that the tour bus picks up from a stop just off the marina. Or at least it would do if it were not for some temporary work going on. As the bus pulls up the driver gestures to us to get back out on to the main road before coming to a stop. Tour buses are the only buses in France in our experience which have genuine wheelchair access, so I am spared the help of the French public and instead board the bus in the manner for which the automatic sliding ramp was intended when it was added.

For a while we sit back and let the bus do its work. It takes us further on the Grand Prix circuit, offering stunning views of the landscape on the way up through the mountains. We get off the bus at a particularly scenic spot just by the palace. Or Palais Princier de Monaco. Monaco is the second smallest sovereign state in the world after Vatican City but is all the better because it is not home to God bothering paedophiles masquerading as moral crusaders. The view of Monte Carlo from the top of the road where we have been dropped off is breath-taking. So much so that I am at a loss to describe it again, so here is a photograph;

Some other fun facts about Monte Carlo;

As well as Bore-mula One it also hosts world championship boxing matches, the Grand Final of the European Poker Tour and the World Backgammon Championships.

The Monte Carlo Masters tennis tournament,regularly hoovered up by Rafa Nadal, is not played in Monte Carlo at all but in the neighbouring town of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin which still belongs to France.

The Monte Carlo casino featured in both Never Say Never Again and GoldenEye.

Ringo Starr, Bono, Shirley Bassey and Paula Radcliffe all have homes in Monte Carlo.

We move on over to the palace, which looks a strange pink-ish colour with perhaps a hint of yellow. How should I know? I'm a man and we're all colour blind to some extent. It's an impressive piece of architecture, home now to Prince Albert following the death of his father Prince Rainier in 2005. He was married to 1950's actress Grace Kelly, subject of Mika's God-awful song, who met an untimely death in 1982 when she had a stroke and lost control of her car while driving on these narrow, highly dangerous looking mountain roads. I remember hearing this tale of woe when I was here as a child and becoming convinced that the coach we were on would soon career over the edge and wipe us all out. What I didn't know then that I know now is that she'd had a stroke.

Just like at Buckingham Palace, Palais Princier de Monaco is manned by smartly dressed statuesque guards. And as with Buckingham Palace tourists are somehow compelled to gawp at the guards and take multiple photographs of them in their shiny white garb. You can just make out the tiny figure of one of them if you click on this photograph which is admittedly far more focused on the building itelf;

We get back on the bus and the real fun starts. We can see that a bus goes from Stade Louis II to the train station, so we decide to get off the bus there, have a quick look around or maybe even take the tour before heading back. It takes us several minutes to find the entrance to Stade Louis II (which will become a theme). The stadium is, among other things, the home of Monaco FC. They are notable to English football followers only because they used to be managed by Arsene Wenger who had, among his charges, one Glenn Hoddle during the late 1980's. Despite claiming to be independent of France they play in the French league in a kit that is red and white split diagonally from bottom left to top right. They reached the final of the Champions League in 2004 where they were roundly gubbed 3-0 by Jose Mourinho's FC Porto.

Unfortunately the tour is off the agenda for the day. The players are training at the stadium for a Champions League qualifier this coming Wednesday against Galatasaray. If nothing else that does at least spare us the prospect of being spoken to about football history in French and trying to decipher any of it. We get back on the tour bus instead of taking the public bus to the station at this point. There's more of the area to see and we still have a bit of time now that we won't be spending it at the stadium tour. The idea was to eventually find somewhere we recognise to allow us to make our way back up to the station, hopefully by-passing most of the massive hills and mountains. We go one better than that (or so we think) as we discover that the tour bus stops at the train station. It's odd. It feels a bit different, not like the place we arrived at from Nice this morning, but a train station is a train station so we get off and start looking for a way back to Nice.

As we enter through the main entrance there are screens displaying train times and destinations. This may look more like a public lavatory than a train station but it is definitely the latter. We take the lift up to the next level which brings us out at the end of a long corridor. Half way up on our right are signs for the platforms with escalators leading to them. Further on at the end of the corridor are a set of lifts which we quite reasonably believe will take us up to the same place as the escalators. They do not. Instead they take us to another level on which there are two more lifts and another escalator. We try both lifts. Both lead back outside with no sign of anything resembling a platform. Not quite believing any of this we try all of the above again.

We meet one lady who advises us to go back outside the lift and travel up a very steep road where, she assures us, we will find the accessible entrance. What we find is a couple of Italian men who speak little or no English, and another man who does speak English but has absolutely no clue where the accessible entrance to the station might be. He assures us there is no way around on this road which has come to a dead end. We can see the railway bridge and the platforms above us but there is no way to get there. Finally, we go back inside, taking all the many lifts once more before Emma goes up the escalator to find out more.

While she is away I am approached by two people who speak English, both of whom ask me if I am ok and where I need to go. All of which reminds me of the many times as a child that I would be approached by strangers in town who thought I had got lost because I happened to be waiting outside a shop or something.

"Are you lost?" they'd ask.

No. I'm not fucking lost. There's 47 flights of stairs in this shop that sells Commodore 64 games and all of my mates are in there looking for the latest edition of Barry McGuigan's Boxing.

I convince everyone that I will indeed be ok, which just leaves me as the only person yet to be certain of this. I have been at the bottom of this escalator for some time now and Emma has not re-emerged. Finally she comes out of the lift, telling me that she thought I would be meeting her on the floor below. It's all very confusing when you are in an unfamiliar building which has a huge array of lifts leading to precisely nowhere. Emma confirms that the platforms are at the top of the escalators but that there is no lift to get us there. That's escalators. Plural. There are three of them, she says. When I was younger and away on basketball trips I saw several of my team-mates negotiating escalators in their wheelchairs with the minimum of fuss. They just placed their front wheels on a step and hung on. What could go wrong? I never had the cojones to have a go myself and never felt the need. Everywhere we ever went had lifts and if you took the escalators as a wheelchair user you were just showing off. The wheelchair users equivalent of doing the Grand National. Not the famous Aintree horse race, but jumping over the garden fences outside every house in your street until you fall flat on your face and break your nose. However, in this situation what choice do we have? We take the escalators. All three of them.

With Emma there to help it isn't that difficult. She just has to stand behind me to make sure I don't fall backwards as I hang on to the moving rails. If she falls backwards well then we're both fucked, but fortunately she has the ability to stand upright for long enough to get us to the platform. When we get there it still looks like a different station. Everything here is underground. We ask the lady on duty about trains to Nice, and about booking some assistance and she just tells us that she doesn't know if she can arrange it for the next one which is due to arrive in 10 minutes. By this time it is about 5.45 in the evening. When it arrives she has done nothing to assist us, so in the spirit of everything else that has happened in this station so far we attempt to get on the train unaided. The problem is that there are two steps up to the carriage, and they are as steep as anything we descended in Monte Carlo this afternoon. There is no way we are getting on there, especially not with hordes of people barging their way through. It's organised chaos.

