Marseille is too big, too chaotic, too busy, too sprawling, too hot, too dirty, too smelly, too loud, too crass, too dangerous, too foreign ...
And so utterly, intoxicatingly life-affirming!
It is like Australia's mad north - crazy Darwin and the Northern Territory at their tropical maddest - made madder by French, Arab and African, mixed in a blender, concentrated in a centrifuge, nutrients added ...an experiment that has mutated, replicated uncontrollably, overcoming and devouring the scientists before breaking out of the lab!
Marseille isn’t perfect Love Island bodies. It’s a large brown roll of well-oiled fat hanging out of a diamanté g-string.
Nor, most certainly, is Marseille a delicate ceviche of octopus. It’s an octopus pulled fresh from the sea by an old fisherman, bashed against the rocks, cleaned and gutted by hand, thrown on a red hot grill with a sprinkle of oregano and salt, roughly chopped, drizzled with olive oil and lemon juice, and eaten with burnt fingers.
Marseille is stunningly beautiful rocky Mediterranean coastline desecrated by concrete corniche and the smell of piss.
Marseille is paired-up barely dressed adolescents weaving through heavy traffic on underpowered scooters leaking oil, one driving and the other perched on the axle astride the rear wheel, the journey a series of near misses, ropey muscles glistening with sweat and tits bobbing up and down, scarcely contained in their bikini cups.
Marseille is best approached not with an open mind but a closed one.
Arrive looking down on it and it’s peoples, if you can, with a sense of snobbery, with a liking for perfectionism, perhaps with a superiority complex. This is not Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat or Saint-Tropez, after all. If a few ugly class and racial stereotypes come to mind, all the better, let them brew.
That way Marseille can break you, perform surgery on you without anaesthesia, and you get to experience the full exhilarating, celebration of life.
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