The Handbag in Lourdes

Photo (c) Expedia.com

A student of mine had gone to Lourdes as a teen helper, pushing wheelchairs.

“It was alright when we were going downhill. When we were going uphill, it wasn’t so nice.”

I was helping him write a French composition and we ran short of a few words to say at the end so I asked him to add his overall impression of the place.

“Well, I don’t know if I can say this.”

“Try me.”

“With all the neon and so on, it was like a holy Vegas.”

The only time my mother accompanied my late father to Lourdes was in September 1983. Finding on a footpath a lady’s bag stuffed with money and documents, they approached a security man outside a nearby basilica. He didn’t want to know. Therefore, they hung around in the passing throng at the spot where they had spotted it. After a long while they spotted an elderly French couple hurrying up the steep hill, with the man in front, running, and the woman failing to keep up. They were country people. Their despair was evident a mile off. My mother held up the bag.

“My God it was like the sun rising.”

The woman could barely breathe when they got there. Then the man tried hard to give the saviours a fistful of money. Then he scribbled an address on a piece of paper, like they could stay with them anytime or something like that. With the language barrier, all my parents could convey was that the guardian angels were Irish.

“The look on their faces, for me that was the miracle of Lourdes,” my mother concluded.

Long afterwards, I quoted that to a rather literal and dismissive Frenchwoman. 

”That wasn’t a miracle. It was just a coincidence.”  

“If you think she meant a religious miracle, you’re missing the point.” 

Death of Thatcher

Photo (c) AP /Lefteris Pitarakis

2013

8 April, Monday

Thatcher is dead. At five the editor of the Telegraph tweeted that they had closed all comment lines due to the level of abuse. 

11 April, Thursday 

The phrase that Trevelyan used about the Famine being the work of “an all-wise and all-merciful Providence” smacks so much of Thatcher and the Protestant thing that good works don’t matter, only faith, or, in her case, fanatical conviction. I can’t help also thinking, though, that the Miners’ Strike could not be similarly policed today, with all the camera phones. Nonetheless, on the principle that most of the work of revolutions is done by those about to be overthrown, there could have been no Thatcher without three-day weeks, power cuts, constant strikes and, as one of the Royston Vasey boys once described the shops back then, broken biscuits and boxes weeping with damp. 

12 April, Friday 

Last night I read over the mini-thesis I wrote on the Miners’ Strike in 1985. The subject is well-documented and I had an eye for a quote but, apart from the acknowledgement that Thatcher and Ridley were determined to get the miners, after 1972 and 1974, there is no display of awareness of how the Seventies had paved the way.  

13 April, Saturday 

Tebbit’s Thatcher eulogy in the Lords was ample corroboration of the fact that the Brighton bomb was like the assassination of Heydrich. It took him out, as he himself admitted a few days ago, in not so few words. Even his Wiki entry quotes Thatcher as saying he couldn’t concentrate on anything after that because he was distracted by his constant concern for his wife’s welfare. 

14 April, Sunday 

Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead is in at number two in Britain (52,605 sales). Even the Bishop of Grantham has said this big funeral is only asking for trouble.