The lady comes back from wherever she has been and we try to explain our predicament. We need assistance or else we are not getting back to Monaco by train. What is more, if we do have to find another way home it could mean descending those escalators to exit the station. They might not be so easy to negotiate on the way down as they were on the way up. Only then does the lady inform us that there is a lift. She has been telling us to go back downstairs to organise assistance and we have been trying to explain that there is no lift, and that we had to take three escalators to get up to the platforms. She insists that there is a lift and points in its supposed direction. Unconvinced, we follow her instructions more in hope than expectation.

And she's only right. It must be 200 metres away from the escalators, not remotely visible from where we have been waiting and trying to get on trains, but it exists alright. It takes us down to the information desk and as we exit it we realise that we are actually in the same station we have been in this morning. Interestingly, we were to meet a couple in Nice airport on the way home who told a similar story of how they had been to Monaco by train but could not find the accessible entrance to the station when they returned to it. It's like the island in Lost, some fucker has moved it in the struggle to provide credible material for that 834th series.

The drama is still not quite over. We queue patiently at the information desk (we already have return tickets so no need to worry about that this time). When we get to the desk we find the one helpful person in all of France, who tells us that it will be fine, she will organise the assistance and we just have to wait there for them to meet us. But while I am in the toilet it transpires that our friend from the platform has been back down to see us, taken our tickets and promised to return. In the meantime, the helpful lady at the information desk has given up for the day and shut up shop. So we are completely in limbo now, relying on a hugely unreliable member of staff to come back with our tickets and someone who might reasonably be expected to be able to operate a ramp.

It happens, but the train we board is the 7.10 having arrived at this unendurable station at around 5.30pm.







And there the story ends. I had hoped to tell you all about Cannes, Antibes, and about the man from Tahiti who entertained us at Akathor. But I won't because...well.....you're not there any more. Either because I don't have the requisite talent or because you're sick of being offended by my views and my tone. When you sift through 'Other People's Blogs' and see how greatly they are outperforming yours it is perhaps time to knock it on the head. It has been fun and I did try. Thanks to Rob for reading the French stuff, and to Mark and Anne for trying to convince me that this shit is worthwhile. I shall of course continue to write for Redvee which I enjoy hugely, especially since there are a great many people who are actually interested in it and regularly interact. The same, sadly, cannot be said of Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard which is taking an indefinite break from......now.

Nice - Beggars Belief

As July ends so too does our time in Marseille. We're moving on to Nice for the next six nights. I know, we flew to Nice six days ago but let me explain. We wanted to see Marseille, but knew that it was going to be too far away to take a day trip from Nice and besides, we wanted to spend a decent amount of time in Marseille. Nice was always part of the plan and, having flown to Nice, we then have to fly back home from Nice. So the best thing to do was to get the train down to Marseille from Nice, have six nights there before taking another train back to Nice, staying there for six nights before flying home. Got it? It works, honest.

Since this is a long journey (around two hours 40 minutes) we are back on the nice trains. That's nice with a small 'n'. However, any hope of having the spacious compartment to ourselves is obliterated by the presence of a hugely irritating young man in a Manchester City shirt with the name 'Aguero' emblazoned on the back. He looks to be somewhere in his early 20s. It is quite possible that he spent the majority of his childhood having no clue about the existence of Manchester City, but that's what billionaire owners will do for you. Aguero can't keep still. He shuffles around in his seat endlessly and stares at people intently in between taking extremely short phone calls and generally messing about with his phone.

Soon we are joined by a group of about six people of a similar age to Aguero, who targets one of the girls among them for the full-on stare treatment. It's slightly creepy but I'm not sure she has noticed given how engrossed she seems to be with whatever she is reading on her own phone. Most of the others fall asleep. If Emma and I were not here this girl could be under serious threat from the fidgeting, leering Aguero. He gets off the train at Cannes, where we hope to spend a day later in the week. I can't shake the feeling that we will run into him and he will annoy me again. That is if he hasn't been arrested for his top level leering by then.

Thankfully there are no suicide attempts on this train journey, so we arrive in Nice just after 3.00pm. We take a taxi to the hotel (past the shop with the word 'SEX' written in large blue letters across the front). We'll be staying at Hotel Mercure, the first thing about which to note is that it has a small step up to the entrance. The staff hurriedly carry a small ramp out to the front and promise that they will be available 24 hours a day to make sure that I have access to the hotel as and when I need it. Which is all very well, but in the end we tend not to bother them with it. If we are leaving the hotel I can bump down the step myself, and if we are heading back inside I just need a little shove from Emma. Still, it's a trifle naughty of them to claim full accessibility if that accessibility depends on hotel staff rushing out with a ramp as it no doubt would do for many other guests.

This first thing we do and probably the first thing that anybody does when arriving in an unfamiliar place is go for an exploratory wander. If you have a television, the internet or a local newsagent it will not have escaped your notice that Nice suffered a heinous terror attack on Bastille Day. That's just 11 days before we flew out to Nice, and only 17 days before we return today. We are staying right on Promenade des Anglais where Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel deliberately crashed his lorry into the crowd over by the beach before shooting at the police and being shot dead himself. Eighty-four people were killed in the carnage, and an 85th was to pass away from their injuries before we landed back in Manchester.

Opposite the beach there is a park at the centre of which is a pile of tributes to the victims. Cards, messages and cuddly toys all cover the middle area of the park where a constant stream of visitors mill around paying their respects. I decide it would be inappropriate to take any photographs so you'll have to take my word for it when I say that it is both moving and unbelievable. Unbelievable to think that something so utterly shocking could happen right here in such a beautiful place which at the moment just looks so peaceful. Credit is due to the people of Nice. Were it not for the tributes and the odd quartet of armed soldiers (who were visible in Marseille also) then you would never know that their city had suffered so much. They just get on with the daily business of enjoying the total majesty of their home town. There's no edge to the atmosphere. Bouhlel has not taken away their freedom. I don't feel unsafe at any point.

We turn left off the Promenade, pass through an arch and find ourselves on a busy street loaded with bars and restaurants. We stop at one called 'Atmosphere' which has lime green canopies and waitresses who like to dance to awful music which they crank up to Spaceballs-esque 'are you nuts?' levels of volume. We discover that Nice is no less expensive than Marseille. It costs €4 (around £3.35) for less than half a pint of lager but it is extremely pleasant to sit there in the sunshine soaking up the surroundings. Perhaps that's it. Perhaps it is a sunshine tax that they place on beer in the south of France which we will never have to worry about in the UK.

