holdingstillness

The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford – Book Review

I loved this book SO much.

I’ve been aware of the slightly bonkers Mitford family for some time, but up till now had only read one offering by a member of the family, which was Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford. I enjoyed it, but not enough to feel a massive urge to read anything else from their brood.

I didn’t watch the 2021 TV adaptation of The Pursuit of Love (as a general rule I don’t like historical dramas), so I’m not sure where my recent urge to read the book came from. But I’m so glad I followed it.

The book follows the stories of the upper-class Radlett family, as seen through the eyes of their cousin, Fanny Logan, who acts as narrator. Set in inter-war England, Mitford wittily and unflinchingly portrays the bizarre upbringing of the children of the Radlett family and how a lack of adequate education (formal or otherwise) for the daughters of the house leads to an unhealthy and disastrous obsession with the pursuit of love and romance.

There is a tendency to dismiss Mitford’s novels as being a bit frothy and superficial, but I have to admit I found a lot more within the text than just a portrayal of upper-class life in London and the Country.

I started the book whilst enjoying an exam stress-busting pre-A-level brunch with youngest child at our local branch of Karak Chai. The description of Uncle Matthew giving the children a pre-Christmas treat of being hunted through the local countryside by his “four magnificent bloodhounds” whilst he followed on horseback made me snort hot chai out of my nose, and I managed to throughly irritate youngest child (who was trying to revise) by reading out particularly amusing passages for her enjoyment.

Beyond the hilarious descriptions of life growing up in an eccentric, aristocratic household however Mitford quietly draws attention to the problems of being raised with an absolute sense of entitlement to your place in Society and England’s place in the world (e.g. smuggling a puppy in to England from France because why should someone of your social position be bothered by little inconveniences such as quarantining for Rabies?) Besides this however there is also an acknowledgment that for many of these ‘entitled’ families there was also a deep sense of noblesse oblige. That being of an old family meant having a responsibility to protect the Country (and the country) that provided so amply for them and to look after the people who depended on them for a living. This is contrasted with the depiction of the self-serving newly wealthy classes who feel no sense of obligation to any but themselves:

“Sir Leicester was expecting soon to become a peer, so this was a subject close to Tony’s heart. His general attitude to what he called the man in the street was that he ought constantly to be covered by machine-guns: this having become impossible, owing to the weakness, in the past, of the great Whig families, he must be doped into submission with the fiction that huge reforms, to be engineered by the Conservative Party, were always just around the next corner. Like this he could be kept indefinitely, as long as there was no war. War brings people together and opens their eyes, it must be avoided at all costs, and especially war with Germany, where the Kroesigs had financial interests…”

Plus ça change as they say.

The book ends quite abruptly with a conclusion which is quite shocking in it’s cruelly casual matter-of-factness.

The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands by Sarah Brooks – Book Review

This was an ARC which was kindly supplied by NetGalley and the publisher Orion.

Well. This was a pigeonhole-defying, thought-provoking, rollercoaster of a read. Similar in feel to books such as Piranesi and The Night Circus, at times both beautiful and brutal, I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed this book.

The novel is set in an alternative Nineteenth Century, where an expanse of land between Russia and China has started to transform and evolve and so this ‘Wasteland’ has been cut off from the rest of civilisation by fortifications and barriers. The story follows the journey of an impenetrable train, the Trans-Siberian express, as it travels across the Wastelands and interweaves the stories of the passengers with the growth and encroachment of the environment outside of the train.

Brooks’ writing is superb. They managed to keep me gripped throughout the story with excellent character development and an ability to evoke and evolve the dreamlike and almost psychedelic influences of the new world that she has built. The multiple POVs of the book worked really well and helped to keep the narrative moving along without losing the sense of claustrophobia associated with so many people inhabiting a small space over an extended period of time.

Touching on the interconnectedness of things, the inhumanity of corporations, the beauty of life and the development of love and friendship, Brooks manages to pack a lot into a book which by the very nature of it’s main plot (a train journey) has structural limitations that she has to work within.

Absolutely loved this!

Oxford Day Trip and Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan – Book Review

Over the Easter holidays Youngest Child and I headed to Oxford for the day, to give us both a rest from her A level revision schedule. It was rainy (of course), but Oxford is always beautiful, whatever the weather. There is something about wandering those streets and alleyways, with the honey coloured fortresses of learning all around you, that makes you want to embrace the (dark) academia lifestyle with gusto and dive into an area of learning you haven’t explored before.

