Another Part of An Ethnographer In Paradise

I am on the beach at Eze Sur Mer. The day is typically idyllic. Perfect light. 

If I am honest, though, I might sometimes question the idyll. It's hot, very hot. Locals cool themselves under the showers provided along the beach by the municipal authorities. Press and woosh ... warm water sprinkles over the shaggy-haired head of a middle-aged woman. Meanwhile, I am, perhaps with a little too much of the worried parent, making sure that every exposed millimetre of my youngest's face has ingested some suncream. She is wriggling away from this dousing and there's a fat bead of perspiration on my head. I am trying to inspect her shoulders but she escapes and is gone to a game in the pebbles.

But the light, the blue light and the yellow, goes straight into the memory. That's the joy of it. Like the memory is a camera, it needs only the smallest aperture, the slightest invitation, to imprint new memories on a day like this.  Perhaps this is why the sunshine is our idyll. It makes it easier to see ourselves, easier to remember ourselves.

As one scans the horizon there are, I don't know, more than a dozen boats within view. Wait a moment, no, there are much more than a dozen. Scanning right to left, from Beaulieu to where the sea disappears behind the cliffs before Cap d'Ail and Monaco, there must be twenty. There are several of the classic yachts of the rich. But there are other smaller boats too, speedboats and day-trippers. Dead centre as my eye tracks, well away on the horizon, is a magnificent, proud yacht. It is a real yacht with translucent sails tall to the wind.

Behind me somewhere a double-decked train comes out of the tunnel that hides Eze Sur Mer from Cap d'Ail. It is racing from Monaco to Nice. Behind that, beyond my view, the Basse Corniche is doubtless parading its exotic combination of Renault amongst Bentley, Citroen amongst Aston Martin. Peugeot. Black Mercedes. Peugeot again. And then, overhead to the beach, there is a deep rumble as one, two and then three heavy, propellered planes of the French Air Force come flying low over the cliffs. I recognise the red circle insignia from my schoolboy history books. It is the first time I have seen it or thought of it since. I may not be an aircraft expert then, but I know enough to recognise from their hull-like shapes that these are seaplanes. Soon, my family are treated to the theatre of these strange hybrids arcing wide towards Beaulieu before defining and landing upon a strip of sea amongst all the boats out there beyond Eze Sur Mer. They do not stop, but instead churn up white spray before taking off again. There they go, one, two, three, back up off the sea, dripping wet, back into the skies. They repeat this landing procedure three more times, each time winding their way over Eze Sur Mer and Beaulieu before they finally turn back over the cliffs and disappear to whichever air station they came from.

We feel like applauding but the locals look nonplussed.

Somewhere else, beyond the enclave of villas that hum with air-conditioning units, electric blinds and cooling fans, there is, doubtless, a nuclear power station silently injecting the vines of the national grid with that most necessary of energies, electricity. The Riviera is electricity-hungry.

And France is a technologically sophisticated and seemingly comfortable nation. This is perfectly expressed in the Riviera. There is no tension between the expressed idyll of the Riviera and its technology. Technology, from the bikini to the Bentley, the cooling fan to the yacht, the shower on the beach and the wine-cooler in the kitchen, is part of the Riviera's image of itself. This is no rural idyll. It is a sophisticated playground of man, technology and nature. Take away the technology and the idyll would diminish. No wonder James Bond returns here so often. In his own native England, the Bentley is parked away from the beach, the seaplanes would be an interruption, and no millionaire would ever buy a villa with a railway at its back.

And so, as I write I am again in mind of the Hopper brothers' provocative book "The Puritan Gift" wherein, amongst many other things, they tell of how America learned its technological skills from France. Not England, nor Germany. But from France. On another occasion, in the privilege of the company of William Hopper and David Howardin the Athenaeum in London, I was interested to hear David argue, perhaps with some regret, that if one really wanted to award a prize to one nation for its technological innovation and engineering sophistication, it would have to go to France.

For me, a Mancunian, this was news. But on reflection, I began to understand. And now, in a new light of understanding this history, I think that a failure to institutionalise its own native technological brilliance has been a blight on British governments since the industrial revolution.  Britain has done well with banking and financial services, but this was always London's business. Technology, innovation, and the ability to disturb the established order of things, were the business of the North of England and Scotland. And here, when it comes to institutionalising our knowledge and culture, we've done badly. We are nothing like the French.

And that is not good news. Not if you are from the North.