CHRISTOPHER HOWSE
ISt Seine l'Abbaye have just caught a sheep. Well, that is not quite true. If you have ever tried, you will know that sheep are very hard to catch, being quick, strong and not, in this part of Burgundy, fitted with collars. The best you can hope for is to get a handhold on its fleece. Anyway, the sheep was in the garden, where it ought not to have been, and I helped heave it into the neighbouring field. Afterwards, someone unkindly said that I had just stood there like a policeman directing traffic. That was enough incident for one hot day, and I returned to the shade of a walnut tree. My hostess cooks us pigeons and veal and lamb between finishing her book on Napoleon after Elba, which sounds a corker. Wednesday was Napoleon's birthday, and she held a fete champetre for admirals and generals and historians who revere his name. The day is a bank holiday in France, not in honour of Bonaparte but because it is the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Going to church in a foreign country is a short cut to understanding the national character. The Italians chatter, the Spaniards are impervious to distraction (and so do not mind impinging on others). The French, when they bother going, can take things fairly seriously. The disappearance of kneeling has been a peculiar tendency recently. I don't like it. A generation is growing up not knowing how to kneel, either in church or by their beds. The parish church here has nothing to kneel on but the damp stone floor, and everyone stands throughout Mass. But on Sunday morning we went to the Benedictine monastery at Flavigny, a mediaeval town on a hill overlooking valleys that are surprisingly green in the August sun. The Benedictines' church is just a plainly vaulted choir with stalls facing each other, as in a college chapel. Visiting lay people are corralled at the west end behind a wroughtiron grille ritually enclosing the monastic cloister. The 30 or 40 monks chanted practically the whole of the Mass, in Latin, which we layfolk could follow in a missal. Gregorian chant is marketed on CDs as an aid to 'relaxation'. It is certainly conducive to a meditative frame of mind, and listening to it in the liturgical context for which it is intended multiplies its power. And there was plenty of time for kneeling — on extremely hard kneelers.
In this village, the auberge is called Fifi's. Fifi turns out to be a burly man, and his customers are a rough collection of farm workers who sink remarkable quantities of Ricard behind a smokescreen of Gauloises. Among
them is generally to be found Gaston, the local wise man or healer, as one of our party had cause to discover. He had hurt his back and spent half of the weekend in agony. It would have to be the renowned French NHS in Dijon — unless Gaston could help. Gaston was hauled out of Fifi's with almost as much difficulty as the sheep from the garden, and persuaded to hold an impromptu surgery in the kitchen of his house, which is a shop, except that there is hardly anything for sale and it never seems to be open. The women were firmly locked out of the house, and after a preliminary prodding at the griping backbone, Gaston gave a crunching wrench, with his knee as a fulcrum, that left the patient reeling with pain. I have long been suspicious of chiropractors doing backs irreparable harm, and this confirmed my fears. But after the initial pain had subsided, mobility returned, and, the morning after, the spine was back to load-bearing order. Gaston has been thanked with tobacco and Ricard, which Fifi wisely makes available in periodic allowances,
Ihave an ailment that Gaston cannot help with. It is a tremendously vulgar complaint — gallstones. My GP told me that it is associated with three characteristics beginning with F: female, fair and forty. When I retailed that to the surgeon he came up with three more gallstone-related Fs: fat, fecund and flatulent. So there I am, stereotyped as an Ealing comedy barmaid. Shortly, I shall have an operation, but, if I survive it. which I probably shall, I won't have much to show as souvenirs. These little fellows would not
contribute much to a gravel path. When Pepys was cut for the stone (bladder, not gall) he preserved it in a leather pouch and, on each anniversary of the successful and unimaginably painful operation, held a dinner in grateful commemoration.
Acommemoration about which we haven't heard much yet in the way of planning is the Queen's Golden Jubilee next year, and it is easy to think why. Of course no one in authority wants to mention the timing of the Queen Mother's funeral. But I suspect that another reason is a fear that too grandiose arrangements might fall flat. There is nothing to stop commemorative schemes being adopted locally, though, throughout the Commonwealth. In 1887. for Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee, the lepers of Singapore were given an extra dole of rice, and at Mithi, in Sind, was opened the 'Queen Victoria Jubilee Burial and Burning Ground'.
Bi ore I left London I kissed Joanna Lumley. Nothing serious, just a social peck, but not to be sneezed at. The telly does not do justice to her great beauty. The occasion was a strange session to choose the winners of the Daily Telegraph Mini-Saga competition, sponsored by the Arvon Foundation. The challenge was to write a complete story in 50 words, neither more nor fewer. Like writing clerihevvs, it is easy to do but hard to do well. About 5,000 people tried their hand. These had been whittled down to 200 by the time Miss Lumley, Quentin Blake, Blake Morrison, Brian Aldiss and I sat down in a bare room near Hyde Park to place a miniature laurel crown on the diminutive winner. It was like a speeded-up Booker, and naturally I was pathetically outmanoeuvred. Just as I thought my little pony was going to make the finishing-line by four lengths, Quentin Blake came up on the outside with a runner that I had left behind at the rear of the pack. But the winners are frightfully good, as you'll be able to tell when they are published next month. And my consolation prize was osculatory.
Alunch, not on that day, I came across a puzzle that I almost put to 'Dear Mary'. I noticed my host was still apparently under the influence of drugs from the day before. His conversation proceeded by knight's moves and up into little flights of ideas with scant discernible connection. Should I have said, 'You're smashed', or have entered into the spirit of it, lunging at the nearest passing idea, as at a stray sheep?
Christopher Howse is Comment editor of the Daily Telegraph.
Previous page
