Agde is, if you’re into yer footie, a game o’ two ‘alves: or if yooz a little more refained like what Hi ham, a curate’s egg.

The main town here has a charming – I mean, properly as opposed to commercially, charming – Sunday market. It is so old fashioned, there are still blokes there offering to take your holiday snap – an offer I haven’t refused since the Sicily of forty years ago. It has those lovely meandering couloirs of flat-fronted apartment buildings I remember from my last visit to Montpellier in 1972: a weird mélange of dark windows and bright primary colours, crouching below and yet painfully rising, like an old lady’s back, to look up at the Mediterranean blue sky.

Whenever one loses a sense of direction (and I did quite a bit this morning) real old ladies will point when you ask where the river is, and say “Tout droite monsieur, tout tout tout droite, et puis on achève l’Herault”. By the time you’re in the centre of Agde town and at the riverside, there is a long, river-borne stream of seafood restaurants. So many, in fact, you could stay here for most of the summer and still not sample them all.

The worrying thing about this bit of Agde, however, was that the Herault was many times wider than I remembered it being outside the campsite; and while my river science is limited, even I can work out that a river-mouth point half a mile wide is likely to be one helluva distance from another point where it was barely enough to allow the regular passage of water.

Three miles and nearly two hours later, I was back at Le Camping Neptune…the unwilling owner of very sore, espadrille-clad feet. But if you want to know why I was so far from Le Camping Neptune, then another story must unfold itself before your very eyes, as Arthur Askey used to say.

The reason why Agde is curately eggish concerns the difference between Agde centre-ville (where I’d just been, and loved) and Cap d’Agde (into which I had ventured involuntarily before that, in search of a bakery).

In Cap d’Agde, you should not be surprised to discover a team of blokes on the beach with foot-pumps, busily inflating the balloon which – it is clearly the intention of the local developers – the rich should inhabit in their retirement….safe from the reality of Agde Village, a place where real people turn up to buy, vans do not deliver, germs circulate between Gallic noses, and there are more restaurants than estate agents.

In Cap d’Agde, I counted today nine banks, thirteen estate agents, a garden centre, and zero, null, no boulangeries. If ever there was a definition of dystopia, then that’s it. The retirement flats come in all the sizes and few of the colours. They are not so for the retired as regimented. As a pedestrian, one feels dwarfed by the three-line highways barely populated by dark-windowed Jeeps: but mainly, one wants to GTF out of the place as quickly as possible.

Oddest of all, the boulangerie I sought wasn’t necessary at all. For, explaining the day’s adventures to Mum in reception at Le Camping Neptune, she listened attentively and then said “Eh bien m’sieur, si vous ne voulez qu’du pain les matins, il faut le commander de nous ici”.

I love Le Camping Neptune. It is the fucking business. And they hire out bikes for just eight euros a day too.

To paraphrase Titus Oates, “I may be here some time”.