Existentialism takes a European vacation

Where do existentialists go on summer holiday? Don't worry, this isn't some egghead joke. The answer's not "the Kierkegarden Route", or anything.

The real answer is St Tropez. When Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were bored with ignoring each other in the Deux Magots in Saint-Germain they would put on their sun block and knickerbockers and head down to the Riviera and paddle around with their shrimping nets, giggling "Man is condemned to be free" over their ice-cream cones.

I arrived in St Tropez this week on a very philosophical morning. The skies were low and grey and from time to time it rained, not enough to drench you, just enough to prove that skies, too, have choice. I came in on a blue-hulled, white-beamed pleasure palace called the Azamara Journey, as neat as the crease in a pair of flannels, as fine and trim as a pointy nautical beard, and I strolled through the narrow yellow streets of the old town feeling as free as a columnist on holiday who hasn't yet remembered he still has a column to write.

I am passionately fond of good cruise ships. I like the dark rushing water below my balcony, and the white bow waves and how the sea is purple at dawn before the sun reaches it and how the lights of sleeping Riviera towns glimmer against the pale morning hills. But cruising does have certain undesirable effects on me. One is that I grow immoderate in the presence of so much food and wine. I become fanatical: I must have it all, and at once. As a consequence I rapidly expand, like some ungorgeous merman hauled too fast from the depths to the depressurised surface.

The other problem is my weird excitement at talking to Americans. I find it thrilling, as though I'm on TV. I love how enthusiastically Americans make small talk, how they can deliver perfectly commonplace observations with such open-hearted conviction in the value of what they're saying. That sounds mocking, but I'm not. I envy them: their social generosity and lack of defensive snark, their utter absence of cultural insecurity or self-doubt, the way they are so in every way unlike me.

When I talk to Americans I start to drawl and turn my sentences into questions and I say things that in some lunatic corner of my brain I must assume sound American, like "Shucks" and "Go figure" and "Ain't that a crying shame?"

But at some point I realise I can't be them, and that's when a peculiar version of South Africanness begins to assert itself, a weird protective mechanism bolstering the doubting private self in the presence of so much affable certainty. I start to squint against the sun and square my jaw and say rugged things, as though just being from Africa makes me some cross between a game ranger and an outlaw and a frontiersman, tough and undaunted. It's a holiday from existentialism. Fortunately, it happens mainly inside my head, but that's bad enough.

In the afternoon the sun came out a little in St Tropez and I managed to sneak onto one of the private beaches in front of La Bouillabaisse restaurant. The sand was littered with European fancymen, all hairy thighs and speedos the size of a thumb, but no one was in the water. They eyed it warily, as boarding school boys eye the dance floor at their first social. Tsk, I thought. This is not how you treat an ocean. Let a South African take command.

Bold, a little magnificent, I shrugged off my clothes and swaggered boxer-shorted across the sands. Eyes watched in hooded Gallic silence. I struck a pioneering pose. I was even proud of my shipboard belly. I slapped it a little: behold, I am African, and this is our muscle.

I waded in to my knees. Watch, cowards! See how a man swims! I wished some of my new American friends from the ship were there to see me.

I poised to dive, I was on the very balls of my feet, when I noticed something in the water, red and pulsing. Oh look, I thought, a jellyfish. And then: oh look, another one. And then there was another, and another, and I yelped and lifted a leg out of the water as one tried to jelly up against it, and then I yelped and tried to lift the other, and as my brain tried to make sense of the fact that I was up to my upper thighs in water more jelly and tentacle than liquid, I gave a manly shriek and levitated my way back to shore like a fat coyote who'd run over the edge of a cliff. The Frenchmen puffed their Gitanes and chuckled.

"Where are you from?" one of them asked.

"Canada," I said.