Nimes

Maison Carree

After 3 years largely confined at home, we managed to pluck up the courage to escape the UK for a visit to France. We were inspired by the availability of flights introduced from Edinburgh to Nimes. Nimes is only an hour and a half away from our regular escape in the Ardeche. A beautiful Roman town that is twinned with the town where I lived from birth until starting my career. My school had exchange visits to Nimes every summer but I never managed to take part as we didn’t have the space or the money to engage in the exchange. 

The nearest I came to meeting my peers from Nimes was helping my father when he was asked to DJ at a dance for the Nimes teenagers. It was the summer of 1964 and my father’s DJ days were no longer in tune with the mood of the times. His call of "take your partners for a waltz or whatever dance" was no way to address our generation. His attempt to appeal to the French with Francois Hardy's hit 'Tous Les Garcon's et Tous Les Filles' had gone down like a 'ballon de plomb.'  I was familiar with his DJ set-up and had brought along some of my recently acquired 45 singles and a couple of albums. Normally I was only there to wire up the equipment and demonstrate the hula hoop or the twist and an excuse for a late night. 

Dad's attempts to interest the teenagers were disastrous so he instructed me to see if I could get them on the dance floor by playing my records. I started by playing the Rolling Stones' hit, It's All Over Now, and it certainly was curtains for DJ Dad. The floor was immediately full of 40 or so jiving teenage girls. After playing other hits of the summer including Bama Lama Bama Loo by Little Richard, Rosalyn by Pretty Things, the Animals hit House of the Rising Sun, and Doo Wah Diddy by Manfred Mann, I was besieged by requests to join the girls on the dance floor. I only wished that I had paid more attention in French lessons and carried on with my paper round so I could have afforded the 36-hour bus, boat and train trip back to Nimes with them. Still, I reckoned that if my 'O' level results, due the next week were not great, I could try and get a job as a DJ on the pirate Radio Caroline ship moored in the Irish sea off the Isle of Man.

Shoot forward fifty-odd years and the journey to Nimes was surprisingly straightforward, a two-hour flight with no long queues at Edinburgh airport. although the cost of airport parking had set a new record for hyperinflation and the cost of coffee at the airport made you want to gargle. The flight was on time and Ryanair did the basics well, even the cramped hard seats seemed comfortable and they were cheaper than a train journey to Inverness although the cost of taking luggage more than doubled the price. Nimes has a small, new airport so our exit and roll through customs were extra speedy. Within minutes we had a car, which is where the trouble began.  

We had not been given a parking ticket to leave the car park so had to return to the airport building to retrieve one and then the satnav directed us to the autoroute for the short 7-kilometre drive to our Airbnb in the city centre. It added distance, time as well as a cost but there was no escape from having to enter the herd of speeding vehicles heading for le weekend. A few minutes later we were stuck in a queue playing a horn symphony in protest at a driver that could not find how to pay at the exit barrier.  

As we entered the old city, the final straw was discovering that both indicators were flashing. In a strange car with left-hand drive, busy traffic and shouts from my agitated passenger to turn the indicators off, I tried every switch from indicators to lights to windscreen wipers and washers, all to no avail. I decided that it was probably safer to continue with both indicators going and try to find our Airbnb than to find a parking place on the narrow streets The owner was stationed on the street to meet us and guide us into a tight underground garage. We discovered after parking that Aileen had inadvertently switched the hazard warning lights on. We declared a mutual truce on our pent-up angst.

By 8pm we were promenading to the city centre on a balmy summer evening. The clean pedestrianised streets with limestone flagged pavements, the Arena of Nimes, a Roman Amphitheatres that serves as a venue for many musical events and a centre alive with outdoor cafes and restaurants all helped revive our post-Covid spirits. Love was in the air. The beer was cold and the steak hache and frites were a real treat after three years of vegetarian food.  The place was buzzing and the locals seemed relaxed and happy, I even wondered if I had danced with any of them on the twinning visit back in 1964. Surprisingly the prices in euros seemed no different than our last visit here in 2018. However, we must remember that the pound has plunged in value from 1.40 euros to 1.11 euros since Brexit.

We arranged with our Airbnb host to leave the car in the underground parking until the next afternoon so we could have a few hours enjoying the city. We were in the centre by 9:00am and after croissants and coffee in a cafe, we began to explore the city. The mainly independent shops in the centre were busy as was the market and there seemed to be no vacant shops unlike in most British towns. After an enjoyable perusal of the centre, we walked up to the Jardins-de-la-Fontaine, the first public gardens in France and climbed to the high point of the town before returning to the centre for a fine salad lunch by the Maison Carree, a Roman Temple. The heat was 37°C as we left Nimes for our gite which was only an hour away but we took the scenic route via Usez squeezing between the plane trees and oncoming traffic on the narrow rural roads of the Gard. We picked up some drinks and food at Gaujac to make a meal when we arrived at our gite. It was good to be back in Europe, it feels like home.

Arena of Nimes

Canals leading to the Jardins de  la Fontaine

Jardins de la Fontaine

Nimes Centre