In my swimming costume, all one metre forty and tiny tits, I look about ten. So keeping my living-dead T-shirt on when I’m at the beach is the only way I’ve found of adding on a few years. And it keeps at bay the little girls who might come and ask me to help them build a sandcastle. It’s because I don’t look fifteen that fifteen isn’t there behind my eyes, in the depths of my heart, between my thighs.

So I slip on my armour.

I know what you’re about to say, you’re about to come out with that line about the spoilt little girl who’s incredibly lucky to be on holiday in a corner of paradise, and who’s disgusted by everything, the mountains, the beach, the sea.

Well, you’re wrong. Not at all.

Not at ALL!

I love everything, I love the beach, I love the water!

At the swimming pool in Vernon I swim lengths like a mad thing until I’m exhausted and ready to sink like a stone, like Adjani in that video for the song ‘Pull Marine’.

I think they’re lovely, the lyrics written by Adjani and Gainsbourg. They talk about swallowing someone whole. Gainsbourg, he’s an immortal kind of guy. He has cigarette after cigarette, girl after girl, and he will go on writing songs to die for until the end of time.

Besides, on the subject of water, let me tell you a secret. For several months a weird thing has been happening to me. I’ve found myself wanting to change my Tim Burton black for blue. It first happened to me by chance, ten months ago. Without warning. At the cinema.

The Big Blue. The sped-up shots of the Mediterranean, Eric Serra’s haunting soundtrack, the white and turquoise façades of the Greek houses.

And bang! In less than two hours I was crazy in love with dolphins, and maybe a bit with their human friend, not the Sicilian with the glasses, the other one, the explorer of the depths with the eyes like deep pools.

Jean-Marc Barr.

The very thought that by diving into the Mediterranean I’m swimming in the same water as him does something to me. Apparently the film was shot here, off the Revellata Peninsula.

Black as a carapace, but with the heart painted blue.

You won’t repeat that, will you, my confidant? It’s important that I can trust you. It’s my life I’m entrusting you with.

I’m writing on the sand. The sand of Alga beach. It looks like a crescent moon that has forgotten that day has broken and is now being nibbled at by the small waves of a fluorescent-blue sea, where fish slip between your hands and your toes.