BORSCHT AND TEARS

We are supposed to be in a recession, but last month we sold more than a million labels. To put this in context we normally sell about 400,000 labels, but last month it was more than a million and this month it may be as many. So really we should be happy bunnies, shouldn’t we? Well, yes. I mean ‘yes,’ no question yes. Except for the fact that all this selling of our little self-adhesive friends is hard work.

The labels long ago escaped from their normal confines of the two rooms that were the old garage and which we converted into a bedroom and sitting room for MIL in the days when she was still with us. Then they took over the dining room, whence they can be expelled on high days and holidays all apart from two large and growing stacks of heavy duty pallet labels in garish colours that lurk behind wicker screens bought for the purpose in IKEA.

But now as I write they have even over-spilled the dining room. There are boxes of labels, piled high, along the hall and in the sitting room neat rows of partly filled white mailing bags stand on their ends, their sheet-like corners waving at odd angles. They remind me of so many baby ghosts, lined up in some ghost orphanage.

We have an exceptionally large order to despatch to several hundred stores. What seemed like a great piece of business has turned into a nightmare of perplexity. Nothing is very difficult in quantities of ones and twos, but multiplied by several hundred the slightest difficulty or hitch requires hours of labour to remedy.

The labels we are selling are quite complicated - they are the labels used to certify films, 18, 15, PG and so on. We don’t print these ourselves, but we have nevertheless to ensure we have the right quantities and the right mix and to bag everything up and address it and stamp it and despatch. It all sounds easy enough until you have to cope with suppliers that are late and customers who are anxious, and, of course, all the continuing normal workload that goes on with the occasional deadline for an article on European Affairs thrown in.

We have been working, heavy eyed and limbed, from early morning until night, bringing in the offspring as required. Elder Daughter has missed her vocation as Superwoman. She works twice as fast as anyone else and has a capacity for organisation that puts us to shame. I wonder if ever this order ever will be complete and we able to reclaim our sanity and most of the house.

So as a diversion we entertained Di and her two aged mothers (one hers, one her husband’s) to lunch in the kitchen (into which the labels have not so far intruded). One aged mother is 87, the other 97. The 97 year old is deaf, but and so gives a standard response of ‘quite all right, thanks’ in a shaky voice to whatever is put to her. I sometimes think one could go though life on just a few of such standard responses. Alistair Cooke used to say that if a discussion had anything to do with politics, you could sound intelligent simply by saying ‘but not in the south, I think.’

As it happens we did not discuss politics, so I fell, between plate-warming and duck-carving operations, to reflecting how easy it was to form relationships these days through the internet and this led me to wonder whether one is ever too old for internet dating.

Could an 87 year old and British Passport holder to boot ‘want to meet’ a ninety year old Russian or Argentinian oligarch? It seems, I suppose, unlikely, but just imagine.....instead of contemplating a quiet winding down and a diet of painful knees and shuffling gait and generally having to be waited on hand and foot, think how one’s life could be transformed by falling in love at such an age.

With the endorphins released by the brain, the old would become instantly younger. Instead of ageing, one would de-age. And by at least ten years. Mobility would be restored and out of the window would go all those sad poisons prescribed by the gerontologists to hold body and soul together.

Anyway between mouthfuls of duck and roast potatoes I put this to her and she seemed much taken with the oligarch idea. I even taught her the Russian for ‘I love you.’ (When you are 87, it’s as well to work fast). ‘Ya vas loublou’ she said, very prettily. It remained only to set up the advertisement in Yahoo personals and perhaps, for good measure, the London Review of Books, a periodical much given to fostering eccentric relationships among those who feign a literary interest.

But sadly as I had then to break off to serve and sample the lemon tart, a snip from last week’s visit to IKEA, but still delicious with a spot of double cream, I found on my return that the conversation had drifted from visions of yachts and private jets and a dacha outside St Petersburg. I could see my chance of rubbing shoulders with Vladimir Putin in the hallowed portals of The Hermitage, awaiting my opportunity to slip ‘but not in the south I think’ into the conversation, slipping away with every mouthful.

