In Ken Bates’ back garden - The Sea legs blog day 6

Today we landed on the Cote D’Azur, the little seaside town of Villefranche sur mer, just down the road from Monaco, home of the grumpy, beardy Leeds United and pre-Abramowitz Chelsea, chairman This town is the main cruise port for Nice, but clearly they want the hoi-polloi from cruise liners to keep away from the posh bits. Trust the French not to have a cruise port big enough to dock cruise liners, so we queued for 45 minutes to get on a tender to take us ashore.

Hot enough to boil a monkey’s bum, but lovely all the same. After lunch we hopped on a train to Monaco, only 15 minutes away, and spent the afternoon in a harbourside café and staring, open mouthed, at the Gazillion Euro yachts in the harbour. “Yacht” does not really do them justice; these are really miniature cruise liners. They have teams of lackeys cleaning, polishing, serving, and maintaining 24/7. They are the size of a respectable detached house and probably cost 100 times as much.

Playground of the rich and famous indeed…….

A scrum of Japanese metro proportions, missing only the uniformed “beaters,” got us on to the return train to Villefranche and back to the tender; mercifully no queues this time.

After dinner, which was enjoyed watching Monaco disappear in to the mist, we went to the now obligatory evening show. This evening, it was what Dad would have called “A Good Club Turn” from Dewsbury via Blackpool. He entertained a rapidly diminishing audience with a selection from Neil Diamond to Kurt Weil and finished with the inevitable “Amarillo.”
Sadly quite a few people walked out during his show; rude I thought, the guy had a good voice, probably as good as Neil Sedaka and certainly as good as Tony Christie, but, like Joni said in “Real Good for Free”

“They knew he’d never been on their TV, so they passed his music by”

I couldn’t help wondering that if he’d had just one good, original, song written for him and the right contacts, he might not have been getting off the cruise liner at Linorvo and flying back to Blackpool, but might be sitting on one of those yachts in Monaco harbour sipping champagne and staring back at us staring in.

The Wheel of Fortune,
goes spinning around.
Will the arrow point my way?
Will this be my day?

(Kay Starr)