RICHARD BRANSON IS known to fly his chopper from Necker, his private island, to the best restaurant on the British Virgin Islands, just for lunch. JP McManus takes his private jet to reach Barbados, while P Diddy and Roman Abramovich each have mega-yachts moored offshore and looming on the horizon of St Tropez, sunlight glinting menacingly from the on-board radar, writes John Butler
I've never yet made it on to the deck of a mega-yacht, nor seen the inside of a chopper, and the only way I'm going to make it to Sandy Lane is if my pet unicorn learns to swim. But I believe each of these international vacationers is missing a trick, because nothing in the world beats renting a scooter on holiday. Harley Davidson enthusiasts often comment on the thrilling sensation of 80 horsepower between their thighs, but that repressed homo-erotic gibberish calls to mind Tom Cruise in Top Gunand the play Equus.
You can keep the big engines. I'll tell you what's a real thrill - calculating what a six horsepower engine equates to in wasp power. I believe this is how you measure the engine capacity of a scooter. By the end of my last holiday, I calculated that the equivalent of 125,000 wasps had been propelling me. At least that's what it sounded like.
This happy union of man and flying insect came about semi-accidentally. A friend and I were sharing an apartment in Cannes, and some other friends had taken a house in the hills, a 30-minute walk away, directly uphill. There is nowhere to park a car in central Cannes that won't cost an arm and a leg, and I knew each party had reserves of stubbornness and indolence to match the other. Walking was out of the question.
The day before my friend arrived by train, I found a rental shop, chose my machine and rented two helmets. I will not lie, I was slightly nervous and sensing my skittish demeanour, the languid 14-year-old manager wanted to know whether I done this before. Of course, I snorted. Within five minutes I had driven the wrong way up a one-way street, knocked half a baguette from the arms of a handsome grandmother in a woollen pantsuit and burnt my left calf on an exhaust pipe. Heaven.
I spent the rest of the day acquainting myself with the machine before the arrival of my pillion passenger. I buzzed around the coast, stopping precisely wherever the fancy took me, not 500 yards away, at the nearest parking space. If I wanted a swim I drove on to the beach. If I was desirous of ice cream I purchased it, from the saddle. I drank espresso outside a café with feet resting atop the front wheel.
Sitting outside, staring at my machine, I began to come to terms with the fact that all withering analogies to phillipic attraction between men and their motorbikes were now backfiring on me. In the blue heat of the Riviera afternoon, I was developing a proper little man-crush on my scooter. All that remained was for me to name him, and help was on its way. The term sounds impossibly precious, but when my pillion passenger emerged from the train station in Cannes to meet me, and clapped eyes on the tiny Vespa that was to be our way of getting around for the next five days, she squealed with delight. Sorry Catherine, but a squeal is a squeal.
Having already endured a flight and a train journey from Marseille, a less hardy travel companion than she might have baulked at the idea of jumping on the back of a scooter, wedging a suitcase between her and a driver who may or may not have already enjoyed a carafe of wine over brunch, and buzzing the wrong way up a one-way street on market day - but not Catherine. Not only that, but she immediately christened it - "It's the wee beastie!" She's far more erudite than I - I had to be told that the name came from a poem by Robbie Burns, entitled To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest in a Plough:
"Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie/
O, what a panic's in thy breastie!"
Over the week, the name acquired the status of holiday catchphrase and plaything. On our travels, jetskis were spotted and referred to as "sea beasties". On the day of Electric Picnic back home, we lamented the fact that we had missed seeing the wee Beastie Boys live. The joke was taken too far only when I stood up from lunch on day four (a wee feastie, I guess) and, consulting a map, suggested a spot of beastie-ality.
This way of travel is not for everyone. With a passenger on board, I couldn't help noticing that wasp power had been divided by two, but on our last day, even with 62,500 wasps each, we made it to Juan les Pins for lunch, before powering onward to Antibes. We decided to buzz around the Cap, kindred spirits of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.
A cocktail at the Hotel du Cap, we thought.The journey there felt like an homage to independent French cinema. I accidentally took the motorway and we hugged the wind-whipped hard shoulder, howling trucks buffeting us. To augment wasp-power we hunched down, and finally we made it. As we rolled up, a concierge saw us, his eyes wide in amazement. He began to walk, then jog, then actually sprint towards us, flapping his arms wildly. I can't remember the excuse when he caught us, but by now, man and machine were one, and to him we were just an angry pest, dying in the late season. No cocktail. I would have stung him if I could. We left before the rolled-up newspaper was produced.