We carry on browsing the bars and restaurants, passing one promising live music every night called 'Akathor'. There'll be more from that place as the week goes on but for now we head back to the hotel for a quick refresher and then head out down the main street where Hotel Mercure is situated to see what else we can find in the way of evening entertainment. We stop at a bar called 'Red Kaffe'. While we are enjoying our still overpriced lager I notice an old lady loitering around on the street outside the bar. The bars sprawl out on to the streets in this area so she is just metres behind me. She approaches the people on the table next to us and asks one of the girls for a cigarette. The girl looks a little surprised but she obligingly takes out her packet of cigarettes and hands one to the loitering old lady. At that point the owner of the bar comes out and says something to her. It sounds like he is politely asking her to stop bothering his customers and move on away from the front of the bar. She's probably a homeless person or some kind of beggar. The bar man will have seen this sort of thing many times before, no doubt. It's rife here. We had one experience in Marseille when a young boy approached our table in a cafe and gestured to us to give him some money. He was accompanied by a woman who was probably his mother. I don't know what is more tragic, the fact that people use their children in this way or the fact that they feel they have to. They were not the only ones. Day after day in Marseille we would see the same two or three people hanging around cafes and bars trying to persuade people to give them their money. Looks like things won't be any different in Nice.

The old lady responds angrily to the bar owner's request, shouting at him and gesticulating. The argument continues for a while and I'm half expecting four armed soldiers to turn up and settle it with their huge machine guns. Which is not a euphemism. Then, just as the begging old bag is reluctantly walking away she aims a floating missile of sputum back in the direction of the bar. It's Rijkaardian in its audacity and outright foul rudeness. It misses my head by a matter of centimetres and comes to rest in a wretched pool of vile greenness in a spot just behind my rear wheels. At first I thought she had got me. It was that close to the side of my head. If I had a mullet like Rudi Voeller's she would have scored a direct hit. Being bald has been helpful on this occasion. The bar man rushes over all frenzied apologies and offers of piles of tissues to clean up any stray gob that might have found its way on to me. Thankfully there isn't any and we just sit there and finish our drinks in stunned amusement at the whole affair. What a perfectly pleasant way to end our first day in Nice.

Despite the owner's apologies and his helpfulness, we don't return to Red Kaffe for the rest of the week.

Stade Velodrome

Friday night in Marseille is a bit of a blur. After the long trek back to the hotel from the railway station we headed straight out and drank too much. Five full days of paying €8 for a pint of lager does strange things to you, so I started on the cocktails. I have since had it suggested to me that cocktails are girls drinks, which is the kind of 1970's thinking that stops many women from going into a pub or a betting shop on their own. The bottom line is that cocktails get you drunk faster than lager will, and at €8 a pint they are not that much more expensive. I'm all for spending money recklessly, especially on holiday, but if you are going to avoid running out of money before you get home then some nights you are going to have to look for the value.

Saturday morning we had tickets to visit the Stade Velodrome, home of Olympique Marseille FC and one of the venues for Euro 2016. It was here that Woy's hapless England side drew 1-1 with Russia, sparking all kinds of frayed tempers among the Russian support and proving the catalyst for two or three days of violent scenes in the city. Quite glad I wasn't here for that one if I'm honest.

The stadium is in another part of the city, well away from the port with its picturesque scenery and expensive bars and restaurants. That means another bus ride and, you're ahead of me, the lift on the bus does not or will not operate properly. As such I am again lugged on to the bus by the nearest person eager to help. If, like me, you can bounce down steps then getting off buses isn't a problem so at least I only suffered this indignity one way. However, any disabled person who for whatever reason cannot manage steps in either direction is frankly risking their well-being twice as many times as I did. The willingness of people to help is all very well and good, but they know nothing of the safest way of providing that help. You can find yourself clinging on a bit, especially if like many wheelchair users you have the kind of balance that would embarrass Luis Suarez.

The bus drops off a short distance from the Stade Velodrome. Turn right at the top of the road and you will see it dominate the landscape. It's recognisable because of its curved roof in homage to the cycling events which were held at the stadium after it was built in the 1930s. This is different from the English football stadia I have visited which are all visible from the moon thanks to their lavish branding on the stands. Giant club crests adorn the stands at Liverpool, Everton, Sheffield Wednesday etc...but to look at Stade Velodrome from the top of the road where it sits you would not necessarily be able to identify which club plays there except for the fact that you are in Marseille and Marseille only has one professional club. Interestingly (to me anyway) Stade Velodrome was shared between Olympique Marseille FC and the city's rugby league team in the 1970s. Where did it all go wrong for RL in France?

The reception area has very minimalist décor. It's a big empty room except for the receptionist who sits behind a desk not paying very much attention to us. We tell her we have tickets for a tour of the stadium at 11.00 and she tells us in very broken English that we will need to wait for assistance. Stairs again which are circumnavigated by a series of lifts and it all starts to feel a little bit like the French railway service again. We wait outside and it has rained this morning for the one and only time during our stay in France. Only for a short time but quite heavily, and the drainage system mustn't be the best as the roads and pavements are gathering water in puddles in the way they would at home if it had rained solidly for two days.

Eventually we are led up to the Presidential Suite. A man is holding court with a group of visitors, talking enthusiastically about his experiences during Euro 2016. Apparently they had 'all the players....all the stars'. Chief among these of course is Cristiano Ronaldo. Between stifling a yawn and trying to figure out if this tour has actually started I catch half of an anecdote about how much attention the preening, footballing behemoth attracted when he deigned to rock up at Stade Velodrome with Portugal when they played Poland in the quarter-finals. But Ronaldo Attracts Attention is Man Has One Head kind of territory in terms of headlines and I quickly tire of his monologue. What I want to know is where was he when it all kicked off between the Russians and the English? Whose fault was it exactly and did, as I suspect, the media make it sound like the Spanish Civil War because football hooliganism is A Good Story?

Turns out the tour hadn't started yet. Our tour guide is going to be the lady from reception, the one who gave us that can't-really-be-arsed welcome earlier. The guy talking to the group in the Presidential Suite (from where you get an absolutely belting view of the pitch by the way) is going to be the one charged with helping me and another guest with some mobility problems get around to see everything. He's on crutches and he is from Norway, but that is as much as I find out about him. Nobody can get a word in as our chaperone likes a chat. He's from Algeria, he tells us, and when he finds out that I support Liverpool he reminisces about the atmosphere in an Algerian bar when Liverpool played AC Milan in that memorable Champions League Final in Istanbul. According to him half the people in the bar where shouting for Liverpool and half for AC Milan. Who shouts for Algerian teams in Algeria, then?

Having to be separated from the group to take different routes down secret passages and hidden lifts is not the biggest problem with the tour of Stade Velodrome. The biggest problem is that Aida, our tour guide, conducts proceedings entirely in French. Our Algerian friend (I never find out his name, regrettably) advises us that all tours are conducted in French but that if we ask her she might be able to at least summarise what she has been saying in something that resembles English. So Emma asks and Aida refuses. Point blank says that no, she can't do the tour in English nor explain anything about it in English. I'm feeling a little left out again. Like my friends are in the tent with the girls and I'm walking to the shop again. Even the Algerian man does not offer to explain any of it for us, which is pretty unfathomable considering that he is fluent in both English and French but does not consider either to be his first language. The staff here should wear badges that read 'Unhappy To Help'.

