LESSON FOR A WET MIDSUMMER'S DAY: HOW TO SAVOUR A ROSE

Aged Mother held the pink rose and inhaled deeply, her withered face broadening into an impish smile. I had, as it were, been teaching granny to suck eggs - or rather, I had been teaching Friend Helen's Aged Mother to smell roses; this being a natural enough thing to do when one finds oneself in a seaside rose park on a Saturday afternoon with temporary responsibility for Aged Mother's amusement and perambulation.

Of course one shouldn't really pick roses in parks, but the old do have a certain licence as well as a frequent difficulty when it comes to bending down to enjoy a fragrance. If Aged Mother can't come to the rose then the rose must come to Aged Mother, thought I, sneekily plucking a bloom from the rear of the bush. She sniffed at it somewhat hesitantly as though she thought it might suddenly turn into a species of biting rodent.

When it comes to smelling roses I am not completely without form. Many years ago I was taught the proper way to appreciate that special floral fragrance by an extravagant Frenchman called Jean-Pierre Garot, on whose improbably luxuriant moustaches the Magic Roundabout character of Zebedee was modelled.

When he was not smelling roses or attending to his livestock in our twin town of Clisson, Jean-Pierre worked in an art studio, out of whose collective imagination the fairy tale of La Manège Enchantée was sprung on an unsuspecting world.

On one of our very first town twinning trips, somewhere no doubt in the valley of the Sevre, we stopped for a breather at some celebrated rose garden. Thinking that as I was outside the inhibiting confines of Britain I could safely be a trifle adventurous, I took a bloom delicately between thumb and forefinger and sniffed gently.

"Mais non! Madame Fennie, Mais non!, came this deep voice from behind a black forest of handlebar moustache. "That is not how to appreciate a rose. You must fill your lungs, imbibe its fragrance."

And freely wrapping a strong Gallic arm about my person in a way that only the handsome nature of his moustaches could possibly have excused, he whisked me off to some particularly well-upholstered rosebush, teeming with yellow blossoms.

I should run out of space if I listed all his instructions, prodigiously demonstrated, as to the correct fashion in which to savour a rose. Both he and I were exhilarated, I suspect, by the effects of a Muscadet fuelled lunch. Nevertheless what followed was a pedagogical experience of rare quality.

We had, first, the necessary mental attitude (this no doubt to stop me giggling!) followed by: addressing yourself to the rose; the expulsion of air from the lungs; the bow to the bloom; the long and slow inhalation to fill the body with scent; the closing of the eyes; the peaceful exhalation; the blissful smile; the repetition of the process.

"There, Madame Fennie," (which is how he unfailingly addressed me), that is how you are to smell roses in the future. That is the French way."

He was, as I have said, an extravagant character and seemed quite unperturbed that if this really was the French way then it hadn't spread much beyond our own 'petit coin' of the rose garden.

Maybe I alone was deemed worthy to be initiated into this secret while the rest of the party kept their olfactory talents hidden from the noses of 'Les Anglais.' Indeed, maybe I was his first successful pupil - shy and eager to please that I am, but given to occasional bouts of exuberance when I think no-one is watching.

And thus it was in the park on Saturday afternoon that I in turn became dashing Jean-Pierre, educating a bemused and arthritic mid-eighty year old into the art of savouring roses, while the worried citizens of Barry hurried by, their eyes averted from this unlikely spectacle.

But just as I had been entranced all those years before, so was she now; and still keeps the remains of the rose, a little shrivelled by now Helen says, by her bedside.