We started the day with a coffee and croissant at the Grand Cafe, supposedly the oldest coffee house in England. The interior is slightly ‘Alice in Wonderland’-esque with arms coming out of the walls and kettles hanging from the ceiling, but if you can ignore that, then you can enjoy a jolly decent cup of coffee.

The obligatory trips to fine stationary shop Scriptum (such beautiful things in there!)

To see the doorway that inspired CS Lewis to create Mr Tumnus

And of course to visit the Ashmolean followed. Then I hit Blackwells and saw a signed copy of a book which seems to have cropped up everywhere just recently- Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan. Reader, I allowed myself to be influenced and bought the book.

Reading the reviews on the back cover (“a Dickensian dream that blazes with profundity and philosophical inquiry” -Nikita Lalwani; “O’Hagan has made more than a great book – he has made a social miracle” – Joshua Cohen) I can only assume that the authors of the reviews are either friends of O’hagan, or are hoping for reciprocal support from him as he is editor-at-large for the London Review of Books. Calendonian Road is an enjoyable read, but it isn’t Dickens.

Following the course of a year in the life of Campbell Flynn, art historian, and various other people who inhabit the same physical or social world as he does, the book is posited as a state-of-the-nation critique of liberal intelligentsia, the chattering classes and high society. It reads more like a wistful paean to these things. Flynn, “tall and sharp”, “such a resourceful, clever man…with all his elegance and talent” who comes from a poor background in Glasgow, seems to bear an uncanny resemblance to his creator O’Hagan. The trappings of rich, liberal life, which the book is supposed to critique, are described with such loving attention to detail: the “new perfect dimple in his Charvet tie” “It was a different world. The stained glass on the small cabinet and the mother-of pearl inlay, it was everything, a piece of furniture made by Wylie & Lochhead in 1901” and contrast starkly with the tendency to adopt a slightly sneering tone when describing the living spaces of poorer characters in the book “…everything was white, silver or grey, with spray-painted bamboo twists sprouting out of white pots on the mantelpiece. The cushions were either silky or furry and several had sewn hearts or the word ‘Love’ spelled out in sequins”.

Similarly, O’Hagan’s depiction of younger people in the novel is two-dimensional. The richer kids who inhabit the same sphere as he does generally come over as both self-obsessed and weirdly interchangeable – a morass of ‘the youth’. As for his writing about poorer, black youths who live around Caledonian Road:

“Pharma got up. ‘Look at these bubbles, fam.’ A bird broke the surface. ‘That was a duck, for real.’

‘That ain’t no duck, that’s a moorhen, you doughnut,’ Travis said. ‘It’s totally black, bruv, and it’s got a white face, innit. Check it.’

‘Shut up, bruv!’

‘Don’t lie, fam, look at it – white face, like Milo!’

‘Raaah, allow it, that’s cold,’ Pharma said, chuckling.”

It reminded me of nothing so much as Jilly Cooper’s misguided attempts to depict working class comprehensive school kids in her 2006 publication ‘Wicked’.

Having said all that, I must admit to having thoroughly enjoyed the book. If you can ignore the grandiose claims for it’s depth and breadth, and just accept that it’s a jolly good, if flawed, page-turner with somewhat ridiculous plot twists (like the aforementioned Jilly Cooper, or even Dan Brown), then you’ll get along with it just fine.

Just don’t expect a modern-day Dickens (and to me, that’s a blessed relief!)

Restless Dolly Maunder – Book Review

With thanks to NetGalley and Canongate Books for the ARC.

Restless Dolly Maunder by Kate Grenville

This is the story of the author, Kate Grenville’s, grandmother and her difficult upbringing and life in late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century Australia. The book has been longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2024, but I have to admit that I am a little puzzled as to why. Grenville has a very accessible writing style, and the story trips along at a pace, but, BUT, the tale itself is fairly unremarkable. I found the narrative to be repetitive – Dolly’s restlessness and drive to move on to somewhere (anywhere!) else basically followed the same trajectory each time – buy a business, improve it, get bored, sell the business, move on – and the repetition of this same pattern grew tedious and made the book seem much longer than the 256 pages the printed hardback edition has.