Another of their flaws is that they conveniently gloss over significant parts of the club's history. One of the main exhibits focuses on their 1993 Champions League triumph (helpfully there is some English text alongside the photographs to give you some context). What it doesn't tell you, is that due to financial irregularities that Champions League winning side was relegated from the French First Division the next season and blocked from defending its European title. Emma asks about this and the Algerian flatly denies it. The only part of what he says which is true is that they did not have that 1993 Champions League stripped and so it remains on their list of honours. However, it is plainly very far from the whole story.

The best part of the tour was the photo opportunities, some of which I will leave you with below. However, at €13 a ticket you might want to brush up on your French skills or else take a translator with you before you part with your hard earned for this one....

Toulon

As busy as we were in France we did have some down time. That is, time just spent hanging around in the hotel doing not much of anything, usually when we had returned from a trip out or had decided to have a bit of a rest for a day or so. The French railway system can be a tiring experience.

It was during one such period of nothingness that I discovered that the television in our room had one channel which broadcast films in English. I found this strange. Despite literally hundreds of channels being broadcast on my Sky+ system at home there are precisely none which show French language films. The only place I have ever found those is on BBC2 late at night at the weekends when the schedulers think nobody is watching. They'd be right if I had a life.

One afternoon I decided that instead of falling asleep and waking up two hours later feeling like I had been hit by the 33, I would take the opportunity to watch an actual English language film. This isn't Sky Cinema where you have the choice of...oh....seven or eight films which were all broadcast the previous day and will be broadcast again on all subsequent days until you die, so there was only one option. The Invasion stars Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman and is a quite revolting tale of a zombie apocalypse. There is none of the humour of Shaun Of The Dead. This is a serious business. Whereas in Shaun Of The Dead victims would be zombified by being bitten (or having their insides eaten like Dylan Moran's character), the unfortunates in The Invasion become so by having one of the zombies basically vomit in their face. Apart from outraged revulsion there is no immediate effect from this. It is only when the victim falls asleep that they become an extra from Thriller as they awake.

Now, is it only me who finds the idea of vomiting into Nicole Kidman's face outrageous? Craig looks like someone has already vomited in his frankly, and no amount of smart suits, bow ties and girly drinks in any number of James Bond films can pull the wool over my eyes on that score. But Nicole? It's an absolute affront. What next? Taking a dump on Charlize Theron's marble floor? You're not going to bother to watch this terrible film so let me just tell you that there's an inevitable moment when Craig's character gets zombified and he tries to lure the sleep deprived Nicole towards him so that he can complete her transition. She's been trying to stay awake all night locked in some kind of warehouse, or maybe a supermarket, with her son. Whereupon she shoots Craig in the leg, which is apparently what you do when you really need to get rid of someone but you can't bring yourself to kill them because you love them. It was a load of old nonsense, made worse by the fact that when it had all come to its logical conclusion (Nicole having found some way to reverse the affects of the face-spewing which has by now escaped my memory) Craig was safely co-habiting with her and looking about as trustworthy as a Russian weightlifter. Perhaps they had a sequel in mind at that point. Perhaps there is a sequel out there somewhere. One can only hope not.

On Thursday we decided to visit Toulon. This meant a bus ride from the port to the Marseille St Charles station. Like trains, buses in France are accessible without actually being accessible. That is to say that the law says they must provide access features, but is fairly apathetic about whether or not those access features are operational or not. The theory is that a ramp should automatically slide from under the bus at the middle doors, leaving those not requiring access to board at the front as you would see on a traditional British bus. Only the ramps don't work. None of them. Of all the bus rides we took in Marseille (around four or five in total) the ramp was operational on only one occasion. That's according to an array of drivers who spoke little or no English, so in actuality I couldn't be sure whether the ramps really were broken, whether the driver did not know how to operate them or just could not be arsed to do so, or whether he was making an active stand and keeping my kind off his bus. Prejudice takes many forms. The likelihood of the latter is however lessened by the willingness of the Marseille public to physically drag a wheelchair user on to a bus when the ramp is not operating for whatever reason.

It's just a pleasant one hour on the train from Marseille St Charles provided you have the patience to get through the railway station protocol. On the way we took in Marseille Blancarde, Aubagne, Cassis, La Ciotat, St-Cyr-Les Lecques-La Cadiere, Bandol, Ollioules-Sanary-Sur-Mer and La Sayne-Six-Fours. None of which are pronounced anything like you might imagine from looking at their spellings. Helpfully the railway station is very close to the town centre meaning that we need not find out that day whether the bus services in Toulon were any better than those in Marseille. Having got up early to get through all of the railway station shenanigans we have had to skip breakfast and so by the time we arrive in the town centre finding somewhere to eat has become a top priority.

We cross the square (known actually as Place de la Liberte) towards a row of restaurants, passing the impressive Fontaine de la Federation as we head towards them. Built in 1889 it stands in front of the façade of the Grand Hotel and looks a little something like this. Except it doesn't normally have some behatted berk sat in front of it;

Photo opportunity taken we press on. At one end of the row of restaurants is a place called 'Ptits'n'Pins' which I find funny in a Beavis & Butthead sort of way. Yet we can't seriously sit in a restaurant with such a preposterous name so we choose the Brasserie next door. It's a choice we'll regret. Everything appears normal at first. We take a seat at a table and wait. Two waiters are hurriedly walking around tending to customers. They haven't even looked at us but that's ok. They're just busy. We wait, and we wait. Five minutes or so pass without either of the waiters even acknowledging our existence on the planet never mind within their restaurant until finally one of them comes over and offers us the menu. Though it is obviously going to be written in French I expected to at least be able to understand the basics of what was in each dish but with this I don't have a clue. My internal arty-farty food alarm starts ringing. I'm not going to find anything here that I would class as edible. Emma doesn't seem any more enthused at the options. So we leave, evoking memories of that cringeworthy moment in Palm Desert when we left a branch of Ruth Chris' because a piece of chicken, by itself before you get started on your chips and/or your vegetables, cost $23.

The waiter seems a little surprised, perhaps slightly offended. Yet neither of us have the linguistic skills to explain that we don't want to pay €15 for an item of food we can't identify. So we just apologise and go. Instead we find a small sandwich shop on the corner further down the road where we boringly eat cheese and ham baguettes but, boring or not, they're enjoyable which is kind of the point of being on holiday. After lunch we take a walk down by the harbour. It's just as stunning as that at Marseille. After a customary stop at one of the cafes for a beer we move a little further down and off the main promenade. We come out on to a road, and directly in front of us is the rugby stadium. Stade Mayol is a rugby union stadium, home to the town's RC Toulounnais Top 14 side. If you're acquainted with me, or with anything I have ever written either here or on redvee or the18thman, you will be left in no doubt about my loathing for all things rugby union. It's a quite tedious game played by lawyers and future Strictly contestants. But Stade Mayol is no less impressive for all of that.

