Diary
Who would have believed that a time would come when an Englishman had to travel to the South of France for some proper . . . marmalade? At breakfast this morning in Vence, high in the hills above Nice, it was not the taste of coffee and croissants that made me realise I was on holiday abroad, since these can now be found quite easily in Fulham. It was the taste of oldfashioned thick-cut marmalade Which seems nowadays quite to have dis- appeared from Britain's breakfast tables. Occasionally one comes across a jar or two of the real stuff, at a church fête or a WI bazaar, but if one relies on the English shops there is nothing to be found that does not have the consistency of emulsified Pap and the flavour of orange cough drops. In Vence, however, the local marmalade is even richer and darker in texture than Vintage Oxford used to be, due to a drop or two of cognac which also helps to bring out the tangy flavour of the local oranges. Another notable feature of the Vence supermarket is a brand of Nescafe called Alta Rica which is far, far superior to the very best Gold Blend available in Britain. I 'now the visitor to the South of France is meant to rave about bouillabaisse, loup de Ter, ratatouille and all that Provençal stuff. But at the risk of provoking Cyril Connolly to sink to the bottom of his celestial rock P", I have to report that none of the other gastronomic treats enjoyed during this most recent visit has been nearly so memorable as the marmalade and instant Coffee.
certainly not the dinner we had one evening in the Majestic Hotel in Can- nes, where the food was grievously dis- aPPointing. One dish, however, a gateau of cervelles, so impressed our famous interna- tional hostess that she summoned the chef to ask him for the recipe, since she had it in mind to serve the dish at her house in Jamaica where she was planning to spend Christmas. After hearing the details of the sauce she asked whether it would be tloossible to fly frozen brains into Jamaica ecause, as she explained, 'they don't have any of their own out there'. Then, aghast at what she might have been misunderstood to have said, this very grand lady felt constrained to apologise to her guests that she was in no way intending to suggest that ni ative Jamaicans were a particularly stupid _°t. So it seems that the current mania for ,uspcting racial slurs where none was OIntended has even infected the higher soctal reaches of the Cote d'Azur, which paOnlymean that there is no longer any
of the world safely immune from this Creeping pestilence.
Because of the hills it is very difficult to get the BBC overseas service here, which means that one listens instead to the French news bulletins in the hope of hearing what is happening in the miners' strike etc. Normally the French quite like to give publicity to such unfortunate events across the Channel, but for the last two days all the news bulletins here have been dominated by only one subject: la rentree, the return to school, for the new academic year, of 12 million French children. Night and day, radio and television reports have been flooding the country with every detail of this great event. At such-and-such a school parents picketed the returning teachers, showering abuse at them for excessive 'laxism', i.e. permissiveness. At another school teachers had to be drafted in from some different part of France to fill a gap caused by the local teachers going on strike. What a contrast with Britain where the media only bother to notice children going back to school if there is a royal prince involved.
At High Mass on Sunday I stumbled on another example of French organisa- tion and method. Gone are the days when Mass was attended solely by elderly ladies, nuns and small children, with mothers staying at home and fathers hanging about uneasily between the church porch and the local bar. Instead Vence cathedral — main nave and sides alike — was packed to overflowing with locals of all ages and both sexes, with only a handful of tourists to swell the numbers; and everyone was taking Communion. How has this extraor- dinary transformation come about? The essentials appear to be that the Mass is said in French; epistle, gospel and notices are read successively by members of the con- gregation; the sermon is short (six minutes) and concise; and the singing — by the congregation conducted by a priest — is not so prolonged as to hold up the pace of the Mass. In a mere 40 minutes these elements interacted triumphantly — like a kind of spiritual nouvelle cuisine — avoid- ing the heavy excesses of a full-dress pontifical High Mass (minimum of one and a half hours) and the trendier liturgies played out against much twanging of guitars setting one generation against another, as happens all too often back in England. When I made these points to a French friend he laughed cynically. 'You left out one ingredient of your spiritual nouvelle cuisine,' he said, 'and that is the new ritual which at a certain point in the Mass — the kiss of peace — requires each member of the congregation to embrace his or her neighbour.' According to my French friend, the young Lotharios of the town take great pains to position them- selves next to the pretty girl of their choice, and exploit this new ritual as a blessed, not to say heaven-sent opportunity to make contact. So naturally more young men go to church, since that is now where pick-ups come easy.
itting in a deck chair in this lovely
garden I watch the animals and insects, all of whom are constantly on the alert, perpetually uneasy, looking and listening for all the signals that reach them from their surroundings, as if they feared some constant peril from them, to which they must automatically respond by flight or bite. That is also, to a large extent, the condition of Homo laborans — except when on holiday. Only on holiday can he hope to escape the animals' fate of unremitting disquietude. But how very few choose to do so. Most holidaymakers pay vast sums to travel to strange places where their alien status renders them even more vulnerable to external pressures than they are when at home. Thus they rush around the COte d'Azur, for example, constantly on the alert to being rooked, perpetually uneasy about the food, looking and listening for all the signals that all too often fail to reach them from their surroundings, as if they feared some constant peril from them, just like the animals and insects in the garden. Ideally a holiday should be an opportunity to travel inside oneself, away from the pressures of the outside world, which animals are incapable of doing. As it is, most humans perversely choose to spend their holidays doing exactly the reverse.
Several houses in Vence have a notice on their iron gates which reads 'Attention, Chat Mechant', the theory being that cats are much more of a deterrent to burglars than dogs. Unlike barking dogs which are relatively easy to dispose of, cats can be trained to fall upon intruders by stealth. Although at first inclined to dismiss all this as a shaggy cat story, I began to think there might be some truth in it on noticing the town's wholly disproportionate number of blind Algerians.
Peregrine Worsthorne
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