A FOX IN THE CUPBOARD

I don’t know about you but for me the Christmas and New Year holidays have a hologram quality, taking on a radically different manifestation according to the perspective from which you happen to view them.

Before the event, everything appears in a sort of Nigella Lawson-esque glitter, a soft-focus world of roaring fires and delighted family smiling benignly amidst oceans of discarded wrapping; sipping your best champagne and nibbling those cute little chocolate dainties whose confection will be - to quote Nigella herself - ‘the work of moments’.

You picture a time of celebration, of festive meals, parties, occasionally perhaps eating and drinking more than strictly wise, but forgivable in the circumstances. You imagine long walks in a frosty countryside, interspersed perhaps with a successful visit to the sales to recover some object of desire, long coveted but never hitherto affordable.

But above all my pre-Christmas perception is that the hours will slow down and that I will be left with acres of golden empty time to call my own. Freed from the insistent telephone I shall have time not only to clean, tidy, mend, shop, bake, decorate, wrap presents, entertain, and visit, but also to rest with long lie-ins and vacant evenings tucked up in front of the television with a suitably seasonal and warming beverage.

Of course the idea of empty time is just as much of a delusion as the idea that one can make a tasty plate of Nigella’s Christmas pudding truffles in ‘moments.’ The reality is morbidly different. First, the adrenalin thoughtfully provided by work deadlines and which hauls you out of bed on cold winter mornings and propels you urgently in the direction of the office, simply evaporates. In a few days, while not retiring noticeably later to bed, your getting-up time advances rapidly from 6.30 to 7.30 and then to 8.30, losing you a good two hours before you even begin.

Without adrenalin’s whip-cracking brother, the ‘to-do list,’ starred and underlined with the day’s über-priorities, I have the most appalling tendency to faff about. In consequence everything I undertake has the feeling of dragging feathers through treacle. The result is that I stagger through Christmas wondering where it all went and making guilty resolutions to do it better next time.

At least this was what I thought as I sat by the chuntering printing machine on New Year’s Day finishing off a labelling order that I should have had done by Christmas Eve, but which, missing the adrenalin which switched off promptly at 5pm on 19 December, of course I didn’t.

If this sounds like an invitation for sympathy then please put away your hankies, for in fact, once you have gulped down a good lungful of New Year air first thing on 1 January and with an agreeable little apéritif with friends to look forward to at five o’clock, then sitting by the printer, reeling and occasional changing stock or ribbon with a good book in front of you, is actually rather a pleasant way of spending the day, particularly as the book I was reading was rather special.

I am rather a fan of Jane Shilling who used to write for ‘The Times’ but who departed earlier in the year when the paper took yet another lurch downmarket. I had dropped hints that one of her books might not be unwelcome in my Christmas stocking but evidently the hints were not sufficiently heavy or well-directed for I ended up with Alan Bennett instead.

Nevertheless there is a certain guilty pleasure in buying yourself desired but unreceived presents. Santa cannot be considered infallible, I argue. You are allowed to correct his mistakes. It was in this spirit that I ordered ‘A Fox in the Cupboard’ from Amazon. It arrived two days later.

The book is basically a most wonderful if meandering account of how one thing can so easily lead to another if you are not paying attention. In Jane’s case, how to fill time one holiday, lead to riding lessons and then to the purchase of suitable clothing and then to buying a horse and then to taking-up hunting, only to find that the timing collided unhappily first with foot and mouth and later with its Parliamentary ban.

Despite being raised in the country, field sports and their adherents have always made me feel uncomfortable. Nevertheless, I have been sufficiently close at various times of my life to horses, dogs, guns and so on to be able to have a nuanced appreciation of what she is describing, even if my riding was self-taught and bareback and my knowledge of hunting obtained from the stories of my namesake Somerville and Ross.

Part of the fun of the book lies in its magnificent use of language. The style flows freely but only the precise word will do, even if that means you have to keep a dictionary by your side. I counted 24 words, which either I did not know at all, or of which I was dubious of giving an accurate definition...words like ‘solipsism,’ ‘adamant’ (as a noun), ‘knout,’ ‘semiotics,’ ‘shirring,’ ‘bimbling,’ ‘gravid,’ ‘scuts.’ If Jane is ever honoured it will be for services to the nation’s word power.