Around the corner we find a place that is much more my sort of thing. It's a bar for starters, but not only that it is a bar called Le Saint. It even has a little stick man logo, harking back to the good old days when Saints logo looked like something from the credits of the old Roger Moore crime show. Those used only to the Super League era will know nothing of this but it's all a far cry and a safe distance from ludicrous animal nicknames and their associated logos which exist only to please the marketing men. The only problem with Le Saint is that on further inspection, having gone down a ramp to the side of the building, it is not accessible. There are two quite large steps at the front of it and well, it just isn't worth the hassle really. Not that I'd miss the opportunity to take a photograph like this one;

The road loops back around leading back to the harbour. We walk back along towards where the boat we have booked to sail on will be leaving. Unlike in Marseille there's no important tacky but brilliant film-related landmark to focus on. This will just be a nice, pleasurable cruise around the port area which looks magnificent. So much so that it is beyond my limited powers of description. This time we sit at the front of the boat, which inevitably turns out to be another mistake. The trip is accompanied by a constant commentary, entirely in French. In front of us a middle aged couple seem to find every part of the commentary wildly amusing. Worse still, they start throwing some of their own comments back in what can only be described as an attempt at banter, all of which is utterly befuddling due to the language barrier. What concerns me most is that nobody else other than this couple are laughing at the commentary or responding to it. This means that either nobody else on the boat speaks French or, more likely and mortifyingly, it's just not funny.

Compounding the lady's behaviour is the fact that the wind keeps blowing her skirt up above her waist so that you can see 'all the way to Florida' as Carrie Fisher once memorably described the main selling point of her iconic chain bikini from Return Of The Jedi. But this lady is no Carrie Fisher circa 1977 and there is no selling point. It all makes me feel a tad queasy if truth be told.

We snoop around the shops and I buy the obligatory souvenir mug. The awful truth is that our house is overrun with mugs but this in no way acts as a deterrent. Darth Vader, killer whales, Chicago Bulls, St Helens RLFC (three times), Barcelona FC, pandas, Disneyland Florida and Yorkie bars can all be found on mugs in our house. Add Toulon to the list. Another beer by the harbour later and it is time to head back to the railway station. We have a day of nothing much planned tomorrow except sitting around by our hotel pool which seems like as good a reason as any to get back in time to go and drink far more than is reasonable. If only the French railway system would co-operate.

Everything appears as normal as it gets in France at first. We buy tickets, book the assistance, all with no trouble at all. It is only when we get to the platform that our troubles start. On that subject actually, I just want to say how bloody rude it is that they send Emma down the stairs on her own to cross the track via the subway while I am whisked further down the platform to cross the track above ground. Why is it necessary to split us up? What harm does it do them if one more person has to be escorted across the track above ground? I'm not comfortable leaving her on her own like that even though she doesn't seem to mind. It's a small thing, but it's the small things that chip away at you and dehumanise you in my experience.

We wait on the platform but are informed by the staff member assisting us that there could be a problem with the train we are waiting for. They're trying to find out, something they fail to do fcr an eternity. Even when the train pulls in they won't let us board, still insisting that they are trying to find out whether it will be going on to Marseille or else terminating at Toulon. Finally it emerges that there has been an incident on the train in which the driver or the guard has been assaulted by a passenger. They don't say what they mean by assaulted but they do say that the police are involved and we are still waiting for an answer as to whether the train will continue on to Marseille. Eventually it transpires that it will not, and we have to board another train. There are trains everywhere, several of which looks suspiciously like they may be heading towards Marseille. Yet it takes fully an hour from the moment we arrive on the platform for us to board a train that we can rely on to take us to Marseille. It's a shambles but it's not their fault, it never is. They apologise.

I'm quite enjoying the views on the train ride back to Marseille when I see something startling and quite outrageous. A couple of things actually, though the first should perhaps be filed under ironic and annoying rather than startling and outrageous. At Bandol a couple board the train. Nothing unremarkable about that, until Emma points out to me that they are the same couple who had been bantzing with the commentator on the boat earlier. At least there is no wind on the train to interfere with the lady's attire but what are the odds? They must have taken a train to Bandol from Toulon immediately after they left the boat while we were enjoying our beers on the harbour. To be fair to them they are somewhat less annoying when they are not being egged on by a self-proclaimed comedian with a microphone on a boat, but their very presence is yet another indication that we are forever cursed by these kind of ironies and coincidences. At that point it would not have surprised me if we had been vomited on by Daniel Craig.

The second incident is much more troubling. A young man and woman board the train at a carriage further up from where we sit. They have a little boy with them. As they shuffle around towards our carriage trying to find a suitable place to sit the young man is shouting at the girl. Not loudly, but in a tone forceful enough to leave you in no doubt that he is not happy with her. She doesn't really respond and it becomes clear why soon after when he leans in towards her and blatantly headbutts her above the eye. She's clearly terrified of him and his psychotic penchant for domestic abuse. It is not clear whether they are a couple with their own child or maybe siblings travelling with their younger brother, but either way this kind of thing just appals me. Women go on and on about how infidelity is the worst thing that can be foisted upon them, but are quite happy to put up with this kind of bullshit. If I had the physical capabilities I would stalk the Earth ridding it of domestic abusers like some kind of vigilante superhero. Maybe someone will do something similar in that novel I have been promising to write since I was 21. Which works fine until you consider that a) I am now 40 and that novel is looking less likely than my presence in the 2017 TT Races and b) I hate superhero movies and stories and have not seen or read a good one since Superman II in 1978 when I was two years old. Oh alright, Watchmen was mildly diverting....

When the domestic abuser and his victim disembark the train at Marseille she has one hand over her right eye which is also hidden by the brim of her sunhat. He looks guilty but unashamed at the same time, and I want to punch him in the head repeatedly more thane ever. Instead we just get off the train and start looking for a bus back to the port. Except we don't find one. Somehow we have exited the station at a totally different point from where we were dropped off this morning and we can't find the number 83 bus for love nor money. Emma's idea is to walk back towards the port, the logic being that we will surely find an appropriate bus stop en route. Which we do, but not before we are within half a mile of the harbour and have been on the move for about 20 minutes to half an hour. We still manage to get out to the bars albeit much later than planned, but we're a little bit drained for anything more than the usual row of bars along the harbour. The next night is our last in Marseille. Perhaps we will make up for it then.

Chateu D'If

Have you ever seen or read the Count Of Monte Cristo? The film version I have seen is gloriously tacky but no less brilliant for all of that. It stars Guy ‘Mike From Neighbours’ Pearce and Jim Caviezel and also features the late, great Richard Harris as well as Henry Cavill. The latter can currently be found fronting Hollywood’s bid to saturate the movie market with pointless, brainless superhero movies in his role as the latest incarnation of Superman. He’s devilishly handsome and as such is a hate-inspiring smug shitbag of the worst order.

