It must be said that there are things that the English are good at - war and pop music - and then there's things that mainland Europeans are good at: smoking fags and sitting over a drink in shady squares, watching the world go by. On balance, if I had to choose, I'd be good at war and pop - but after a week in Corsica, I concede that there's quite a lot to be said for the other way of doing things, too.
I didn't go abroad until I was 35, when I started going on long-haul holidays like a thing possessed. I did this because one of my jet-setting friends told me, spitefully I now realise, that, having seen the beaches of Antigua and the Maldives, I was officially spoiled for Europe, where the sea was grey and the beaches thick with used syringes.
On a more erudite level, this passage from Kingsley Amis's I Like It Here, as the hero contemplates the horrors of a hot mainland Europe, always stuck in my mind: "All that sun, which made you set out to be colourful and wonderful instead of keeping quiet and getting on with the job. All that geography and biology, which made you behave as if you had invented the country instead of just living in it... All that air of maturity, lack of nervousness and doubt, devotion to serious shouting argument or dedicated gaiety, naturalness which was always an actor's naturalness... All that staring - which in England would be the mindless inquisitiveness of those whose greyly uniform lives were nourished on mere sensation, but in the sunny South was a frank, free, healthy, open, uninhibited curiosity."
But what can you do? When in Rome, eat spaghetti. And when in Corsica, you'd better get used PDQ to a whole wagonload of sun, geography, maturity and the rest of it. You also, in my case, have to get used to the fact that your jet-set friend was lying to you, and that the sea and sand of this island poised between France and Italy is of a standard that makes the Caribbean look positively murky. The weather's better, too; I went in May, and I came back moderately sunburned - it will be two degrees hotter than that in October, however. Whatever you do, avoid July and August, when it's full of Frenchies, too scalding hot to go out before 4pm and prices in hotels and restaurants double - mmm, lovely.
Corsica is 100 miles from France and 50 miles from Italy, which sounds like something God would do on a particularly good hair day. Corsicans are like the French without the ponciness and the Italians without the corniness, and the climate is similarly sweet, though the months from November to April see the island become the wild, untamed place of the popular imagination. When I was there, bright warm sunshine combined with the most impudent and charming breezes, as though someone who likes you a lot was following you around with a big feathery fan and wafting the scent of the lemon trees all over you.
Everything looks lovely in Corsica, even things you wouldn't normally expect anything of, like stations and airports - the airport is like a lido without the water (and as my dad used to say of the Moscow Underground, you could eat your dinner off the floor) while the stations look like something out of Clochmerle.
Corsica does everything well, but what it does best is squares. Big, cool, shady squares under plane trees that are a hundred years old, and loads of tables without ashtrays because you might as well just drop your fag end in the sand on the ground. And the most gorgeous dogs running round everywhere in mint condition, complete with collars and ID, not strays, but obviously out for a constitutional and looking to make a few new friends.
It is this feeling of everything being relaxed and organic that makes our sorry attempts at café society look even more pathetic than usual; all those people sitting under gun-metal grey skies in Soho and Covent Garden, doing their best to trip up the tourists and getting dirty looks if they bring a four-legged friend with them. The only place I've ever seen the alfresco thing work properly here, in fact, is in Torquay.
Frankly, though you're not supposed to say it, I love Torquay, and to a great extent I approve of holiday destinations insofar as they resemble it. I liked Funchal, the capital of Madeira, for this reason, and also Harbour Island in the Bahamas. But the little town of L'Ile Rousse, where we stayed, scored highest of all on my Torquameter.
Founded in 1760 by the Corsican nationalist leader Pascal Paoli, who worked ceaselessly to throw off the yoke of Jacques and Giovanni Foreigner, Paoli predicted that it would be "the gallows on which we hang Calvi" - Calvi still being in the mitts of the Genoese, whose blockade was suffocating the economy of the putative state. Due to the export of wine and olive oil, L'Ile Rousse became a successful port, but now, according to the excellent Rough Guide to Corsica, "The main traffic consists of holidaymakers... That the only town intended to be a Corsican success story makes its living from tourism as a classic French-style resort adds an ironic twist to Paoli's dream."
There's always some misery-bucket who has to spoil things for everyone else, have you noticed? The only twist I was interested in was floating in my Martini as I sat in the square outside the Café des Platanes in the place Paoli, the central square of L'Ile Rousse, thinking that, to judge by the statue there, old Pascal had been quite fit in a depressed done-it-all Jeff Bridges sort of way. I suppose you could call Torquay a French-style resort, too, if you wanted to be rude, but importantly they're both like the Riviera as it must have been in the early 50s, before mass tourism discovered it - more Mr Ripley than Mr Whippy.
