In the cafe Le Central where I went at 10.45 every morning in Golfe Juan three miles east of Cannes and three miles west of Antibes there was a bit of a scuffle for the cafe’s Nice Matin newspaper every morning. If I was lucky it would be lying on a table top and I could pick it up and scour the local gossip and the one page of national and international news. Sometimes a bloke would come over and asked if I’d finished and I’d say just give me a minute to look at the football report and then hand it over. Once he came over when I had finished with it and I said I’d been keeping it for him. We had a kind of cafe relationship.
One day I was reading it and I saw his face appear and I said I’d be five minutes, but as I was finishing, an elderly woman came over and pleaded with me to have it for two minutes to look at the weather forecast. She was so baleful that I handed over the precious script but told her she had to give it to my friend in a couple of minutes because he’d come hunting for the it. I turned my head for a minute and saw her delivering it to another bloke. At the same moment my man came over. It was chaos. It was the battle of Nice Matin. It only costs 1 euro 70. I bought it myself the next day but strangely the pleasures of a bought journal are so much less than those of the free cafe paper.
peoplearerubbish 