But it’s a great film as I say. It tells the classic story of Edmond Dantes, stitched up royally by his best friend Fernand Mondego to the point where he ends up imprisoned at the remote, depressing Hell-hole that is Chateau D’If off the coast of Marseille. There he meets Harris’ all-knowing priest, learns all manner of skills from him from swordsmanship to the less obviously useful skill of being able to stick his hand under dripping water and pulling it back before it gets wet. Using all of his new found abilities he escapes, swims to the beach, meets a group of pirates from whom he acquires a small fortune, becomes rich and powerful and exacts a terrible revenge on Mondego and the authorities with whom he was in camp cahoots. Oh, and he gets his girl back from Mondego too, after the sleazy schyster had stolen her away following Edmond’s conviction. What? She had no choice, right? If your fella gets wrongly imprisoned for 13 years what else are you going to do but shack up with his best friend? Other men out there you say? Plenty more fish especially when you look like Dagmara Dominiczyk portraying the lovely but a bit dim Mercedes? Desist with your common sense, you’re ruining Dumas’ classic revenge thriller.

This glowing synopsis of The Count Of Monte Cristo is in here for a reason. Chateau D’If is a very real place and one you can visit by boat from Marseille. It’s no longer used as a heinous prison in which the one solitary officer comes to your room and beats the shit out of you every night whether you need it or not, but instead is open to the public to view, enjoy its history and surprisingly its not inconsiderable beauty. Unfortunately it is not accessible to wheelchair users such as myself but I’m kind of ok with that. You can’t really tamper with hundreds of years of history by putting in one of those shite single person lifts that they have at Tesco on Tithebarn Street or at Thatto Heath Rugby Club. I almost got stuck in the one at Tesco yesterday. I’d popped over to buy my lunch and the gate wouldn’t shut behind me. As usual an attractive lady came to my aid, the mortification elongated by the fact that it took her a good 10 or 15 goes to shut the fecking thing. Then it just started moving down of its own accord. At that point I had no choice but to descend, buy my lunch and then worry about how I was going to get back up and out of the building later. Sure enough it got stuck again on the way out, at which point one member of staff and one man who looked as if he had just wandered in from a night’s sleep on the street were the unfortunates charged (not by me) with the task of getting the thing to work. Finally it got going, but it might be a while before I buy my lunch there again. I told the member of staff that it might be a good idea to put a note on the gate telling people that it is out of order to avoid the risk of anyone getting stuck in the store like something out of a Simon Pegg/Nick Frost movie. She just looked at me as if I was disabled, which I suppose I am.

Back to France, and despite the lack of access within Chateu D’If you can still take your biffy arse on to a boat to get close enough to see its awesomeness and get some pretty handy snaps with which to bore all 300 of your Facebook friends. Which is exactly what we do. We sit right at the back of the boat and I climb out of my chair, half expecting to be collared by one of the teams of armed soldiers for behaving in a way not befitting someone using a wheelchair, but thankfully nobody seems to care much where I sit. The whole thing takes around 45 minutes which, although they advertise it as a one hour ride, is probably long enough. The weather is beautiful and so are the views of the coast and out to sea, but not so much that you want to stay for the three hours or so we did in Tenerife when three quarters of the people on board were throwing up at regular intervals when they should have been whale watching. Or looking for dolphins as it is better known.

So anyway, Chateau D’If. It was built in the 16th century as a fortress by King Francis 1, who saw the island of If as a strategically important location for defending the coastline. It later became the prison where Dumas based his famous revenge yarn until the end of the 19th century when it was opened to the public. As we sail past we can see scores of people milling around at the very top of the castle, with many more starting the ascent of the steps to have a snoop around. Apparently you can see the dungeons where Dantes is supposed to have been detained but I’ll never know what they look like. The boat stops here for a brief period and those who can visit the castle and have paid more than our €10 to do so get off. We stay on board and are joined by those who have already visited the castle and want to make their way back. Here’s one of the shots I managed to take of Chateau D’If for you to peruse while you try to bring to mind the image of Guy Pearce playing a dastardly French aristocrat trying to dump on his best mate’s parade. I'll add more later. Maybe;

France - Valerie Adams And L'Open Tour Marseille

Plodding along whether you are here or not then, let me explain a bit more about Marseille. The Raddison is immediately opposite the impressive marina. On our side of the road are a row of bars and restaurants while on the other you will find an equally endless supply of boats, the bluest water on Planet Blue, and a London Eye style wheel which looks a little something like this;

I wouldn't go on it. Unlike in London, the pods are not enclosed. I wouldn't say I have a problem with heights but I don't like being up there without the comforting presence of windows and a roof. It didn't look all that accessible anyway on further inspection, but I wasn't ever going to give it a try. What if it stopped at the top? That's fine if you have windows but otherwise I'd cover the marina on vomit. I'd probably lose my shoes up there too. My shoes always fall off regardless of what size I buy. It's just a fact of life that I have come to accept.

One of the first bars you hit as you walk along the street opposite the marina is a place called The Queen Victoria. It's clearly trying to style itself as an English style pub but it's name is just about the most English thing about it. That's not necessarily a bad thing. One of the most head scrambling things you see on holiday in Europe is people gathered in English-style bars watching bloody Eastenders or Emmerdale. Holidaying in Spain or France doesn't represent a massive cultural shift but bloody hell show some willing and give the soaps a miss, would you? If I can give up my half hour of Only Connect with Victoria Coren-Mitchell you can knock the soaps on the head for a week or two.

The prices at the Queen Vic (get outta mah pab!) are certainly not English. Everything is expensive in the South of France, not least here where 250ml of lager (less than half a pint) will set you back €4. That's around £3.35 which is, well, let's not dress it up, pretty horrifying. They do a special house brew which they call 'beer of the month' (or whatever that is in French) which they serve only in 500ml measures (still less than a pint) and for which they charge €5 (£4.20). A pint of anything that you would recognise as lager costs €7.80 (£6.55). This all makes my bleating about paying £5.30 in a London pub in June look a little petty to be honest. Food is equally expensive. On the first night we eat at a restaurant just down the road from the Queen Victoria. I choose duck, mostly in the absence of chicken, and it costs €23 (£19). Emma says it looks like a liver, but fortunately she tells me this some time after I have finished eating it. Had she said so at the time I might not have eaten too much of it because I absolutely detest liver. Which is apt because my liver fucking hates me too.

Still, the Queen Victoria is not without its plus points. It has a disabled toilet, which for access fascists is an absolute must. It also has free Wi-Fi, meaning you can post numerous holiday meanderings and pictures of yourself and whatever concoction you are consuming at any given moment at the touch of a couple of buttons. Even I know how to do it, which when you consider the trouble I had inserting that picture of the wheel into this article tells you something about how easy it is. I know you come on holiday to get away from the daily drudgery and the berserk microscope that is social media, but human nature has decreed that you'll still want to be nosey about what people at home are doing, and you might also want to keep them updated now and again about your movements given the uneasy feelings around security in France that are currently very prominent. All of which is, admittedly, the moral equivalent of going to Spain to watch Eastenders and Emmerdale.

