COMING HOME

To be, or not to be, that is the question.

We are coming home tomorrow all being well.  After many adventures. We've had a delightful time.  Exotic weather. Hot, yet cool in the shade of the enchanted trees.  As ever I have eaten and drunk more than I should.  Our marvellous hosts hosted marvellously.

Our Shakespeare show, performed 'pour les voisins' went well enough.  We could have had a bigger audience, but it is not every day that you will find Shakespeare performed in 'La France Profonde' in front of the Deputy Mayor who is a proper mayor, though naturally with no chain.  There is no formality:  everyone kisses everyone else.  We drink rosé wine and eat smoked salmon sandwiches on the Mill lawn.  Under the walnut trees again.

We did the St Crispin's Day speech from Henry V and also some bits from 'As You Like It' and 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'  for which I had a fantastically painted face thanks to one of our friends here who is a face painter.  Our French audience applauded dutifully.  We provided translations.   The Scottish play figured too.

We've been in the medieval town of  Figeac today.  It was Market day and we heard someone from a far-off country playing jazz on a piano in the Place Champollion. Then he switched to Bach.  Prelude and Fugue number 1.  Absolutely beautiful.  We set ourselves to walk around the town, to snap the ancient buildings teetering over their alleyways, but tiring we sat down to lunch - for me a tough steak better suited to shoe leather.  But the chips and salad were agreeable. Then over to our friends in Lessal, a forgotten hamlet nestling in a forgotten departement. They have a swimming pool but I didn't swim because the water was only 26 degrees. My delicate skin needs 30: not to feel cold. Instead we watched a Redstart feeding her chicks and drank china tea and contemplated why Buzzards ride the thermals.  Their house is on top of a hill whereas the Mill is at the bottom of a valley - so it is hotter and more humid here.

There are wild boar around, we see their tracks and where they have dug for roots along the walking trails we have cut on past visits. But they make no noise and the place is silent apart from the eternal chuckling river and the birdsong and the drilling of the cicadas in the uncut hayfields.

Sadly the Mill is sold so we may never stay here again, indeed may not even see it again, so there will only be memories and photographs.  It feels like a death.  The trees will grow on without me. The tractor will rust. I drank a glass of Sancerre under the walnut trees this evening to say goodbye.

The others are watching Miss Marple on the television, but I am out here on the terrace, typing away.  How quickly a week passes and we have done very little.  Reading, a very little writing and learning lines, even less cooking.  But still it has been relaxing but I could do perhaps with another week and then perhaps another.  I asked our friends whether they didn't miss the madding crowd of social life back home and they looked out over the rolling hills and said 'no.'

We went to see a neighbour's house. A tiny house of two rooms and a kitchen - no bathroom.  Unlocked.  Tiny windows.  The whole place black with smoke from the fire.  The only concession to modernity an electric cooker shoved into the grand inglenook and a stainless steel sink in the galley kitchen But it must have looked much the same two hundred years ago, with the drain running out of the wall and into a clump of nettles.  Dark, oppressive and dirty; a hanging shelf in the middle of the room to keep food out of reach of rats. Quite eerie - a regression to another age.  Yet in the midst of plenty. 

The old mayor brought us a bottle of walnut oil this morning. He said it was strong and it looked strong - a rich nutty brown, and yet it has hardly any taste apart from a slight mustiness, similar to that which still rises like a miasma from the old and disused walnut pressing chamber in the Mill here.  That too is dark, black and gloomy.  Like hell with the fire out.  Most curious. We delivered to him last autumn three sacks of walnuts and he has given us back three sacks of crushed walnuts. Our task now is to separate the shells from the kernels.  In the old days apparently the village would get together for this task and spend a day shelling walnuts and generally feasting and drinking.  Then the shelled kernels would go for oil.  I am an expert on this now.

It is still warm, but becoming too dark to write. The birds are still singing and a cock has just crowed somewhere in the gloaming.  Neither have the cicadas found it time to go and clean their teeth. I expect the first bat will be along in a minute.

MAGIC OF SHAKESPEARE

James Reynard and Claire Tucker

Leafing through the paper the other day I found an interesting graph showing how the country's economic growth has risen and fallen over the last few years.  It bears no relation whatsoever to what has happened in our business apart from the fact that the general trend in both cases is in a southerly direction.  This month in particular has been slow, the sort of 'feathers through treacle' slowness that makes you think seriously of staying under the duvet with the coverlet pulled firmly about your ears. Orders have slowed to a trickle and you wonder whether you are still going to be here a year from now. Then on Friday the cheering news of a large order from the Library Service of one of the bigger London Boroughs.

From a brief perusal of recent newspaper headlines you might be forgiven for thinking that there weren't any libraries left, certainly in places like London, or if there were some left then certainly that they wouldn't have any money; and if by some fluke they did have some money then it would be reserved for some core project rather than additional supplies of labels.  But of course you would be wrong and this order was proof.  Along with a couple of other orders that emerged like beetles from the woodwork, the month ended on a somewhat happier note.

Now, you might be enquiring which London Borough this might be in case they happened to be in the market for your goods and services too.  Well, I am not at liberty to say but I shall give you a clue (which of course might be wrong for boundaries change over time) but I think it was the same borough that once housed Shakespeare's Globe Theatre.  If this seems a recondite sort of a clue, then I admit it is, but along with the febrile state of the British economy Shakespeare has been much on my mind this week.

You see it was our little theatre group's AGM on Friday and I had invited a couple of actors (James and Claire - see above) to try out an adult version of a show they have developed to introduce Shakespeare to children, called The Magic of Shakespeare. As they had to travel all the way from Gloucester, and were partly doing us a favour,  a suitably sized audience to show our appreciation was indeed required.  But for a variety of reasons - some possibly economic - I was beginning to worry that we should not have one.

Friends that usually come along to our shows wrung their hands and said that they couldn't come along to this one.  Excuse followed on excuse and apology on apology.  I wasn't even sure we'd have more than the apocryphal two men and a dog turning up to the AGM.  Even our esteemed Chairman found that he had to attend a wedding in Inverness.  The Secretary and Patron Secretary also sent apologies.  Regulars regretted that this or that had intervened. I was biting my nails.

But in the event something turned up and it was a respectable audience.  My fears went thankfully unrealised,  as fears so often do. The show proceeded and most excellent it was too.  And educational to boot.   I learned, for instance - because this was an 'introduction' to Shakespeare's work - that the Globe Theatre had no lighting.  That sounds obvious - of course the Elizabethans had no stage lights, they had no electricity; the best they could do would have been the occasional candle, or perhaps a couple of burning brands.   So plays took place mostly in broad daylight.

Yet many of Shakespeare's best known scenes take place 'in the foul womb of night' and if you read those lines closely you will learn that Shakespeare tells you (and then tells you again in case you might have been asleep) that a scene is occurring in darkness.  Take, for instance, the famous balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, the word 'night' occurs fourteen times - just in case, in the sunshine of the Globe Theatre,  you might be tempted to think it was day. 

So the AGM and the show passed felicitously and afterwards we had some champagne because the two actors, James and Claire, who wrote and presented the Magic of Shakespeare,  recently became engaged and are to be married in April, perhaps even on Shakespeare's birthday, and it just so happened that it was also the 53rd wedding anniversary of Rosie and Jim.  So we all had a little theatre supper and a few bubbles to celebrate, and a happy time was had by all.