We park in the subterranean carpark beneath the Palais des Festivals, a multi-storey cavern so immense it is easy to lose your bearings unless you are careful. Louise works the shops on the Rue d’Antibes while I install myself at a pavement cafe with une demi pression.

By 1.30 we are seated beside a glittering Mediterranean Sea with the sun and a clear sky overhead. The waiter brings us a bottle of pale pink and perfectly chilled Chateau Minuty, and we are in heaven. Our choice of menu at Plage Royale tends to follow its annual habit: soupe de poisson, a steak tartare with frites, and a green salad. Perfection!

Thursday, 27th January. We check in for our EasyJet flight back to Bristol in good time. This leaves us an hour to kill at Nice-Cote d’ Azur’s Terminal 2.

We go to our departure gate B23 where, nearby, there is a cafe styling itself as the “Bar du Monde”. Here I buy myself a ham salad for 5,50 Euros. It turns out to be the most miserable plastic foodstuff I have attempted to eat in an airport anywhere in the world… ever! It does not bear describing, worse it contains a foreign body which, I think, may once have been aubergine but now looked like a desiccated human ear.

Perfect flight home. Very jolly EasyJet crew who try to sell us things we can do without.

At The Castle tomorrow we welcome the Schubert Ensemble for a weekend programme of four concerts. And, I gather, in our absence over the past seven days, two Michelin men lunched with us to check out Jamie Raftery’s progress in the kitchen. They left promising more visits through the year… all incognito, of course.

Kit Chapman, proprietor of The Castle at Taunton and author of My Archipelago.