Outside the bar an argument breaks out between two people walking along the street. One is a girl reminiscent of veteran New Zealander and double Olympic shot putt champion Valerie Adams. She's shouting in French at a much smaller young man and as he heads for the relative safety of the inside of the bar she makes a grab for him. Within seconds the fight is broken up by four men dressed in full military gear, including berets, who carry huge guns around with them. They patrol the streets in groups of four, presumably in a bid to dissuade any members of ISIS/people with mental health problems/delete as appropriate from engaging in any heinous violent crime. It's overkill for this particular minor scuffle, although I am nearly knocked into Emma as it gets a little bit physical, but it is amazing how quickly fights like this are broken up by soldiers carrying deadly weapons than they are by bobbies carrying truncheons and asking people to please calm down. In all likelihood arming our police would likely escalate gun crime and cause all manner of problems, but it would certainly give the Crockie Crew something to think about. In the end, Valerie stomps away still muttering to herself and anyone who will listen, and I learn that the word 'homosexual' spoken in a French accent with the required level of aggression is a gay slur.

We don't drink too much at the bars along that row because we are up early the next morning to do a bit more exploring. We visit the Tourist Information Centre which has a lift which doesn't work, leaving Emma to go in alone to find out what there is to do around here. The lift broke yesterday, they tell Emma. Why wouldn't the lift break 24 hours before my arrival? That's exactly the sort of thing that happens. We have breakfast at a café over the road and I am hugely underwhelmed by what I am told is an English breakfast. It's about as English as the Queen Victoria. There are scrambled eggs involved but the bacon has been practically grated and instead of beans and sausage there is salad. You will go an awful long way in England to find an English breakfast that is served with salad. Emma has more luck with her continental offering, which includes a piece of cake and numerous European bread products and fruit. Over breakfast we decide to take the bus tour around the city today, visit Chateau D'If by boat tomorrow and take a day trip to Toulon on Thursday.

The tour bus - or L'Open Tour Marseille - leaves from just over the other side of the marina from the hotel. That is just a short walk away from the café where we have breakfast and, in a rare moment of convenience, the lady selling the tickets speaks pretty good English. The first bus that arrives is chock full and the driver isn't keen to let any more people on, so we are asked to wait for the next one which will arrive in 15 minutes. Well, we're not going anywhere else. We stay on the bus for a short while listening to the commentary, which refreshingly works through the headphones system and which even more refreshingly is in English provided you have the intellectual capacity to tune in to the correct channel. I can just about manage that so I'm learning all about Marseille's rich seafaring history when we reach the stop at Notre Dame de la Garde where Emma suggests we get off for a couple of photos and a closer look. We had seen this catholic basilica from outside one of the café bars the previous evening. It sits on the top of the hill which sprouts up from behind the marina, something like this;

The image is a little far away for you to get a proper look but you can see it better on my Facebook page. Still I wish we had been able to get a better shot after getting off the bus. Unfortunately the stop was in the middle of one of the steepest hills I have ever been on. We would have seen the basilica much more clearly the top of the road which could not have been more than about 100 metres away, but we don't get more than 20 metres up this ridiculous mountain before I decide it is not going to be possible and tank it. Even if we had been able to get to the top of the road, coming back down again to get back to the bus stop would have been life threatening. People assume going down hills in a wheelchair is easy, but these are people who have never tried to stop themselves travelling down absurd gradients at any kind of speed. The brakes on my chair are a token effort and totally unsuited to the job, which leaves only my hands to stop the momentum. And with that you get burn, blisters and balance problems.

The next bus takes around 30 minutes to get back to the stop, so we just sit for a while and rest in the sweltering heat. There's more bad luck on buses when we get back on board because the next one has a broken audio system, leaving us to complete the second half of the tour with no commentary. It all looks very pretty but there is no context for us as we drive past Vieux Port, Le Panier and Musee Cantini among Marseille's many other places of interest.

When we get back to the marina we carry on wandering around, eyeing up restaurants and bars and looking for anything that might be more reasonably priced. There are happy hours, generally between around 5.00pm and 9.00pm when you can get things a little cheaper or even half price. This is useful to know and explains why, when we emerge later that evening at around 6.00-7.00pm, most of the bars along the row are extremely busy for a Tuesday. Before that we stop at a shop where I buy a postcard to send to my work colleagues, complete with cheap jibe about Liverpool and scousers, and Emma buys an anniversary card for her brother and his wife. It takes a while to buy the stamps and figure out how to send these items, again down to our hysterical lack of command of the French language, but we get there in the end. It's nine days before the wedding anniversary and 13 days before I am back in work. All of which should be more than enough time for the posted items to arrive in England before we do.

France - From The Beginning

I’m not completely sure how to structure this epic tale of Marseille, Nice, Toulon, Monaco, Cannes and Antibes so let’s just start at the beginning.

3.00am, Monday July 25 2016. I’m up at this ridiculous hour to catch a flight to Nice from Manchester Airport at 7.30am. Emma’s been at her parents’ house for the weekend and since my uselessness includes but is not limited to packing for holidays it has been a bit of a scramble to get everything sorted. By about 4.15am we are as ready as we will ever be and on the road. We’re low on petrol, but not low enough to actually stop and fill up now. Resolving that we will be able to do it on the way back in 12 days time is the kind of giddy thinking that can only be inspired by the prospect of going on holiday. And is exactly what we do.

Predictably there is a problem before we get anywhere near the terminal building. We’re leaving the car at Ringway. We always leave it in a long stay car park and then get the bus they provide to the terminal. This decision was inspired by one particularly unpleasant experience in which the company we had hired called the day before departure to say that the lift on the accessible mini-bus was broken, making it an inaccessible mini-bus. Accessible buses that were actually inaccessible buses were to become a theme during our stay in France, but first things first. We’d had to drive to the car park on that occasion and have always done so since. Call it cutting out the middle man.

We board the bus, Emma lugging two large suitcases with her. Turns out I can’t carry suitcases either. She’s managed to store them safely and we were set to go. Except the bus isn’t. The driver has flipped the ramp down to allow me access on to the bus, but upon flipping it back he has found that he cannot then close the door. He tries and tries for possibly the most awkward few minutes any of us on board could remember, before finally giving up and asking for help on his radio. A man who looks the part as a mechanic turns up seconds later, fiddles with knobs knowingly and with authority, before deducing that the thing is actually buggered. We have to disembark which means more lugging for Emma, and then move down to the next bus stop in the car park to catch the next bus. Only the driver of that bus turns out to be the would-be mechanic on the buggered bus, so we then have to wait for him to finish his chin-stroking diagnosis before we can get on board the new bus and be on our way. Fortunately for all our sanity and the brevity of this particular story, the second bus is sufficiently functional to get us to the terminal.

The flight is as uneventful as it can be when you are unable to walk. That is to say that being dragged backwards down the aisle of an aeroplane without any trace of my dignity is now such a regular occurrence that it no longer warrants any further comment. There is a strange moment at the end of the flight when the girl sat next to me by the window decides to wait until my assistance arrives before getting off the plane, even though she appears able to do so under her own steam. I ask her if she wants to get past me to get off and she just shrugs. The thought crosses my mind that maybe she can’t because of some terrible unseen condition so I don’t push it any further. But then one of the cabin crew asks her about it and she squeezes past me, stands up and walks off the plane unaided.

