'Ere we go, a quick chorus of La Marseillaise

Am back in the village of Fa after ten frankly exhausting days in Barmyville sur Mer – alias Marseille or France’s second city.

Even a couple of months down the line, I am still not sure what to make of a Mediterranean metropolis which appears to wear its entrails on the outside. 

I’ve vaguely tried comparing it to the two other second cities I know well, Barcelona and Brum. Barcelona is also by the sea and, er, that’s about it . . . 

Being a West  Midlander, Brum makes a certain sense born of long experience and even some town planning, while the Catalan capital has a definite structure and logic.

Marseille doesn’t. It sprawls truculently, jammed against the sea by the giant hand of its surrounding hills and the dizzying cliffs of Les Calanques, soon to be a national park. Imagine multi-coloured and multi-cultured rice pudding squodging out between those great craggy fingers, and that’s about as close as I can get.

I would recommend Marseille to anyone seeking the colourful, the atmospheric, the piquant and the certifiably insane, especially if your hand luggage is no heavier than a briefcase. If it is imperative to use a vehicle or do anything involving, shall we say, full-time gainful employment, forget it. You will waste most of your day going the wrong way down impossibly steep and impossibly narrow one-way streets that often turn impulsively into staircases. As these all have a stout steel handrail down the middle of them, trying an Italian Job is not recommended.

I’ll admit it’s difficult to string a dozen fleeting impressions into any coherent form. Marseille is – mad. This is a city where:

* You cannot buy a ballpoint pen. You ask for a newsagent/stationer’s and people look at you baffled; there isn’t one. After an hour’s hopeless search, an adorable shop assistant gave me hers and I gave her two euros for a coffee and her smile.

* You cannot buy a street map. Everyone who lives in Marseille either knows where they are or doesn’t care if they don’t.

* McDonald’s in the Vieux Port or old harbour, i.e. smack in the middle of the city centre, employs about four people, one of whom is a head honcho in a suit, who stands around being important and watching the other three being steadily crushed to death by mounting queues of the deafeningly ravenous.

*Everything is being dug up. One day they will have a nice new tramway, the latest thing in modern urban transport. They already have people who simply leave their cars in the middle of the road if they can’t park, other people who continue to stand talking in the middle of the road oblivious to HGV drivers trying quite hard to flatten them, and a one-way system that would baffle Einstein. Tram or no tram, I feel that endemic traffic chaos will not give up without a fight.

On the other hand, Marseille has the best local radio station I have ever heard and I didn’t get murdered. Radio Marseille Outre-Mer plays African music, latin, salsa and classy funk all day every day, reflecting the city’s rich ethnic mix, and that the port has for thousands of years been a gateway to France from all over the Mediterranean. 

It can’t be all bad, standing high on a roof terrace, surrounded by the swaying wreckage of a thousand decrepit Roman-tiled roofs, being lured by the beat, steadily out to sea and the beckoning Sahara.

Apparently it’s quite easy to get murdered in Marseille. But if you’re simply standing in the wrong place at the wrong time, generally speaking it’s an accident. Most murders are local mafia killings between rivals who already know each other. My mate Raymond went for his first big job in Marseille, with a high-powered outfit and an all-day interview. 

Pausing for lunch, he nipped into a nearby café, and was annoyed to be barged into by a great gorilla of a man. Being young and full of attitude himself, Raymond was about to give the guy the sharp end of his tongue. He saw the gun just in time. The gorilla wasted the café owner against the wall, seriously injured an assistant indiscreet enough to be standing next to his boss, and dashed out again.

Returning somewhat shaken to his interview, Raymond was surprised to be offered the job. To be honest, I was more surprised that he accepted it . . .

I spent my time living in Marseille’s old quarter Le Panier, or The Basket, a labyrinth of steep and tortuous streets, bordering on Le Vieux Port and looking out towards the landmark 19^th century basilica, Notre Dame de la Garde. By the end, I could just about get the trusty Kangoo in and out, only going the wrong way down two or three one-way streets, breathing in hard, and removing both wing mirrors. The long-term solution would be to buy a donkey.

The other trick is to do all your business between 6-7.30am, so you can get safely back before the traffic jams and someone nicks your parking place. Feeling your way through the suburbs in the half-light reminds you forcibly that, in these difficult times, other people are a sight worse off than you are. 

Outside the big builders’ merchants stand groups of men, mainly Arabs and Africans. At first I thought it was some kind of demo. Les Marseillaises just love to strike; it’s costing the modern New Port a lot of business. But actually these men are just waiting, waiting, in the hope of a day’s work. Many have no papers which means, if they’re lucky, they’ll labour all day for 20 euros.

Le Panier has a charmingly self-contained life of its own. It’s even the location for its own French TV soap. The quarter is peopled mainly by students and young families, and a disconcertingly visible rat population. Every morning at 6am, council workers whang the fire hydrants on max, presumably to try and drown them. It doesn’t work. 

There’s a couple of lively bar restaurants. At one of them I sat in with the local samba group. But my life-saver was a little boulangerie cum pizza place, invariably staffed by the same couple seven days a week, and apparently never shut. I concluded that they must have given up sleep as an unacceptable luxury. 

Every Sunday night they have mercy on shell-shocked American tourists, unable to believe that in France’s second city, everywhere else is shut. I have to say that rather threw me too.

Le Panier is the great survivor, unlike the old north quayside of Le Vieux Port, which was destroyed by the Germans in 1943. Thousands of its inhabitants were killed or deported, including 4,000 Jews. 

Today the quays are lined with restaurants, most of them offering the Marseille classic bouillabaisse. Devout foodie that I am, I had to give it a try, equally devoutly wishing that I had sufficient local knowledge to find a real restaurant. Inevitably I failed and had to make do with standard tourist fare. 

Bouillabaisse was originally cheap fish soup, made by the fishermen for themselves. It uses bony fish species that they couldn’t sell to posh restaurants. Later on, bouillabaisse became fashionable so rich people ate it too. These days many of its characteristic fish species have become rare, so cheap it ain’t: You can pay up to 60€ a plateful. The one I sampled was basic with only three sorts of fish and seafood, and potatoes in a yellow Provençale vegetable soup, traditionally coloured with saffron.

It wasn’t quite autumn when I arrived back in Fa. The butter was becoming a little harder to spread, a sure-fire indicator of whether it really is colder. But I walked in the sunshine through the hills above the village, still to the accompaniment of butterflies. To be honest I was glad to be home.