Still, the holiday is almost over; I ate the last of the bon-bons yesterday. Soon I shall be looking back and seeing Christmas from an altogether different perspective. In retrospect Christmas will look rose-tinted again, the horrors and excesses forgotten. It will be seen as a time of good rest, fellowship, family, feasting; a time of wonderful confections (though I say so myself) and even better reading. By 2009 the limiting resolutions will have been forgotten. It was ever thus. And I have already started dropping hints about needing a new dictionary for next Christmas.

Geese

My parents used to keep geese on the farm and later, when the children were small, we raised a family of goslings on our suburban lawn. They have always been one of my favourites. Both to look at and to eat, though I nevertheless feel guilty at the thought of killing such beautiful and soulful animals.

I’m even more guilty when I think of Foie Gras - fat liver - eaten by the bucketful in France at this time of year and in other places too. To make this, geese are force fed until their poor livers have expanded to twice their normal size. That eighteenth century cleric, Sidney Smith, said that his idea of heaven would be eating Foie Gras to the sound of trumpets. He didn’t say anything about Chateau Yquem - that lovely silky Sauternes made from grapes already rotting on the vine - which is held to be the very best accompaniment. Better than trumpets, certainly.

These days there is no need for cruelty. You can just take an ordinary goose liver and mix it with goose fat and there you go. Not quite the genuine article but sufficiently close to be an acceptable compromise.

Geese are intelligent creatures and one of very few that combine the ability to fly with the ability to swim, as well as to walk, of course. Like dogs, they also have tails that wag when they are happy. What they lack is any sense of humour. Yes, geese are the strait-laced brethren of the animal kingdom. And perhaps that is why they mate for life.

Such pairings are sometimes rough and ready - a tough gander seizing on a reluctant goose whether she likes him or not and guarding her jealously (and viciously) lest anyone try any funny business. But they can also show quite human tenderness.

On the farm we kept a family of ornamental Chinese geese. All geese carry their heads very high but Chinese geese are taller than most with long elegant necks. They are black (or dark brown) with white breasts and black beaks. Not all that unlike Canada geese in fact.

Emden geese, though, are what we think of as domestic geese. Presumably they originated in Emden in Germany. They are stumpy things, all white, with short thick necks and bright orange beaks. They were bred for their meat and because they are heavy I suspect they cannot fly once they are past the gosling stage. We kept a flock of Emden geese as well.

The Chinese geese didn’t fare well and eventually only one gander remained. The Emdens fared better. But the Chinese gander took a wife from among the Emdens and thereafter the couple were inseparable. They used to promenade together, side by side and he would always wait for her and be attentive. When they were fed, despite the competitive nature of feeding a rabble of miscellaneous poultry, household scraps mostly from a bucket with maybe a few handfuls of barley meal thrown in, he would always stand back and let her eat first and only then join the feeding fray. Never have I witnessed such altruism in the animal kingdom. Though maybe it was just self-preservation for how could we ever eat a Darby and Joan, never more than a couple of feet from each other day or night.

Having no sense of humour makes them vigourous complainers at the slightest provocation. This is why they make excellent guards. The Romans used them in this way around their camps. Better than dogs at warning of an enemy’s advance. People seem even more scared of geese than they do of dogs, though what a goose can do beyond giving you a nasty nip I don’t know. Our three half-grown geese, loose in our suburban garden, once saw off a policeman who came to call and who beat a hasty retreat in front of their lowered beaks.

As a child I was warned that a goose could break a man’s arm. But this is surely nonsense. Human arm bones are made for fighting, whereas a goose wing is made for flying, the bones, though strong, are light and hollow - there are even air sacs inside the bones. In any contest these must surely break first.

All you need do is to stand your ground and laugh at them (geese really don’t like this! and then when they are six feet away say ‘boo’ in a loud voice. They will cackle dreadfully and give you most hideous looks as if to say that they won’t do anything this time but let it be a lesson to you and then, still cackling, they will retreat, stiff-necked, and stiff-legged, with as much dignity as they can muster.