Sitting in Place Paoli, you can sip a Suze or a peppermint Get 27 and eyeball the 18th-century French architecture, all balconies and shutters and just a little bit gone to seed and therefore perfect, and fancy yourself as a European something rotten. The Café des Platanes has been there since 1928, serves more than 150 types of alcoholic and/or ice cream cocktails (Turbot Jet: chocolate and peppermint ice cream and Get 27; Barbe Noire: chocolate ice cream and whisky; Colonel: lemon sorbet and vodka) and you can bet your virtue that it isn't owned by some horrible corporation, as is invariably the case with every folksy little joint in Britain.
From your vantage point, you can observe that even in the town centre there are no yellow lines, no parking restrictions and that Corsican cars, like Corsican dogs, appear to be allowed to do what they want, even parking on zebra crossings. Yet somehow everyone seems to rub along.
Maybe this sweet- temperedness has something to do with the restaurants; they certainly put me in a good mood. No cheque had a space for service charge; carafes of the purest Corsican water came to the table unbidden; not one joint tried to charge us for the air that we breathed while on their premises, which so many English restaurateurs seem determined to. The ritziest dinner we had was at Le Grand Bleu in rue Napoleon, which cost Ffr320 (£32) for two people with a gorgeous Corsican wine, Colombo, but there were also Ffr70 and Ffr90 set menus, as there are in most Corsican restaurants. At L'Etoile D'Or, in Place Paoli, I had a seafood salad with a champagne sauce that was unbelievable. I never thought I'd go at a salad like a piggy at its trough, but the lettuce had actual sex appeal. A testimony to the cool and ceaseless smoking of the Corsicans is the huge steel stand-up ashtray right beside the toilet here.
Le Crillon, a hotel and restaurant two minutes away from the main tourist drag, on the avenue Paul Doumer, is the sort of place that, in the 50s, Cyril Connolly would drag his mistresses hundreds of miles to, in search of the perfect tomato salad. High ceilings, glazed windows, a condiments boat and Ray Charles on low, obviously not done up in any way and a lady who looked like Edith Piaf sitting alone at the next table eating fish soup with aïoli; here, you can find heaven for Ffr78. The steak roquefort and potato gratin screamed out for a cigarette afterwards, and I'm not even a smoker.
There's only a few bad things about Corsica, and even they aren't really that bad unless you're working overtime at being a worry-wart. There's not much to do, even in Calvi - you'd better be there with someone you like a heck of a lot. I'm afraid to say that the long afternoons between the glorious beach sessions and the gorgeous dinners did seem to call out for some form of lingering, languorous sexual activity, but as I was on holiday with my boyfriend's mother, romping wasn't really on the agenda, to say the least. Instead, I found myself walking half a mile each afternoon to pick up yesterday's Daily Mail, just for kicks. But Calvi is only 45 minutes on the train, through some of the loveliest scenery you'll ever see.
Don't be expecting to pig out in five-star luxury in Corsica; our hotel, the Santa Maria, was clean and cool but had no suites, no restaurant and the television was entirely foreign except for an American financial channel. In the Caribbean, you get about 16 English channels, many of them devoted to films - but then the price you pay for this is holidaying among masses of North Americans, and, frankly, I don't think I can ever do this again, not at my age. The floor was of the sort of rough rustic matting, a bugger on the bare feet, that would have had Kingsley effing and blinding like a good 'un, but the bathroom was a pristine white temple to dear departed hi-tech.
Whatever shortcomings the hotel had were more than made up for by the pool; one reasonably-sized cold rectangle on an attractive terrace. I've lost count now of the number of Caribbean resorts, some of them very upmarket, which fail to manage this, and now that the sea in so many places is rendered hazardous by wet-biking, it's not much to ask. But no; the pools in such places tend to be tiny, tepid, constructed in such a way that laps are an impossibility and, most annoying, surrounded by sticky-beaked signs instructing one "not to swim unless the lifeguard is present", though how you're supposed to drown yourself in a pool measuring four feet at the deep end, I don't know. Here, the deep end was deep - ie, you couldn't stand up in it - and if there ever had been a lifeguard, he'd gone off and got a life for himself long ago.
As if all this gorgeousness wasn't enough, it only takes one hour 40 minutes to get there direct.
