Monday was shrouded in mist, or cloud (I don't know how high up we are, here in Languedoc). Sat around Mum's computer on three chairs, we attended
her brother Francis' funeral online, then drove carefully to the abbey in the next village, to light a candle for him.
The abbey's been here less time than Mum and Dad,
only completed in 2018. I don't know who designs sanctuaries these days, but they understood the assignment. The small chapel we were taken to by the monk, where the candles were lit, was bright with stained glass, even in this weather, but the palette of the surrounding cloisters is far calmer, almost prehistoric, the colour of water and bone. And the windows of the main church aren't stained, but grooved like the sand in a
karesansui garden, which my camera doesn't pick up.
The earliest Christmas I remember, I was six or seven: I received a robot that broadcast a panorama of Saturn across its chest and fired missiles from its forehead (
this one, in fact), and
a beautifully illiminated boxed set of The Chronicles of Narnia, which I still own. I remember Mum conveying the excitement with which she and her brothers and sister would look forward to the next story coming out, but I'm only now realising the more personal connection: that its author had actually taught one of them. Apparently, C.S. Lewis considered Francis "the best mannered man of his generation I have ever met." I loved that box, but it would be decades before I got beyond
The Horse and His Boy, although I still remember, vividly, its description of how surpisingly damp and grey it is to be inside a cloud.
Francis' service, if you wish, can be viewed
here.
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