June around the corner

A stray alium outside our 
living room window, and a
redstart on the sculpture
         

        

Our French friends are often keen to remind us that la République française is a secular state, but underneath there are often contradictions.  I started to  write this on Ascension day which is a public holiday here (I once famously muddled it with Pentecôte, coming up soon too) and while I with my Quaker upbringing may not have been attuned to such things, I am often reminded how deep-rooted Catholic culture is embedded in French daily life, not just the major festivals but the saints' days that are printed in most calendars here.  

One anecdote we come back to quite often is the story of the new library in Lunel, opened with a fanfare nearby some years ago.  It trumpeted that it would be open on the first Sunday of each month so we duly turned up on the first Sunday of April that year - to find it firmly shut.  But of course, they explained afterwards, it was Easter Sunday.  Easter is not even a public holiday in France, and schools are often open over the Easter period!

                           

The late spring sunshine and colours in the garden are a relief for us as for everyone I guess in these grim times, when the awful reality of war further east only distracts from the unpleasant dishonesty taken now as normal by a lot of British politicians.  I continue to read a lot of history, and am constantly reminded of the vivid images in Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands which tells the terrible story of Ukraine, Poland and their neighbours in the tug-of-war between Stalin and Hitler.  Putin is truly Stalin's heir in callous brutality.  Poppies seem appropriate on their splendid annual appearance in fields here, symbolic also of wars through the ages.

In times like these, I'm so glad to have a variety of things to read.  My work with the Anglophone Library in Montpellier is providing me with a long reading list, but just now I am harking back to things I've already enjoyed and love to reread - just now Writing Home, the diary/memoirs of Alan Bennett, whose wry observations and light touch never obscure a clear humanitarian eye.

Here are a few snippets from the book:  [In Yorkshire for a family funeral] Wake at 5.30 a.m. and hear a cock crow. A cock, unaware that it has turned into a cliché, unselfconsciously goes on maintaining a rustic tradition, fulfilling its role in the environment. The corn mill is restored, the drystone-waller demonstrates his craft, the thatchers bind their reeds and the cocks crow. Country craft.

The hearse and the attendant cars are grey and low-slung, so that it looks more like the funeral of a Mafia boss than of an ex-tram-driver. As we come out of the chapel cousin Geoff, who always takes the piss, shouts at my Uncle Jim, the last surviving brother, and who’s deaf, ‘Head of the clan now, Uncle’. ‘Aye,’ Uncle Jim shouts back. ‘There’s nobbut me now.’

I take the train back. Through county after county the fields are alight. It’s like taking a train through the Thirty Years War.

Bennett was (and maybe still is) a regular contributor to the London Review of Books which we both read regularly (I online, Mary on paper).  We are also reading An uncommon reader, his fantasy account of the Queen's discovery of books and reading via a mobile library parked in a Palace yard, in French translations with our conversation group.  It is  superbly funny and full of wry observations of corgis and courtiers.  There is also a sneaking interest in France in the royal family, relevant at this jubilant time.  I'm finishing this post as the Jubilee day approaches.