me,â he adds. âWhat else are neighbours for?â
Before I have time to ponder this nicety of etiquette, a furious female voice thunders from the other side of the stream.
âMANU! Come back here! I want to know how Iâm supposed to put my shopping in the deep freeze when youâve filled it up with fish!â
*
âYou didnât tell me you were off to Saint Chinian,â said Krystina, as soon as I answered the telephone. âEscorted by your neighbour, I gather.â
âWell, you see, itâs more of a wine day,â I faltered, as I realized that I must have mentioned the excursion to Babette who must have felt it her duty to give the event some wider publicity.
âIâm not your keeper, of course,â she bristled. âBut I canât send you off in a state of historical ignorance. Iâll pop up at once.â
âI was just locking up,â I explained, as Manuâs horn reminded me that we were already late.
âThen weâd better do the crammerâs course right now,â she decided, as I performed an elaborate mime in the doorway entitled âperson reluctantly taking telephone callâ, in the hope that Manu would go easy on the horn. âYou remember our friends Saint Guilhem and Saint Benedict of Aniane?â (Loud horn blast.) âWell, the Languedoc in those days was a very small world. They had this other friend called â confusingly enough â Saint Anian.â (Louder, more insistent horn blast.) âAnd it was Anian who left Aniane and founded Saint Chinian in 782. Hence the name.â
âYouâre losing me.â
âSaint was pronounced âSantchâ in those days,â she explained, in the special, exaggerated tones perfected long ago for her slow learners. âSantch Anian ⦠Saint Chinian.â (Even louder, syncopated rhythmic horn blast.)
âKrystina, Iâve really got to go â¦â
I had no time to feel guilty. I was too busy feeling car-sick, as Manu did everything within the little red vanâs power to make up for lost time. The village of Saint Chinian lies only about fifty kilometres to the south-west but it is separated by winding river valleys and tortuous mountain passes that double that distance. And for much of the cliff-edge mountainous stretch, the hairpin bends were made hairier still by a programme of roadworks which had recklessly removed every last metre of safety wall before starting to renew even the most vital parts of it. Not that such trifles inhibited Manu from using both hands to point out distant beauty spots at the bottom of precipitous drops; or from accelerating down the middle of the only straight descent to make sure that none of the high-performance vehicles trapped behind us could overtake. Indeed, as we arrived in Saint Chinian, I was half wondering whether Krystinaâs driving might have been more soothing.
Manu has already briefed me on Saint Chinianâs key facts as he sees them: âTwenty villages ⦠Separate
appellation
since â82 ⦠Mostly red, bit of
rosé
⦠What more did I want to know?â He is therefore straining at the leash to sniff out a grower or two before lunch, but I somehow feel that I owe it to Krystina to track down the abbey first. There is nothing obvious on the skyline, so we ask at the elegant seventeenth-century Mairie, where every member of staff pulls the blankest of faces until one of their number remembers Mme Guibert.
âYouâre standing in it,â says this small, serious-looking lady, having sped to our rescue on her bicycle. âWhatâs left of it anyway. It used to be the abbotâs lodgings, before the Revolution. Just as our Salle des Fêtes was part of the churchâs gothic nave. There was also a second, smaller abbey on the other side of the river but they flattened all that was left of that to build the rugby stadium in about 1900. No, thereâs
Yenthu Wentz
Aneesa Price
Suzanne Weyn
Mary Marks
Craig Johnson
Patrice Michelle
Kate McMullan
Sherryl Woods
Steven Savile
Hallie Swanson