LAST DAY OF TERM

It’s odd, isn’t it, how many of us still think of our lives in school terms. In my case, forty-four years after leaving school - to the day almost - I am sitting here thinking this is the last day of proper work before the Christmas holiday. Except that it’s not a day of proper work otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this blog, nor later, going out to lunch. I am demob happy already.

What a term it has been! Never it seems have I been so busy. We have had a record autumn with our labels by some margin. Order after order has come in. Profitable orders from big companies too. Don’t they know that there’s a recession on? And even as we plan to put the dust sheets over the business for a week or two we know we have to find seventeen hours of time to number 150,000 tags for 5 January. I keep asking myself whether this is the storm before the calm.

That’s the labels - but to keep the grey cells alive - I still do a bit of Europe-based writing and consultancy. I became the UK co-ordinator for a communications project this autumn, was briefly on the management team even and paid in euros. There’s nothing more calculated to make you feel as though you are going up in the world than to be paid in euros with the pound falling in value every month.

But sadly on top of my weekly writing commitment and my voluntary work with UNESCO, the project was a step too far. Enjoyable it may have been but my blood pressure ws taking a hammering. Luckily for me the project was unexpectedly cancelled. I was sad to lose the income, but the extra work had been just too much.

There’s another consequence of being overly tied to a desk: I have bulged, shamefully. I am now three pounds over my ‘alarm-emergency’ weight which itself is a stone over what I consider my desirable weight which again is ten pounds or so over what those strict matronly books with their height to weight ratios, say that I should, primly and thinly, be.

In the rush I stupidly sacrificed my Canadian Airforce exercises - ten minutes of mixed aerobics involving a lot of running up and down the main corridor of the house, trying to compensate with a short-lived attempt to tackle the forty-five minute hill-climb up to the top of the Primrose Hill tump and back again every day before breakfast. It’s a wonderful walk in the early morning sunshine. But in the chilling wet darkness of a November morning it is purgatory.

Still from this evening I shall switch into Christmas mode: the house needs cleaning (and how) and decorating. We have to unblock the chimney and look out the logs, spray the fir cones, make confections (Nigella’s Christmas chocolate puddings look nicely adventurous), fetch the goose, ice the cake, build the little village (IKEA c. 1995) that consists of elves and snowmen and houses and snow laden trees with a little church and all of which lights up (hopefully) very agreeably as it nestles round, over and on top of the great snowdrifts of Royal icing I shall mount on the cake.

All these things have to be done. And the presents wrapped and piled around the tree. As a family we rather overdo presents. Forget the quality, our emphasis is on keeping the manufacturers of wrapping paper in business. A litter of glistening shapes and sizes, grows daily around the tree. Each of us will have half a dozen presents or so, including presents from and to any pets that may be lurking. When he was still alive, our Newfie, Sampson, would have been amazed at his perspicacity for buying useful snippets. A hussef, perhaps, or a pepper grinder. In return his present would be a splendid Savoy Cabbage, wrapped loosely in layers of newspaper and tied with a ribbon. This he would lie with, patiently tearing off the paper with his teeth, and then munching his way through the leaves. We would have given him champagne, too, had he shown any liking for it.

I myself am difficult to buy presents for. My Scottish ancestry makes me guilty about any significant largesse pointed in my direction. ‘Something from a charity shop will do nicely,’ I say in an attempt to head them off. This is not mere parsimony. For in truth charity shops always strike me as a modern day treasure trove. The concept of recycling appeals - as does the lack of choice. If we are talking about clothes that fit, there is one example, in one size and one colour - take it or leave it. I have never like decisions.

Last Christmas Younger Daughter bought me a padded plum-coloured gilet for £5. I have worn it almost every day since. It is an admirable garment, if not an admirable colour. Yet I would have never gone into a shop and bought a gilet new for the simple reason that I would have felt my arms would be cold. Only when one is presented to me do I find that by some mysterious process they aren’t. Surely that is something they could have taught me in school those 44 years ago?

