27 JULY 2002, Page 50

Just cruising

Taki

TCape Gargalu, Corsica his is gonna be short (I'm writing longhand), hut I don't know how sweet, I'm on a classic sailing boat without modern contraptions such as satellite connections, and with a tiny engine and lots of sails. She was born in 1930, and her bones creak; never mind. She's like a woman, hard to manoeuvre, beautiful to behold, proud to be of service, but impossible to dominate. Her crew are perfect, the way lovers of a classic beauty tend to he. On board is the mother of my children, and my son and daughter (mit boyfriend). We're expecting Charlie Glass with a modern Penelope, as the Princess Schoenburg has decreed 'no tarts'.

And speaking of tarts, we left St Tropez because they outnumbered the amateurs by three to one. There's nothing more obscene than waking up after a hard day's night and finding whores on board demanding champagne for breakfast. We took a short pit-stop in Porquerolles, to try living with nature and without the temptations of the night, and then sailed throughout the full-mooned night down the Gulf of Genoa, arriving in Calvi at mid-day.

Corsica! The last lovely and unspoiled place left in the Med, fragrant with pine and thyme, tough like its history, the rugged maquis-covered cliffs rising from beautiful clear seas. Thank God for the Corsican people. For close to 40 years, land speculators and developers have been regularly blown up by mysterious explosions. No sooner are their plans to bring Corsica into the modern world revealed when boom! — their offices, cars, even their homes explode. The Corsicans blame Zeus, and I for one will shoulder the blame — along with Zeus, that is.

The jet-skis, in the meantime, remain 120 miles north-west, their owners cleaning their cocaine-damaged sinuses by breathing each others' fumes, their stink-pot boats stacked up against each other like multimillionaire sardines.

What a paradise this is, despite being surrounded by pests who order me not to drink or smoke, and now even complain about me eating meat — I love it.

And while I'm at it, France is a hell of a country. French teenagers don't swear, they know all about Voltaire and quote Racine without being in the least epicene. As I write, drunk of course, 1 think of the greatest Frenchman I know, Michel Don, novelist and an immortal of the Academie francaise. In the late Forties, or early Fifties, Michel went to Greece, bought himself a piece of land on the Isle of Spetsai, and built a lovely house. He was assured by the Greeks that no high-rises would be built next to him. He wrote a magical book about the place, and when he returned the next year his reward was a World Trade Centre which had sprouted up next to him. He sold out and fled to Ireland, where he now lives. Poor Michel. He puts his trust in Spetsiotes, the worst Greeks this side of Albania, whereas he should have gone Corse.

However pro-Frog I am at this very moment, leave it to the French intelligentsia to turn any francophile into an Orlando Furioso. A Jean-Paul Sartre wannabe, one Thierry Meyssan, has written a bestseller by the name of The Frightening Fraud. Two-hundred thousand copies of this book have been sold, and it stands atop the Frog bestseller list. In brief, Meyssan writes that the Bush administration was threatened by a coup of right-wing Americans if he, Bush, did not agree to expand the military budget. In order to do that, Bush needed a provocation. Ergo 11 September. According to Meyssan, the American right-wing conspirators got hold

of a missile and fired it into the Pentagon. The planes that hit the WTC were programmed to do so, and Osama's towelheads had as much to do with it as Cherie's legs have to do with Betty Grable's.

How the hell a Blair-like opus such as this can become a bestseller in the land of Voltaire, Racine, Victor Hugo, Flaubert, Deon — even Jean Cocteau (What's a cocteau?' someone asked Papa Hemingway. 'It's the female version of a cocktail,' answered Papa) — is beyond me.

I guess there are Meyssans all around us nowadays, but I'll take Corsicans, any day.