DIARY
JOHN WELLS ‘I wunnasee a mediaeval city like it wuzz — null like this!' The small, wizened and intensely angry old American tourist in the yellow short-sleeved shirt and the tiny straw hat was having his tantrum just beyond the portcullis in Carcassonne, bob- bing among the dazed human flotsam that swills slowly up and down between the ice-cream shops and plastic swords and dayglo cuddly toys, and it was hard not to sympathise with him. Merimee and Viollet-le-Duc probably wanted to see a mediaeval city like it wuzz when they began the 40-year job of knocking up this early French Disneyland in 1844, and they can hardly have imagined it was going to be peopled in perpetuity with lepers, hun- chbacks and extras dressed in codpieces and pointy shoes pouring boiling oil over each others' heads from the ramparts. What has happened here is that a rather humourless exercise in Gothic Revival has become a colossal smash hit, like Mont Saint Michel or Les Baux, with pilgrims from all over Europe and beyond coming to take their cultural punishment like they do at The Mousetrap. More sensitive souls like the old American tourist, drawn here perhaps by the magic of the name, perhaps by some dim memory of Henry James and Edith Wharton raving about it in their quaint convoluted way before the first world war, find themselves in a minority. The only refuge, apart from one quite good restaurant and a couple of semi-serious antique shops, is one expensive hotel with Puginesque panelling, heraldic wallpaper and milk-jugs designed to match the gothic chairs. On the gothic shelves of one of its vast reading rooms, among the complete works of Moliere and Wilde and Diderot, some of them in the hotel's own bindings, I found one of the London Library's lost copies of The Sacred Fount.
here's a great deal of theatricality, not to mention the magic of the name, in wine-making. The vendange that began last week in the Lot was a very low-key business compared to what goes on at the big châteaux in Bordeaux. There the grape-pickers — local labour, migrant workers, hippies and the rest — weave their slow way among the vines like figures in a more serious mediaeval painting, tipping grapes into quaint baskets on each other's backs, and one drop of rain pro- duces hysteria. Here the harvester — a kind of tall tractor — straddles the row of vines, battering most but by no means all of the grapes off with its plastic flaps and ferrying them up from under on little chains of plastic buckets. When it comes on to drizzle the driver gets his plastic mac out and grinds on. As a wine-growing region, the Lot suffered badly in the last century.
The famous vin noir de Cahors was popu- lar in England and in Russia, but having a higher alcohol content it was used most to fortify the wines of Bordeaux. Then Chap- tal explained to the Bordelais that they could achieve the same result by adding sugar, and then came phylloxera, 'from America,' the harvester-driver added sul- lenly, 'like syphilis and Aids.'
0 ne mediaeval custom does survive, the planting of a rose at the end of every row of vines. I thought it was decorative, but the harvester-driver explained it was entirely practical: any disease or blight that attacks the vines attacks the rose first, and gives the grower time to treat it. But the Lot will need more good theatre to achieve the renaissance it's after: the region now produces less than 10 per cent of what it grew 200 years ago, and it will take a great many mediaeval grape-pickers and cathedral-like chais full of new oak barrels, where the air is soggy with the smell of new wine and a tiny proportion of the crop is
shown maturing as it has traditionally for centuries etc, to put the Seigneurs de Cahors back on an equal economic footing with the Barons of the Medoc.
he farmers of the Lot, meanwhile, are not burning British lamb. According to the local paper, 20 policemen were injured trying to protect a lorry full of Polish pigs. I suppose even that is street theatre of a kind. But it's difficult to know what the newly restored Europeans in the East are going to mount by way of counter- attraction. In the last year of Honecker's regime in East Germany there were com- plaints about the number of new cities that could have been built for the cost of the Carcassonne-style restoration work going on in Berlin. Now even their tourism has lost confidence: according to a friend, an English High Court judge was bicycling near Weimar a couple of weeks ago and made enquiries about bed-and-breakfast. Some clearer image of the High Court judge will now be forming in your mind, but the point of the story was that he was offered bed and breakfast for five marks a night. When he expressed surprise he was asked anxiously whether that was too much.
0 n the theme of romantic illusion, the only really alarming moment so far was when the harvester-driver, a twinkling- eyed figure with a Meridional accent like a knife vibrating against a table, and whom I was sitting next to at supper staying with French friends near Cahors, turned to me and asked me why so many English people — tong des Onglais — were buying houses in that part of France. I immediately felt guilty. English settlers in that part of France, even those who settle in that part of France for more than three weeks in the year, tend to be mildly embarrassing, the older ones loping about in deerstalkers, carrying copies of the Daily Telegraph, and the younger ones, who try to blend in with the locals, having in the main a fairly regrettable taste in leisurewear. I was also thinking how appalling it would be if every empty house in Sussex was instantly snap- ped up by a computer-programmer from Roquefort. I told the harvester-driver he ought to do what they do in Wales and burn them down. No, no, he didn't mean that at all: like the well-known contempor- ary painter allegedly caught in bed with the wife of a well-known contemporary aris- tocrat who asked him, 'How could you?', I had misunderstood the drift of his ques- tion. There was no tone of moral condemn- ation, only bewildered amazement at why anyone should undertake such a thing.
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