The publisher describes the book as ‘subversive’, the story of a woman who was determined to push against the doors that society closed to females and to search for love and independence. Yes, there is an element of that in the narrative, but ultimately, to me, this just felt like the sad story of an intelligent but largely unlikeable woman who railed against the frustrations and barriers she’d faced in her life, but didnt develop the self-knowledge or reflective skills to avoid repeating the same mistakes with her own family. There was little sense of character or plot development – just a nicely told depiction of hard lives and times that will appeal to readers who like historical family dramas but which didn’t really work for me.

Private rites by Julia Armfield – Book Review

Thank you to NetGalley and 4th Estate for the ARC.

This is another offering by Julia Armfield that, like Our Wives Under the Sea, gradually gets under your skin and haunts you long after you’ve finished reading the book. The story of three sisters, Isla, Irene and Agnes, their relationships with each other “A person can be thirty, thirty-five, and yet still largely described by her sisters in terms of things which happened to be true at the age of seventeen”; with their emotionally abusive father; the mother who disappeared from their lives when they were very young; the house they grew up in; and the numerous strangers who seem to be always watching. Add in apocalyptic weather patterns and Domesday cults and you have a gripping, eccentric and twisting narrative that defies anyone to guess the ending!

Almost claustrophobic in the way it describes the minutiae of the sister’s lives, the attention to detail helps to promote or mirror the sense of paranoia that Agnes in particular feels, that sense of constantly being watched by strangers, of having strange or surreal encounters with people who seem to know her -when she doesn’t know them at all.

Armfield’s writing is often beautiful and always full of spot-on turns of phrase and observations.

E.g Isla, a therapist, “…lives in horror of slip-ups, practises saying their names aloud to counter her mental Rolodex: patients listed in order as Bug Eyes, as Taps His Foot When He’s Horny, as Big Hands, as Talks Like A Robot, as Tits. She’s good at her job, but the impulse to open her mouth and say something dreadful recurs and recurs”

The sisters are at once largely unlikeable but also strangely relatable. Flawed -as we all are- their bickering is irritating, but we gradually come to see why they react to each other the way they do, and also to see their relationships grow and change as the fondness they hold for each other is able to develop.

This is a novel born of the climate crisis and the rain, the unrelenting, claustrophobic, never-ending greyness of it is as much a character of the book as any of the main protagonists.

“It rains constantly and the fact of the rain, of the rain’s whole great impending somethingness, runs parallel to the day-to-day of work and sleep and lottery tickets”

If I have a criticism it is that the depiction of the constantly squabbling sisters got a little wearisome, especially towards the middle of the book when it began to seem as if that was all the book was going to be about – but then we got to the denouement of the book, when all the hints and twists came together in one absolutely bonkers ending.

Just fabulous.

September Reading Round-up

Quiet on the blogging front in September because, well, work. It doesn’t half get in the way of enjoying yourself.

So, here we go, the monthly summary of books read: September edition

Synopsis: boy born in to absolute poverty runs the gamut of abuse, upheaval and addiction.

Cons: Demon’s story is so stuffed full of bad things happening to him it almost becomes farcical

Pros: Our protagonist is a likeable character which just about manages to keep the reader invested in the unrelenting horror of the story.

Synopsis: A woman who can’t use her voice is drawn to her Greek language teacher who is losing his sight.

Cons: Romanticised depiction of disability using it as a plot device in a story that often tips over in to pretentiousness.

Pros: Kang’s writing is always lyrical and beautiful.

Synopsis: After the overwritten horror that was ‘Alone With you in the Ether’ this is a welcome return to form as Death is captured and various gods and supernatural beings play an ‘Immortal Game’ to release Him.

Cons: The philosophical ramblings around, and rules of, the Game were overly long and complicated – and a tad boring.

Pros: Witty, engaging characters, and excellent plot. Very readable.

Synopsis: Shortlisted for the Booker 2023 this is the horrifying fictionalised account of what happened to a diverse group of outsiders, living peacefully on a tiny island off the coast of the US, when officialdom intrudes and decides to do ‘what’s best’ for them.

Cons: definitely a depressing read.

Pros: Harding’s writing is engaging and evocative.

