Evening Standard (London): My winter cote

The South of France is like New York, or Rome, or the Starship Enterprise: it's so familiar from films, you can't quite believe you're living real life. It makes for a rather optimistic attitude. I was there in winter. Films from the Thirties and Fifties were always filled with people who wintered in the South of France, to whom interesting things happened, unless, a la F Scott Fitzgerald, they died of drink. (In the Forties, they were about brave resistance fighters garrotting Germans in the South of France; in the Sixties, people taking drugs.) Grace Kelly (admittedly probably there in June considering the catfight she had by a bathing platform) had a great time in To Catch a Thief: a car chase, a picnic with Cary Grant, a firework display, even ending up with Prince Rainier in real life.

The filmic air was compounded by the emptiness of everywhere I went: Cannes, Nice, Monte Carlo, they were all ghost towns. As if all those messy tourists had been kept off the set. I wandered aimlessly along the back alleys of Monaco, which slip off the castellated rock, all honey stone and tiny, crumbling facades, almost alone. This is the first act, I thought. I pretended to be Grace Kelly for a while, but Cary Grant never turned up, nor did Prince Rainier.

Being winter, I bought chocolates for people to eat back in England, and I didn't have to worry they'd melt in the heat. I meant to go to the Oceanarium, but instead I drank hot chocolate and stared at the view. That's something you couldn't do in July. I never had to queue, and when I took the train down the coast, there were no tourists on it (except me), only commuters, which gave the Cote d'Azur a strange air. I stared out of the window at tiny jewelled coves, with their villas, and their rocks, and the cypress trees, as deserted as the west coast of Scotland in July. Unlike in June, I could actually see the sand. I hardly recognised the tiny cove of Cap Ferrat where I'd stayed two summers ago. I realised why the English had fallen in love with the Riviera all those years ago.

The Hotel Metropole in Monte Carlo was another kind of film. It was newly decorated in Rothschild-Renaissance style. I was wary, in the lobby, of being stabbed by a Medici henchman in tights. The other guests seemed to be plutocrats taking their mistresses on breaks from their yachts. The bathrooms were vast, the taffeta curtains billowed over a sea view, and the beds were large enough for several mistresses at once.

The hotel restaurant was superb. I ate, the way an oligarch's mistress can never eat, gorging myself on the six courses or so the waiters recommended off the set menu. Surrounded by plutocrats, I ate cappuccinos of foie gras, and scallops, and quail with sultanas. It was so delicious, I could have gone back and started again.

I heard some fat, well-dressed men talking Russian in the Cafe de Paris, but I wasn't sure I wanted to be in their kind of film. I might have ended up dead and dumped off the side of a yacht. Unless I could guarantee Cary Grant was in it, too. I tried hanging out at Jimmy'z nightclub stuffy, red plush, lots of wood and some fish in a tank. I suppose the couples and grouplets eating dinner at tables were le tout Monaco, but none of them asked me to join their cast. No one chatted me up. I wandered back, alone at 2am, through the Astroturf-neat parks, daring someone to mug me, as everyone had said that crime in Monaco didn't exist a CCTV camera per five of the population.

And, like Grace Kelly's mother, my jewels were insured. Nobody did.

Itook the train down the coast, to Menton, where France blurs into Italy.

It's the retirement capital of France. I watched whitehaired couples trailing down the Esplanade hand in hand. I was tempted to carry on to Italy, another 20 minutes, and do some fake designer bag shopping in the market over the border in Ventimiglia, but prudence intervened. I ate lemon risotto, the local speciality.

They love anything to do with lemons here lemon curd, lemon spaghetti, lemon-patterned plates. I wandered up to the English graveyard worryingly full of people who died young, but then it's up so steep a hill, the climb probably killed them going to everybody else's funerals this was the perfect setting for something to happen, but it didn't. I couldn't even catch a funeral as the graveyard, stuffed with consumptive English people, has been full for years.