I must try again, though. And next time I shall serve Borscht.

DRAMA AT THE FIREWORKS

L rang. “Come over for the fireworks on Sunday!

“Right. Thanks”

“We’re starting at 7 o’clock. Byee!”

And she was gone. As she usually goes leaving one, mouth open, on the point of saying something but not quite getting around to it.

So we trek over in the darkness at the appointed hour, walking self-consciously up the drive with a seventeen year old school chum of one of L’s daughters, dressed as a cat.

L divides her time between London, Wales and Las Vegas. There is a lot to fit in. Things have to be compressed. In this case Bonfire Night and Halloween. Inside the front door a job lot of witches hats lie strewn on the floor and life sized stocks hang on a grey chain from the newel post.

In the kitchen a chocolate fountain cascades merrily. Part of spell-making operations, no doubt. L’s husband barks exasperated orders, shooing us out again into the cold and damp. Flocks of seventeen-year olds, dressed as minor camp, more camp and extreme camp, waft in and out in various states of undress.

We grasp a tumbler of mulled wine - sweet and spicy and stand beside the bonfire, built with the old apple tree that collapsed under this year’s weight of fruit. Some still sits in my kitchen, waiting forlornly to be turned into something edible.

The adults huddle together eating the Shepherd’s Pie of which an exceedingly large quantity has been provided for the occasion. We hunch over paper plates, wrapped fast in our coats, gloves and scarves. We have done these fireworks parties before. It’s not the cold, it’s the damp, that gets to you. That and the drifting smoke from the bonfire. Across the court I note a baby in a pushchair, fast asleep, and with no obvious sign of belonging to anyone. I wonder if it is real or a piece of surrealist art.

I have stood on the decking of cousin’s David’s Alberta house, barefoot and wearing no more than a dressing gown, with the thermometer reading minus 22 degrees and not felt cold like I feel the cold here. I doubt that it is less than 7 degrees above freezing but my nether regions refuse to believe I am wearing any clothes at all.

The young, by contrast, appear to be running a competition for who can wear least, though as at the same time they are also running a competition as to who can appear most gothic it is clear there is a conflict. One enterprising lass, I note, solves the dilemma by wearing just one stocking beneath a school shirt in disarray. They, of course, are impervious to cold.

Somebody starts lighting fireworks which fizz, bang and whoosh into the night. We make the appropriate ‘ooh-ah’ noises. Someone thankfully has removed the baby. Clearly not a piece of surrealist art then.

I have to say that I stopped being hugely interested in fireworks at the age of nine. In great millennial displays that consume the annual budget of a small African country in ten minutes they are, I confess, quite pretty, provided you can watch them indoors. But the whoosh, bang, pop of the garden rocket is quite frankly pathetic. See one momentary starburst and you’ve seen them all.

In my boredom I start thinking about how fireworks could be ‘improved.’ The pretty fireworks are the ones that sit on the ground and spew out coloured sparks. ‘Golden Rain’ they used to be called. The more expensive ones even ran to a rainbow of rich primary colours.

In my mind I attached these to three or four rockets which carried them high in the sky whence they descended on some species of incombustible parachute, Golden Raining as they went. And why only one ‘whoosh’ to our rocket, I wondered? Much more interesting surely would be to couple three or four rockets together in one tube so that the first rocket then ignited the second high above the roof tops and then the third and finishing with three rockets worth of starburst.

By the time we could safely retreat indoors, I had come to the conclusion that I had somehow quite missed my calling in life. Had events taken a different turn, I might have become a famous pyro-technician, lighting up the sky from Llantwit to Llandudno.

Nobody else, needless to say, seemed impressed by this idea. But at least there were now the remains of the cake, tea and chocolate fountain or whatever was left by the time the Goths had ravaged it and retreated to the attics to do whatever seventeen- year old Goths do do in attics.

Host Goth continued to waft around for a bit like the Queen of the Night in faux furs, seeking inspiration from the adults for what she might do after A levels.

