Les Petites Vacances

Rugby World Cup 2023 is well and truly underway and the Overgraduate was in the South of France for an extended weekend of sport and general jollity. Before anything else is said I must thank AO, JRS, AW, AS, and BH for their company on the trip, most particularly to those of them who had a hand in the organisation. OG steered well clear of taking any responsibility in that regard - my role was to pay up when asked and to make as good a pass as possible at being acceptable company. A brilliant trip.

OG's chosen reading - quel poseur

We travelled by train - Eurostar to Paris and then on to Marseille by TGV. These trips were a reminder of just how awesome train travel can be. Reserved seats, no over-selling and clean toilets. On the outward leg I read Private Eye - is it my imagination or did this used to be much funnier? On the return I did my faux intellectual bit and tried to make sense of a copy of Cahiers du Cinema. A barely-scraped French A level more than four decades ago is not the best equipment for this task. Fun though. 

We stayed in the stunning La Ciotat, twenty miles outside Marseille. AO had harnessed AirB'n'B and come up with a ridiculously luxurious apartment. On arrival the suave owner told us we could use any of the building's three pools. As for La Ciotat, well what a nice place. This is a mild understatement.

La Ciotat Vieux Port

Even the moments of mild trauma that inevitably accompany such a trip turned to our benefit. On Saturday under the blameless, burning skies we walked to La Ciotat's quaint railway station (where the Lumiere Brothers filmed their famous steam-train arriving and ushered in the age of cinema) only to receive the news that there was a local train strike. How were the intrepid half dozen to get into Marseille for England's opening match against Argentina? Here that shitty A level finally came into its own. A fractured call to our property manager, Sarah (whose English was on a par with my French), somehow managed to convey that we needed a taxi for six to the Stade Marseille. Sarah came up trumps and we all crammed into a Skoda for the trip. Our driver even arranged our return trip with his mate Phillipe. This proved a turning point in the weekend - Phillipe and his absurdly luxurious Tesla (I take back all I have ever said about Elon Musk) became our transport of choice - he took us back into Marseille for the Scotland v South Africa match on Sunday, took us home that evening and carried us to the station at La Ciotat on our Monday departure. Bravo Phillipe. From this near-disaster it transpired that we had avoided all manner of tribulations with local public transport.  

France had been a joyous host, boosted into a good mood by their team's dismantling of New Zealand in the opening match of the tournament. I should however point out that the stradium authorities in Marseille got it badly wrong for the England v Argentina match. The arrangements for entry into the stadium were dire and dangerous. The goodwill of rugby fans rescued the situation as boisterous Argentinians and wary Englishmen (most of them expecting an Argentinian victory) demonstrated admirable restraint. Enough will have been written elsewhere about England's short-handed victory - they spent almost the entire match reduced to fourteen men after Tom Curry's dimissal. Suffice to say this was a spirited, stoic, professional performance.

I will finish on a vaguely sour note. Phillipe got us back to the apartment on Sunday in time to watch the thunderous game between Wales and Fiji. The sour note? Matthew Carley's refereeing. I had hoped we might have got past the institutional elitism that sees the mistreatment of the 'tier 2' rugby nations. Sadly we have not. Just ask yourself this - would the All Blacks have been as mistreated as were Fiji? No they would not.