In the end I witnessed a romance between a little Vietnamese seamstress in Menton and the gawky young man who ran the florist next door. He was obviously besotted with her he endlessly stood outside her shop, staring soulfully through the window, and I caught her weeping over her bills one afternoon, when I came to pick up a skirt. She said to me, 'It's so terrible to be alone.' I nearly went straight next door and gave him a push.

Finally I went to the Casino in Monte Carlo. My grandmother used to go to Juan les Pins every summer; she and my grandfather would bring their own gin (currency restrictions meant you could only take Pounds 50 a head out of the country) and Granny would pay for their holiday by gambling.

But I am not a lucky gambler, and I don't have Grandpa to bail me out.

Still, in films, things always happen to women who go to casinos. The Casino was a splendid, baroque, weddingcake affair, with domes as voluptuous as anything Jordan could implant.

I'd been told that this was where gangsters laundered their money, so maybe I'd see some mafia lord and his moll cleaning up.

I was worried about being a bit outclassed in films, Casino habituees all live their lives on their looks because their looks are worth it. I went in a cocktail dress, ready to play with the jewels at my throat, as Sean Connery eyed me across the table. But he wasn't there and the other guests had eyes only for the tables.

Nothing to do with my lack of looks the only other women there appeared to be elderly alcoholics. They were just all there for the roulette. And if there were any prince of crime, I couldn't tell who was who.

Nothing unexpected was going to happen at all and then suddenly it did.

I won lots of money on red. I tried to lose it all again, but I failed.

After red came up five times in a row, it was time, I thought, to grab this opportunity by the horns, so I cashed in my e500 worth of chips and headed off to bed, having covered the cost of my trip. Now that really was a fairytale ending.

Out and about on the CUte d'Azur

Getting there easyJet flies to Nice from Gatwick, Luton and Stansted from Pounds 33.63 return including tax (0905 821 0905; www.easyjet.com).

What to do You can either lose all your worldly goods in the Casino (entry complimentary to hotel guests), or shop in the mall beneath the hotel (where the hotel gives you ten per cent off a lot of shops, neatly cancelling the ten per cent surcharge for being in the rich-person capital of the world). Or you can wander down to the sea and count the yachts, or go to the Ballets de Monte Carlo, which is very good. Enjoy the sensation of wandering under palm trees in the moonlight, wearing a king's ransom in diamonds, and not being mugged. Or you can stash your jewels in the safe, and take the train to Cannes, where Arab gangsters and Russians vie for control of the streets, or pop over to Italy just up the coast.

Who goes there This is still the place where the super-glam love to party.

In the summer the skies buzz with helicopters and the sea is white with boats. It's fantastically beautiful and the food, being French, is delicious.

Princess Caroline of Monaco, P Diddy, Naomi Campbell, and film stars beyond mention, all swoop in and out. JG Ballard wrote his novel Super-Cannes here.

Russian oligarchs and Arab princes float in and out.

Hotel Metropole: need to know

DECOR Splendid luxury. The hotel was originally built in 1886 and retains the grandeur of that era, but was refurbished in 2004, so everything is top-notch. All the public spaces are heady with gold, marble and damask.

BEDROOMS More of the above: 146 sumptuous rooms which are so big you could play fives in them. Some have sea-view terraces and there are two no-smoking floors.

BATHROOMS Lots of marble, jet-spray showers, Jacuzzis and E'Spa products.

FOOD AND DRINK Continental breakfast costs e30, but the American breakfast, at e35, is more of a treat.

The Utopia bar serves cocktails to magnates and their consorts. Then there is the Joel Robuchon restaurant; this offers some of the best food I have ever tasted. For really greedy people, there is a six-course degustation menu, at e160. They also do half portions, which means that really greedy people can order twice as much.

EXTRA TREATS The hotel shuttles you by helicopter from the airport, which makes you feel even richer (a dangerous thing). Metropole E'spa opens in July.

TARIFF Rooms from e355 in low season, e460 in high season.

Hotel Metropole Monte Carlo, 4 avenue de la Madone, BP19 MC98007, Monaco Cedex (00 377 93 15 15 15; www.metropole.mc)