“Go to Drama School,” I suggested.

KNOCKING ON HEAVEN'S DOOR

Before we left the Mill, we drove over to Rocamadour, to which we had never been before. It’s a fairish distance from our corner of the Cantal - about and hour an a half - and feels longer cramped in the back of a car. It’s a religious site, a place of pilgrimage - a deep gorge on the side of whose vertiginous cliffs.....well, let me tell the story.

Saint Amadour is one of those obscure early saints that litter the Catholic calendar. I presume he was male, for I doubt a woman would have chosen to live her life, as he did, three quarters of the way up a towering rocky cliff, like some species of seabird. He began as a hermit making a cliff-side cave his hermitage and meditating on the view. Subsequently, he was joined by other hermits who took over other caves. Hermits indeed being social folk despite appearances to the contrary.

In due course Amadour died. Perhaps he had had enough of the view. Anyway, the other hermits carved a sarcophagus for him out of the soft rock, still some three hundred feet or so up this crag, and sealed him in, no doubt accompanied by the usual ceremonies that hermits engage in when one of their number departs for an even greater hermitage at a still more elevated altitude.

And that was that. Nothing much happened for five or six hundred years. But then, just after the turn of the millennium, (that’s the first millennium, not the one just gone) someone came across the Amadour tomb and decided - in true Halloween style - to open it up.

And in true Halloween style old Amadour did not disappoint. For there he was, presumably still fully clothed, and perfectly preserved. Which, when the Pope came to hear of it, was enough to have old Amadour beatified and for the cliff to be re-christened Roc-Amadour and for people to make pilgrimages there for the next thousand years.

Indeed, so well has the little community of Rocamadour done down the ages out of their perfectly preserved hermit that one is tempted to think that perhaps someone removed what remained of Amadour and popped a succession of recently deceased locals into the tomb when anyone came to inspect. But to think that would be to remove the magic.

For Rocamadour is magic - pure spiritual magic - carved in white stone. There’s the little town at the base of the cliff, full of hotels and restaurants and boutique-y shops selling tourist porn - the endless cheap (and not so cheap) souvenir tat, much of it made in Asia, that disfigure any site to which international tourists flock like so many seagulls on a rubbish tip.

But from this unenterprising beginning leads ‘Le Grand Escalier’ - a great staircase of 226 stone steps mounting towards (but never actually reaching) the cliff top. It is a staircase to heaven.

As one mounts, in a series of zig-zagging flights, interrupted by oases of elegant medieval piazzas, you feel you are leaving behind the material things of the world and approaching something pure and spiritual.

You leave behind the modern world with its cars and shops and ascend to the early middle ages. An ecclesiastical building blocks your way - you pass through a door - but then you see that the edifice has only one side. You pass through a wall but the far side is open and the stairway draws you on and ever upward.



Finally you reach the Church of the Black Madonna with its great stained glass window beside the tomb of Saint Amadour - or rather the bottom half of the sarcophagus carved into the rock. Above you - and worryingly over you - towers the rest of the cliff, which actually overhangs this religious ‘city.’ Worse still, the overhang is built on, which makes you feel that it is only the whim of the Almighty that prevents the entire cliff collapsing like the Twin Towers with each upper collapse taking out the floor beneath. No wonder pilgrims tremble.

I am not a religious person, but, as I stood within the walls of this beautiful, capacious church with its high vaulted roof, suspended as it were between earth and sky, accessible only by a staircase of 226 steps, it was easy to understand why it had for almost a thousand years become a pilgrimage for Kings and Christians.

Hamlet’s words “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” came to mind.

A row of candles burnt brightly in the dim religious gloom: votive offerings which I used to be encouraged by my old great aunt to make when she was alive. I feel her nagging at me still to 'put a candle on,' whenever I enter a Catholic church. Usually I resist.

This time, quite overcome, I dropped my two euros into the box and lit a flame. After a token prayer I turned around and descended the staircase again in bright sunshine.