1999-11 (NOVEMBER, 1999)

Brighton, England

Our friend Mark has recently bought a flat in Brighton. On the weekends when he is not using it, he loans it out to friends and relatives. This weekend was our turn.

We did nothing except read books and occasionally went foraging for food. It was fab!

Nice, France

Andrea was in Cannes for the week for the Gartner conference. I flew out to meet her in Nice on Friday morning with plans to stay for the weekend.

Our hotel was very cute! We had a room over looking the sea and had breakfast on the balcony each morning. The '20-degrees-and-sunshine' was a nice break from the '6-degrees-and-grey' which were getting in London at the moment.

On Friday afternoon we simply had a wander around the town centre and got our bearings. We dined at a quaint restaurant in Yieux Nice (the old town). We had "souope pistou" which is one of the traditional dishes of Provence - vegetable and bean soup with pesto - yum!

On Saturday our great-layed-plans about visiting nearby St Paul de Vance were scuppered by a late start. We decided to wander into the town centre again and do some shopping. We lunched long at a lovely wee bistro and continued our leisurely wandering that afternoon. We also visited the Nice marina, which, as you might have guessed, had some pretty fab yachts. That evening we dined at a nearby Italian restaurant where we sampled some local wine and solved the world's problems.

On Sunday caught a bus up to the Matise Museum which was OK. I bought a couple of prints I liked, though. After some more wandering beside the sea we had a gorgeous pizza at Nissa La Bella, returned to our hotel, collected our bags and headed out to catch our plane back to London.

The flight back had one very special moment. Our return flight path took us right over London on a clear and cold Guy Fawks evening. We had splendid views of all the fireworks which made London look as though is was erupting in multicoloured fire. Breathtaking!