Things aren't what they used to be in St Tropez. For one thing, the beaches are no longer full of blondes sunbathing topless; for another, you can hardly hear yourself think in this chic French resort for the noise of helicopters coming and going.
Years ago, visiting St Tropez, I was struck by the contrast between village and waterfront. One moment you were in a shady square, a square like thousands of others in France; the next, just a step or two down a narrow street, you were in an utterly different world, facing a hundred gin palaces arrayed in front of you in the ultimate jet-set harbour. Even then, in the late 1970s, the locals tended to tolerate the yacht owners rather than welcome them. Nothing much has changed.
According to The Guardian, the locals now complain their lives have been made a misery by the heli-pests clattering in from Monaco or Nice. Jean-Claude Molho and his wife, Martine, for example, are woken every morning at 7.30 by a helicopter thundering over their whitewashed villa. "It's hellish. They come every five minutes," says Molho. "It starts in April and goes on until the end of August. At night you have to close the windows and shutters because it starts when you're in bed." Molho runs a local pressure group threatening to picket the nearest official landing site at Grimaud. But the authorities are reluctant to upset the helicopter clients because they bring income to the local economy. And helicopter operators claim theirs is an essential service.
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St Tropez "is a place full of vanity and pretension", says Michel de Rohozinski, director of Azur Helicoptere, which charges £511 for the short flight from Nice to St Tropez. "We have to provide these people with the best transportation we can possibly manage."
St Tropez has played host to the jet set ever since Brigitte Bardot cavorted on its beaches in the 1950s, and, while I have some sympathy with Jean-Claude Molho, anyone who retires there expecting peace and quiet in the summer needs their head examined. But at least the Molhos can take comfort from one new trend. Topless sunbathing in St Tropez, as pioneered by Bardot, is on the way out, reports The Daily Telegraph. This is partly due to worries about skin cancer. But some say it's also a sign of the new conservatism sweeping France.
Topless sunbathing "is seen as a bit vulgar now", says Sabina Hourdin, 38, from Paris. "It's like mini-skirts. You don't show your legs any more, you cover them up. In the seventies and eighties, less was considered more when it came to clothes, but now that has changed. It has gone out of fashion."
Will it stay out of fashion? I doubt it. Many doctors now think worries about skin cancer are overblown and believe sunlight generally does us good. But while covering up on the beach is a trend which may disappear, the same is unlikely to be true of the helicopters.
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