This daily newsletterâs aim is to examine everything that comes hurtling at the car windscreen as we press on through the sleet and murk. Sometimes Iâll get to it as the wipers pull it apart, and sometimes Iâll be picking up what remains of it as it disappears into a dot in the rear view mirror.
But you can't catch everything. And sometimes it's not a pressing matter, just something you notice and think that's interesting, let's share that some time. My plan while Iâm on holiday this week and next is to share a bunch of those things Iâve put aside for later.
So today instead of a few hundred words on the general theme of Old Mate Grabaseat telling us in the middle of last week I trust farmers to do whatâs right about emissions and ending the week with it turns out I couldnât trust a farmer in my own caucus to do the right thing, come with me instead to Tahiti.
In the early 90s we went to Club Med Moorea and had an absolutely splendid time except for the part where food poisoning felled me even though the Club Med doctor assured me it was just a reaction to rich food. This thing that wasnât food poisoning followed me all the way to the airport for the flight home and had me in the bathroom with sweat running down my face before we went through customs, just like Billy Hayes in Midnight Express aside from the bit where they drag him off the bus and put him in a Turkish prison.
But apart from that, Club Med couldn't have been lovelier. The rich food, the swaying palms, the golden sunsets the dramatic peaks of Tahiti, We loved it. Lying day after day in loungers, reading , resting, swimming.
Each morning on the beach, a tune would burst at random from the loudspeakers, a sound both catchy and unbelievably annoying. As soon as it came on, all the good looking young French guests would leap to their feet and start moving and laughing, and every few bars sing some unrecognisable world that sounded like I donât know, are they saying macca raynya?
Sad to see that all of that is now rubble
The Club Meds, they come and go, and they depend on lease arrangements that also come and go. Apparently that proved a problem in Moorea. Also, 9/11 poleaxed them. It was shuttered, even before Dubya was declaring mission accomplished.
Further reading reveals these fun palaces have forever been on a business rollercoaster.
It begins in 1950 when a Belgian entrepreneur named GĂ©rard Blitz puts up a low-priced summer colony of tents in Majorca. He was, Wikipedia tells us, a great entertainer, but no businessman.
He is bankrupt by 1953. Enter, now, the main creditor, namely the supplier of the tents, one Gilbert Trigano, the French "King of Camping". He takes control of the Club and slowly pushes GĂ©rard the Great Entertainer aside. The first official Club Med is built in Salerno, still in a simple village style: unlit straw huts on a beachfront, communal washing facilities.
But thanks to reckless spending, the Club is once again in deep financial trouble by 1960 and is now saved by Baron Edmond de Rothschild. With his loadsamoney many more villages open.
And on the story goes, on through the louche and âluded â70s, the Wall St â80s, on to 9/11 and all the way to Covid and still standing, it seems, with new Chinese owners for the past decade. A long way on from the Long March and the Cultural Revolution. A long way on from a Belgian dude with tents on the beach.
The best of luck to them, but I don't imagine they would want to see oldies like us any more than we are drawn to them these days. I feel sometimes that I'm moving backwards in my expectations of comfort. By the time in my 80s I may be very happy to just have a tent on a beach.
