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Collioure’s colours in their most primeval form.
    The site said that in the summer of 1905, Matisse and Derain produced 242 paintings there. By my reckoning, that had to make Collioure one of the most frequently painted locations in all of French art, on a par with the Moulin Rouge, Monet’s lily pond and Madame Renoir’s thighs.
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    â€˜And then they slit them along the belly and harvest the eggs,’ M was saying. ‘They get up to twenty-five kilos of caviar from one adult fish. Though hardly any of the poor creatures reach full adulthood these days.’
    â€˜Yuk,’ was my only comment. Unscientific, perhaps, but then a PowerPoint presentation on caviar production is not how I usually choose to spend the morning after a romantic reunion with a girl I haven’t seen for three months.
    The reunion itself had been very romantic. I’d strolled into the arrivals lounge at Perpignan airport to be greeted by the smiling babe that all the guys had been checking out. I guessed they were praying that she was there to meet her ageing grandma, and then in I walked, shattering a dozen Frenchmen’s fantasies. A moment for any Englishman to relish.
    M was every bit as hot as when I’d last seen her – her long, blonde hair was ruffled as if it had just dried out in the sea breeze, her amber tan was highlighted by a floaty white dress that she’d gathered on her hips with a leather belt,and to cap it all, there was her brilliant smile, aimed straight at me.
    We kissed, on the lips but chastely, and hugged American style – cheek to cheek and zero pelvic thrust. Suddenly both of us seemed self-conscious. This was natural enough, I reasoned, because we didn’t have any kind of status. We’d spent one night together, but we hadn’t been exchanging breathless promises by text and email ever since. It was all very tentative.
    We chatted in the taxi about what we’d been up to since LA, and seemed to be making a conscious effort to keep our hands to ourselves. Even so, it felt as though we were sizing each other up like two dancers at a nightclub, enjoying the sensation of being so physically near to someone that we intended to get even closer to as soon as possible.
    And sure enough, as soon as we got into the entrance lobby of her hotel, we both decided that the time for coyness was over, and took up right where we’d left off in California, showing the surprised receptionist just how entangled two bodies can get without actually making love.
    We went up to M’s room, kissing all the way, stumbling and fumbling with stairs, keys and door handles. I was glad of the tango practice I’d got in Paris. We dived straight under the duvet, and hardly an intelligible sentence was spoken till the next morning, when I woke up to find myself alone in bed.
    The French windows were open, warm sunlight was shafting in from the courtyard, and the only sounds were the chatter of starlings, the soft sloshing of a pool filter and the distant hubbub of a waking town.
    M was out on the terrace, wrapped in a dawn-yellow bathrobe, dividing her attention between a croissant and her small unfolded laptop.
    â€˜Bonjour,’ I called out.
    â€˜Sorry if I abandoned you,’ she said. ‘But this is a working trip for me, remember.’
    I forgave her when she let her bathrobe fall to the floor and came back to bed, bringing me not only her warm, perfumed body but also a cup of coffee. The ideal woman.
    Except that she’d also brought her laptop, and proceeded to show me precisely what kind of work she was doing, which mainly involved disembowelled fish.
    â€˜It’s like the rhino, really,’ she said. ‘Sturgeon are born unlucky. Sadly for them, their bodies are worth a fortune to us predatorial humans.’
    â€˜A bit like supermodels.’
    â€˜Yes, but we prefer our supermodels alive,’ she said.
    â€˜Some of them aren’t far off