More Restaurants

We were, I think, talking about restaurants. Leastways the Borscht ‘n’ Tears title of my last attendance in this spot was also the name of a Russian restaurant which I learn to my surprise is still going, despite various changes of regime in the Motherland, having been favoured with the custom of several Purple Cooers over the years. Maybe we can organise a grand reunion, should anyone fancy it.

Still the very survival of restaurants in these straightened times surprises me. Of course it is very agreeable to be taken out if someone else is footing the bill, especially when the atmosphere and the company is good. But if you are having to pay for yourself - worse, if you are having to pay for a string of random family - then I can’t help thinking to myself (at least in Britain) whether I really couldn’t have provided better food, better cooking, better wine and certainly a better atmosphere at home and still have enough dosh in hand at the end to buy something totally luxurious and unnecessary.

Of course there’s the washing up and clearing away, never to be underestimated, but even that can be rendered fun given a minimum of imagination. At a charity school I visited once in Norway, washing up for sixty people was accompanied by guitar playing and songs. As a visiting parent I was assigned to the drying up detail, as I recall. It made me feel that songs had a purpose beyond the iPod, not only to be listened to, but actually sung as well.

I suppose in truth I am a restaurateur manqué, which is why I feel mildly annoyed in most restaurants. It’s not only the cost: it’s all the missed opportunities to give people a memorable time. To go to a restaurant, certainly in the evening, should be to go (at least to have the chance of going) to a party. With the host providing a focus of mild entertainment that induces people to make contact with each other and for everybody to be warmed in the ambiance.

British practice is to ignore the folk around you even though the dining salon is so crowded that you are practically rubbing elbows. You keep your voice down and your thoughts to yourself, concentrating on your food if, that is, it is worth concentrating upon, which sadly it rarely is. We, as a nation, to not ‘do’ food. We lack appreciation of it. We value it only for the sustenance it brings and the opportunities it offers for snobbery - ‘sun-dried tomatoes! whee!’ or ‘My cookbook’s Marks and Spencer!’

I am not suggesting we go as far as that restaurant in Berlin known for the telephones on its tables; where you could dial up table 17 and make a secret proposition - though quite what proposition you might make I could never quite fathom. “Vould you like to eat a kipper vith me, Sweetie?” perhaps.

I believe that to be enjoyed a restaurant meal should be a party between like-minded friends and the restaurateur should hold the same relation to his guests as an attentive host at a party, smiling and encouraging all to relax.

Sadly attentiveness is these days interpreted as appearing in a rush out of nowhere every ten minutes to demand peremptorily and without any real interest whatsoever whether ‘everything is all right?’ That always seems to me to be an unforgivable sin simply for the lack of imagination that it betrays.

How can you possibly expand on variations in the subtle delights of dining to such an enquirer? In my restaurant the waiter would need only to lift a quizzical eyebrow to engage the diner in a conversation about the ageing of the beef, the digging of the potatoes or the
whether a coulis might or might not be appropriate. As indeed happens elsewhere.

I remember another little Russian restaurant in London - not a public restaurant at all. You were taken there as a guest. The salon was the front room of a house in a little terrace somewhere in the outer reaches of Kensington. It was run, if that you can apply that word in this case, by a little, white-haired emigrée from the Russian revolution.

You sat at tables. She came and talked to you in a strong Russian accent, sitting down at one of the chairs, moving candlesticks to see you better. There was no menu and no prices, but she told you what she had found in the market that morning and what was now cooking in her kitchen.

In singles and couples her diners drifted in until there were perhaps a dozen, she moved from table to table, a boy bustled round after her, placing breadsticks and cutlery on the table - glasses, napkins, bringing an occasional aperitif, usually vodka. Many talked in Russian.

Then the meal arrived. There was no choice. This was the meal she had cooked. You were her guest. She made you a present of this food. She was matriach, you were her children.

You ate and you drank and you talked and laughed. Most diners knew each other. It was like a family reunion. And after the meal, there were no bills. I never knew how it all worked. Money changed hands, certainly, but how much and when, seemed to be arbitrary. ‘From each according to his ability to each according to his need,’ sprang to mind.

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.