We take a taxi from Nice Airport to Nice Ville railway station. The plan is to get on the train to Marseille where we are staying for the next six nights, before returning by train to Nice for six further nights before flying home. The taxi driver speaks enough English to speculate about whether there are any topless women on the beach as we drive by, to shout abuse at a man he claims is the 'Islam-loving' French Finance Minister (we were sceptical, and then to have a good giggle at the word ‘SEX’ written in enormous blue letters on the side of a building opposite the railway station.

‘I wonder what they sell?’ I ask.

Any train station where language barriers exist is going to be a challenge to negotiate. Add in the need for wheelchair access and you are into Crystal Maze territory. There are two separate desks, one for information and a ‘boutique’ which sells tickets. In the boutique you have to take a ticket from a machine and wait for your number to come up, which is reminiscent of how they carry out blood tests at St Helens Hospital. A ticket to Marseille from Nice costs €70 which after the Brexit fiasco is about £58.00. It’s about 99 miles which should take around two hours and 40 minutes. But this is us remember. It was never going to be that quick or that simple. But before we can even think about that we have to organise assistance on to the train. Bafflingly, this cannot be done at the desk at the boutique. That would be too easy and sensible. You have to take your recently purchased ticket to the information desk and book assistance through them. Turn up at the information desk without a ticket and they won’t take you on, so basically you have to take a bit of a punt that after you purchase your train ticket they will be able to organise the assistance for you in time to catch your train. Generally they require 30 minutes notice to be able to organise assistance for anyone with the temerity to turn up using a wheelchair. It’s not like Lime Street where you can just rock up three minutes before departure and shout ‘Thatto Heath’ at a bloke who is otherwise standing around doing nothing. If they don't get their required 30 minutes notice, you could very well end up waiting for the next train. Trains to Marseille from Nice are not all that frequent so it's not something you want to get involved in.

The lift they use to help me board the train is a real cutting edge piece of technology. It's square in shape and has a ramp that flips open at the front. Then when they close it up behind you they literally wind the thing up manually, like how you used to wind up the windows in your car in 1978. When you reach a suitable height to board the train there is more winding to enable two great fork-like ramps to extend in front of you so you can wheel on board. Sometimes this is necessary as some French trains have two giant steps leading up to the carriage. Other times it is complete overkill and they will just use a small ramp if the platform is closer to the level of the carriage. This one we could have boarded ourselves, so non-existent was the step between the platform and the carriage. But they weren't going to tell us that. It would interfere with their safety policies. The French railway service treats wheelchairs and their users in much the same way as they would treat a toddler wandering around the platform on his own.

There's lots of room in our carriage. It's a specially designated area for disabled people and wheelchair users which were I of a mind might inspire a rant about segregation. However, it doesn't really have that effect as the able bodied population are not shy about shuffling along and occupying the seats there. I jump out of my wheelchair for comfort, pleased that there are no jobsworth guards watching me do so, lest they physically drag me off the seat and dump me back in my wheelchair where I belong. The scenery is breathtaking. The bulk of the journey takes you right down the coastline so you can see all of the stunning beaches and sea views, albeit interspersed with trees and the odd tall building. Everything is so magnificently blue. The sky seems more blue than anywhere else, so too the sea. The scenic route was something we wanted to experience when we considered travelling on the Eurostar. We'd shelved that idea when we realised how long it would take to get from London to Marseille, bearing in mind that it is four hours drive down to London also and probably would have involved another overnight stay. So with that it is fabulous to be able to see France like this anyway, even if the train we are on doesn't quite offer the luxury of the Eurostar.

An hour or so into the journey we slow right down and before long come to a complete stop. We're not at a station so something has gone wrong, which is not altogether surprising in our experience. What is different about this is that it's a little unnerving to listen to announcements over the tannoy in French, particularly when you can only make out the word 'security'. The tension cranks up a notch when the driver, adorning his splendid Axl Rose bandana, hops out of his secluded bubble and begins doing the Peter Kay run that dad's do down the length of the train, all the while mumbling in French in what appears to be an agitated manner. The next minute he is off the train, walking along the railway still muttering away about something or other. There are more announcements that we cannot understand. Now normally this wouldn't be such a big deal but you may have noticed that over the last 18 months or so France has had some issues with terrorism and that public safety is a concern. If you start to think about that sort of thing at the point when Axl gets off the train gibbering away then you could concoct all sorts of scenarios in your mind. But a few minutes later a girl enters our carriage to use what appears to be the only toilet on board. She's French, but she has some kind of far eastern ethnicity also. I'm hoping she speaks English so that I can get her to give us some idea of just what is going on here. As she leaves the toilet and makes her way back to the seat I take a punt;

"Excuse me, do you speak English?" I ask. It's a question I will be asking repeatedly over the next 12 days, owing to the fact that my own French skills do not go beyond Sutton High GCSE experience. Grade fucking C. You're not having a conversation with a real life French person if you only have a grade C GCSE, that's for sure.

"Little." she replies, demonstrating just how little with her one word answer.

"Do you know why we have stopped?"

"Someone, they jump off the bridge because they try to die." She says.

And that is all we find out. Clearly the girl's English skills are too limited for me to press her any further on the matter and it somehow seems inappropriate to do so anyway. So I'm afraid I'll never be able to tell you whether the person who tried to die was successful. I certainly hope not, and can at least assure you that there was no evidence of any death as we finally got going some half an hour or 45 minutes after stopping. No body parts, no gore, no blood or anything like that. There are more announcements, probably telling us how late we are going to be arriving in Marseille, but we'll never know. I should have revised a bit more for that French exam in 1992, I know. But the 16 year-old me thought that revising was something you did if you thought you wouldn't pass otherwise. It never occurred to me that scraping a Grade C would be an issue on a train nearly 25 years later.

We arrive in Marseille around 30-40 minutes later than advertised, and are met by the train station staff with their high-tech lift. You have to give them credit for this part of their accessibility service to be honest. Many is the time (well twice that I can think of) that I have not been met at train stations in England and ended up in entirely different ones than I had intended. By and large the French are very hot on this and are there to meet you with the lift promptly. That's great, but then they have known about the need for assistance since at least half an hour before the train departed. Perhaps that is why they do it, and why they have a computerised assistance booking system at the information desk in the stations. It works, kind of.

Another taxi, another mad driver. He drops us at the Raddison Hotel which is right on the marina at Marseille. The harbour looks pretty spectacular as we drive by it, passing the endless row of bars and restaurants on the way. We're on the fifth of five floors which again could inspire another novel about how we always manage to find our way to the top floor of hotels despite requiring wheelchair access, but let's not spoil it eh? The hotel staff give us a voucher for a free drink, which after a quick refresh in the room we use at the café bar next door on our way out for an exploratory stroll. What we didn't know when we got the voucher is that there is no choice of drink involved. The waitress brings over our free drink which is an orange-looking vodka-based cocktail that looks as though it could take down a herd of buffalo. It tastes good, and it is pretty refreshing in the searing heat that still lingers even at around 6.00 in the Marseille evening.