The brides seemed a good augury. The sun had decided to shine and down the steps of the town hall and the Jeanne d'Arc church next door spilled a succession of wedding parties, belles in white posing for pictures and kissing crowds of friends.
These are bright scenes any time, any place, but they cast a specially reassuring glow on a first-time arrival in Le Touquet because, in my mental landscape, the northern French seaside towns have always been for bypassing en route to "the real France". Anyone who thinks otherwise, in my scheme of things, is a sad case who reckons a dish of indifferent fish soup and a bootful of plonk make a really exotic day out.
Not just that, but these are places with skies as grey as our own, louring over another era's ghosts - fugitives from Leeds bankruptcy or London scandal, but without the dash to head straight for the fleshpots of Italy or the Levant. There they are, in the mind's eye, clinging to France's northern margins, walking its promenades and gazing over its sea-walls longing for their drizzly home on the horizon.
People who Channel-hop to Le Touquet's airfield in little private planes for a round of golf, a look at some beach polo and a spin at the casinos obviously see it differently. Apparently a big chunk of Paris does, too, flocking here for weekends in high summer, as numerous specimens of English "society" did in the 1920s and 1930s - before the war half-wrecked the town - leaving their imprint on hotel names and much else: the Westminster, the Bristol, the Victoria, the Windsor.
I wasn't ready to be swayed. True that even by the end of the Victorian debtor era, Le Touquet hardly existed yet for exile or any other purposes. But, atmospherically, I reckoned that just like those older fugitive havens along the road, it was still going to have Nord-Pas de Calais written all over it - especially when I noticed that though it's just over half an hour's drive from the Channel tunnel and only 20 miles south of Boulogne, travel guides say practically nothing about it. Experience teaches that this is very good, or very grim.
Which it was to be, I was a little at a loss to work out driving in on the red-paved road through tidy pine forests for Le Touquet's annual sum mer street-music bash. Not a hint in this surrounding green belt of crazed rocker encampments - instead it's all big, sturdy burgher bungalows, some with the most impeccable thatch you've ever seen, like coming on hols to a milk-fed German suburb.
But then I note that all sorts of people seem to be having fun ambling through the woodland paths on horseback, and next the bungalows give way to the town proper with its odd mix of little steep-roofed houses and its bumper crop of brides, and finally to my hotel balcony where the seafront buildings end and there is nothing afterwards but beach.
Having hurtled past all these years, I had forgotten quite how sweeping these sweeps of Pas de Calais sand are. Glittering today in the sun, moody tomorrow in the overcast, usually gusty and backed by endless dunes.
So bridgehead established at the Novotel, on to discover where and what the music is. There's a bit of classical and some Afro and Lat-Am, it turns out, but most is pop and it's warming up in bursts of amp-testing and sudden electrical twangs from small sound stages dotted around the main streets. The bands are French and mainly local, but most of the songs are - thank you, God - British or American golden oldies.
The combination turns out to be good fun. Plus, you can listen and go shopping at the same time. Rue St Jean is Mainstreet Le Touquet and it's got some pretty nice boutiques, chocolatiers and handbag shops. On side streets are lots of cafés and some of that really dire retro junk without which browsing is never complete.
People keep coming up and asking where I got my Tourist Office programme, but the fact is that events seem to relate only vaguely to the timetable. Heartbreakingly, I am unable to find a group called Les Blaireaux doing their " chansons françaises inspired as much by cabaret as by the dances of central Europe" - and the four guys between the toyshop and the cr perie on the corner of rue de Moscow might or might not be Lockness belting out: "Eet eez ze ivning of ze day, I seed and watch ze children play."
They may not be able to write a song to save their lives, the French, but why can't Tony de Blaireaux and the rest of us sing out français with an English accent you could listen to all day?
On another cross-street, Revival is where it's supposed to be, doing a sort of screaming guitar thing from Creedence Clearwater with lots of drum whapping outside Arnold's Coiffeur. It comes to me in the course of a sidewalk aperitif that this will probably be the first and last time this decade I will hear anybody sing Proud Mary.
From a couple of blocks away, strains of jazz drift over. In the other direction, a Brazilian percussion group with three sequined dancers is two-stepping up the road. Country & Western is being sung (en français) by Transhu' Manche who go on to dedicate a song to "Monsieur McCartney" and break into Mull of Kintyre (en anglais) before moving on to Neil Young.
A long rue St Jean, throngs of pink people are sauntering in from the beach under blue skies and a dazzling evening sun, practising for supper with cr pes and ice creams. Things are ticking along in the way of most French street festivals - nothing hugely hip maybe, but simply good-natured kitsch free of smashed windows and punch-ups, when...I lock myself out of the car.
This is one of those moments when a woman is deeply delighted not to have someone of the opposite sex in tow to blow it into a Really Big Holiday Crisis. Maybe the opposite sex would say the same back. I go to celebrate with a recrimination-free seafood supper at one of Le Touquet's institutions, Restaurant Pérard.
Flanked on one side by its own old-fashioned fish shop walled in pale turquoise period tiles, Pérard's may not be as superlative as its insistent self-promotion would have you believe, but (aside from its indifferent fish soup) it is a big, buzzy and cheerful room of pink tablecloths and yellow lamps where a hefty tabletop rowboat of decent fruits de mer plus sweet or cheese and coffee seems fairly priced at Fr140 (£14).
Over at the police station, the duty officer says calling a garage to retrieve the locked keys will be no problem, tomorrow. As various bands launch into their last sets not long before midnight, I do a final stroll through the centre where there are now long queues for post-dinner ice creams (and the odd crepe).
Morning is - told you! - grey and drizzling. But also, I have to admit once out where the wind is whipping the dunegrass around, exhilarating. As far as the eye can see, the beach has been washed slick and smooth then decorated lightly with tiny clamshells and gull feathers.
Half the Novotel crowd seems to be breakfasting in terry robes, here on a saltwater spa regime whose rules apparently include croissants and creamy cheeses. The shops are opening and, in spattering rain, people are beginning to queue cozily around outdoor spits on rue de Metz - foodie territory - for roasting chickens, pork joints and ham hocks, and potatoes bubbling in fat below. Fish shops are selling cockles and mussels.
Joël Cailleux, Touquet garagiste, wins honourable mention for pulling up right on time, breaking into my boot in a couple of minutes, effecting hi-tech key retrieval (screwdriver and bent coathanger) and speeding off beside his wife in their little car, all without so much as a suspicion of a smirk.
For taking home, anything but food would be unthinkable from a town that seems to spend its entire life eating between meals. I've had my eye on Patisserie Boully and go there to buy that lovely sugar-crusted relative of flatbread, galette au sucre , and a beautiful little pale brown iced cake in the shape of an oval with the word Calais written on the top in old-fashioned scrolly letters. That's its name. Inside are layers of biscuit with hazelnut and almond cream.
Nearby, Les Arcades looks a nice knockabout café for a parting coffee. Lots of chat is going back and forth across the bar and people are popping in for the Sunday papers and a check on Loto tickets. It's not far off 11am, time for glasses of white wine to start appearing alongside the cups of black expresso. Le Touquet is practising for lunch.
The practicals
Details of events in Le Touquet, and activities including riding, sand-sailing, tennis and golf are available through the Tourism Office (0033 321 06 72 00) or at www.letouquet.com. The town's Fete de la Musique happens around June 20 each year. Return Eurotunnel fares for a car carrying "as many passengers as is legal" range from £120 for a day ticket to £239 for an economy one good for a year. Rooms at the Novotel (0033 321 09 85 00) range from £50/£90.
