The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
My favourite place
Jon Sopel on the Côte d’azur
The BBC’S Jon Sopel is dreaming of the French Riviera
After four exhausting years of covering the Trump presidency, the BBC’S North America editor Jon Sopel, 61, dreams of escaping to the French Riviera
In 1979, at the end of my first year of university, I drove to the Côte d’azur in my bright-yellow VW Beetle with my best friend Robert. I can remember ordering a platter of shellfish at a seafood restaurant and having no idea how to eat it, so we copied the people at the table next to us.
That was my first experience of being in the south of France and it captivated me. I love the luminescent light and dry heat, the smell of the olive trees and wild herbs. When you’ve come out of a winter on America’s east coast and you feel that sunlight on your body, it’s just heavenly.
The Trump presidency has been quite something to cover. It has been a relentlessly busy four years and I can’t wait to go on holiday and decompress. Last year was the first time in 10 years that my wife Linda and I didn’t go to the south of France, because of travel restrictions. We’ve a place booked for September and I’m keeping my fingers and toes crossed that we make it there.
Our favourite place to stay is Saint-jeannet, an old-fashioned village in the hills that overlooks the bay, where the 1955 Hitchcock
movie To Catch a Thief was filmed. It has a church, boulangerie, patisserie, butcher’s, a couple of little restaurants – and that’s it. When you drive through the narrow medieval streets, you feel you have to breathe in to get the car through without scraping it.
For years we rented a house at the top of the village and would watch people climbing the rock that rises above it, Baou Saintjeannet, with crampons and ropes. You can walk it as well and are rewarded with spectacular sea views. In the evening, we’d sit out on the terrace, listening to the cicadas making a racket.
Saint-jeannet is near the hilltop village of Saint-paul-devence, where 20th-century artists – including Picasso, Chagall and Braque – gravitated because the light is so stunning. When they were struggling, artists would pay their bills at its tiny hotel, La Colombe d’or, by leaving a piece of work, so its restaurant has a priceless art collection. The terrace is an idyllic place to spend an afternoon with a basket of crudités and too much rosé.
A lovely spot to go shopping is Valbonne, a perfect little French town with a square and market. During the 2018 World Cup, there were giant screens in the square and the atmosphere was fantastic – it was a spectaculaire, as the French would say.
The Côte d’azur is a rich person’s playground, but that’s not how we roll. I once went to Nikki Beach, outside St-tropez, where the very wealthy park their superyachts. The car park was full of Maseratis and Ferraris and there were people spraying champagne over each other as if they’d just won a Grand Prix. It was fun to witness but sort of shocking as well. A British part of me kicked in and said, ‘This is all wrong!’ It’s great people-watching, but I do not belong there.
If you hire a motorboat for the day, you can drop anchor and swim to beaches where it’s quiet. Those are my favourites, and I’m not going to reveal their locations. I’m not patient enough to be a sun-worshipper, though; I get fidgety. I wrote my first book on Trump on holiday, after my wife said, ‘You’re going to get bored and scratchy. Why don’t you see if you’ve got this book in you?’
My kids Max and Anna are grown up now, but we still have family holidays whenever we can. Like so many families, we weren’t able to get together last year because I was stuck in America for seven months, my son’s in Australia and my daughter’s in London. My son and his wife are about to have a baby, and my overriding strategic objective for 2021 is to meet my first grandchild somehow. Unpresidented: Politics, Pandemics and the Race that Trumped All Others by Jon Sopel is out now (BBC Books, £20)