Picnic in Provence

An awful lot of people are feeling pretty fed up at the moment - what with the Covid going on and on and on and Christmas being over and all that. It could be worse, of course, you could have Covid 19 and be feeling very ill indeed. But right now I know a lot of people are feeling pretty down and depressed - waiting patiently or impatiently for their vaccines which are probably some months down the road.

So I’ve been thinking about wonderful occasions I’ve known and loved - and this is one. A picnic in Provence on a really hot day. Just me and six young women. Why it should have worked out like that, I do not know - I didn’t organise the picnic - but that was the way things were the day we cycled from a lovely hotel called Crillon le Brave to the old sand quarry where they used to dig for the stuff which made the first Perrier bottles…

Here’s part of what I wrote at the time…

Television adverts have come a long way in 50 years - look back and many were eye-wateringly bad, while some of the epic Christmas ad’s we watch today could win movie awards. But there were one or two memorable mini-masterpieces that hit the screen in the 1960s and 70s - one of the first stand-out artistic creations being an evocative Dubonnet ad’ showing a young woman walking through gorgeous French countryside, backed by Canteloube’s haunting Shepherd’s Song.

I was too young to taste Dubonnet at the time, and never have since - but I can still remember sitting in a bleak West Country council estate in winter dreaming of the delights of a balmy Southern France. For most viewers the advert didn’t so much sell some obscure alcoholic drink as convey a superior, warmer, more exotic, romantic lifestyle. 

You can imagine how I pinched myself, then, when I recently found myself enjoying a picnic deep in the Provencal hills with not one, but six, young women - working my way through wonderful local French food and wine in the strong heat of an autumn sun.   

It was one of those grab-this-and-keep-it-forever moments. Maybe it was the cool and surprisingly delicious Provencal rose, but I lay there thinking that it might well be that life would never, ever, be quite as good as this again. 

But then, that was something I felt time and again during the long weekend I spent at an amazing, breathtakingly, good hotel called Crillon Le Brave. 

Its staff had laid on the picnic, brought us the bikes so we would could cycle through beautiful countryside to the picturesque old quarry (where they used to get the sand to make Perrier and, for all I know, Dubonnet bottles), and generally arranged our every need and happiness for days on end. 

Of all the hotels in all the world, I end up writing about this one…

I say that because in my newspaper travel pieces it’s rare that I concentrate on just one establishment. I will this time, though, because I was so impressed and because all this luscious loveliness is just a two hour flight from the West Country (if you take a flight out of Bristol Airport, that is). 

Let me describe the basics of Crillon Le Brave to give you some idea of why I should write about just one hotel…. Most of us know and love the type of medieval hilltop villages they go in for around the Mediterranean. Southern France is rich in them, as are parts of Spain and Italy. But, although beautiful to look at, they can sometimes feel austere and unwelcoming - which is actually part of their nature because that is what they were designed to be in more troubled times.