Sometimes, when I've an idle moment, I click on to the live webcam on the beach at Collioure, a magical French fishing village on the Mediterranean coast, on the edge of the Pyrenees and close to the Spanish frontier.
Somehow, the sun almost always seems to be shining in Collioure. Across the bay, I see the iconic image of Notre Dame des Anges, the tall church tower topped with the strange cupola, and built right into the sea. The church began as a primitive lighthouse in the Middle Ages.
Collioure is quite a small place, with about 3,000 people living there, and until Henri Matisse and some of his friends discovered it in 1905, it was merely a sleepy little fishing village where little happened. The arrival of Matisse and company changed all that. He and his fellow painters were enchanted by the colours of the Mediterranean and of the skies here, the brilliant light and the turquoise, pink and yellow of the anchovy fishermen's cottages. An artists' colony soon sprung up.
Georges Braque, Charles Rennie Macintosh (the great Scottish exponent of Art Nouveau) and Picasso were among the many painters inspired by Collioure. Matisse and Braque stayed in Les Templiers, an hotel on the quayside of the river, and they paid for their keep in paintings. Today, this same hotel is packed with more than 2,000 works of art collected over the years. Indeed art is everywhere in the town and you can follow the Fauvism "footpath", where reproductions of 20 well-known works are displayed at the very places where the originals were painted. The town also has a fine museum of modern art.
A more recent famous resident was the novelist Patrick O'Brian, who wrote 20 tremendous novels about seafaring life 200 years ago. These were all written in longhand - he shunned even a typewriter. But at the end of his life, an illusion was shattered, when it was revealed that he wasn't Irish at all and had created a mythical identity for himself. Born Patrick Russ in England, he had changed his name in 1945 to make it sound Irish.
In 1949, with his second wife, Mary Tolstoy, who had been married previously to a prominent divorce lawyer, he came to live in Collioure. His wife died in 1998 and that year it was also revealed by the Daily Telegraph that his Irish identity was a complete fabrication. He then left Collioure and came to live in rooms at Trinity College, Dublin, which had made him an honorary doctorate of letters in 1997. Patrick O' Brian died in the Fitzwilliam Hotel, Dublin, at the beginning of 2000, aged 86. He is buried in the town cemetery in Collioure, alongside his wife.
Collioure is particularly busy during the main French holiday months of July and August and, above all, during the three-day festival centred on August 15th, the Feast of the Assumption. But the town has changed little since the days of Matisse. Its narrow medieval streets are still the same, the balconies of the houses lined with flowers. The main historic building, apart from the church, is the great castle, the Chateau Royal, built by the Templars in the 12th century.
The motto promoted by the current Mayor, Michel Moly, is "Collioure sera toujours Collioure" (Collioure will always be same"), which is a take-off of the Maurice Chevalier song Paris sera toujours Paris.
The market, held in a central square of the town every Wednesday and Sunday, is a cornucopia of food, including cheeses, meats, fruits and vegetables. You'll also find some of Collioure's own wines, which have become better known in recent years. The vineyards in the hills above the village have long produced red wines, but in recent years whites and rosés have been added to the repertoire.
The best time to sample Collioure is in the evening, when the restaurants along the riverside and facing out on to the beach, are full of conversational buzz and the scents of cooking. The food on offer reflects the political history of the place, with a mix of French, Catalan and Spanish dishes.
I know most of the French seaside towns and cities all along the coast, from Calais in the north-east, right round the Atlantic coast and on to Menton on the Italian frontier. Few if any can equal Collioure, in my opinion. That webcam on the beach at Collioure is a constant reminder of the paradise that the town is, if one ever needed reminding.
But every earthly paradise has its darker moments. One trip to Collioure very nearly ended in disaster for my wife and me. One afternoon, we went to a small harbour on the far side of the bay and, on the spur of the moment, decided to accept the offer of a trip on an open-deck boat going out to sea with a party of sub-aqua divers. It was a fine enough day, in early summer, and the sea was calm, so we had no apprehensions. But when we were a few kilometres out to sea, the weather changed abruptly and a raging storm blew up.
The waves became enormous and the spray was washing over the little boat as it tossed up and down in the violent seas. We had to cling on for our lives, soaked to the skin, and convinced the boat was going to sink. But after a harrowing couple of hours, when everyone on board was too sick to get sick, the boat eventually made the safety of the harbour where we had started the voyage in such innocence.
Once ashore, there was only one option: head for the nearest beachside bar and order two large cognacs.