Synopsis: Gripping discussion on the ethics of surrogacy, genetic engineering, and right to privacy in an age of rapid technological advancement and billionaire influence

Cons: the long, dreary scientific information dumps thinly disguised as dialogue. And the Ick towards the end of the story.

Pros: An intriguing and well written story raising some important questions around ethics and philosophy.

Synopsis: collection of connected short stories weaving together folk, faery, myths and legends

Cons: It would have been good to get to know some of the characters and their back stories better

Pros: dreamy and evocative.

Synopsis: a feminist retelling of the story of Morgan Le Fay

Cons:All the male characters are irredeemably awful

Pros: Refreshing to see a female from the Arthurian canon portrayed positively rather than as distressed damsel, whore or witch.

Synopsis: Booker Longlisted 2023, this is the story of W. Somerset Maugham‘s stay with some English ex-pats in Penang, of secret lives and public faces and the impact of Empire and colonialism.

Cons: Several themes running through the book are all worthy of their own books but end up incompletely dealt with in this novel which is perhaps too ambitious in what it hopes to cover

Pros: sumptuously and dreamily evocative of Malaysia in the 1920s, nods to The Great Gatsby but with more nuanced critique of race and class discrimination.

All The Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami

Synopsis: proofreader Fuyuko Irie is painfully introverted and living an increasingly limited existence when her blossoming relationships with colleague Hijiri and a man named Mitsuksuka cause her to question her choices and push to break those self-imposed boundaries.

Cons: A triumph of style over plot as nothing much happens

Pros: Haunting and beautifully written; the absence of plot helps to mirror the repetitive, pointlessness of most of Fuyuko’s days.

Synopsis: Natsuki believes she is an alien living amongst humans and trying to avoid being forced into breeding for ‘The Factory’. Sexual abuse and family trauma are recurring themes

Cons: DO NOT read if you are squeamish, check the trigger warnings

Pros: Absurd, witty and shocking. If you can get past some of the horrifically unexpected developments towards the end of the book this is actually some well observed and pointed satire.

Synopsis: A young boy is obsessed by a beautiful woman who works at a supermarket sandwich counter.

Cons: Touches on so many things: inter-generational relationships, friendship, loss, family, first-love etc but doesn’t fully explore any of them

Pros: a touching coming-of-age story that can be read easily in an hour or two.

Synopsis: A gothic story from the author of the excellent The Thirteenth Tale. Set in era of industrialisation and modernisation on one hand and an obsession with the supernatural and death on the other this is the story of William Bellman and how one ill-thought out action as a child has an impact throughout his adult life

Cons: Dull. You will learn more about the Victorian textile and dyeing industry than you could ever have wished to know in one lifetime

Pros: some interesting gothic tropes.

The Other Lives of Miss Emily White by AJ Elwood

Synopsis: A tale of schoolgirl obsession, supernatural goings-on, peer-group pressure and the power of suggestion all in a Victorian boarding-school setting

Cons: slow to get going, lacking in atmosphere and none of the characters are particularly likeable

Pros: harmless.

All The Little Bird Hearts by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow

Synopsis: Booker Longlisted 2023. Sunday Forrester lives quietly and with rules and guidance that most people don’t need. Her quiet life with daughter Dolly is disrupted when sophisticated couple Vita and Rollo move in next door and begin to influence Dolly in ways Sunday can’t forsee or want.

Cons: a hard read

Pros: it’s good to read a book with a sympathetically portrayed neurodivergent main character.

How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart by Florentyna Leow

Synopsis: A tale of friendship, and the end of friendship, amongst twenty-somethings in Kyoto

Cons: there is little feeling for place in this novel: the protagonist could be based in any major city in the world.

Pros: Interesting depiction of life as a twenty-something trying to earn a living in the gig economy.

Synopsis: Architecture student Effy and Literature student Preston are thrown together in the mouldering, crumbling home of epic poet Myrddin in an alternative, sea-drowned Wales.

Cons: A little slow to get going.

Pros: Compelling, dark academia fantasy with creepy gothic overtones. Perfect for spooky season reading.

PHEW. that’s the round up for September. What were your favourite reads of the month? And what will you be curling up with in October?

Impressions of Northern France

We decided to fit in a last minute week in France to help youngest child practice her French before going into the final year of A levels. As we were also bringing dog with us, we wanted somewhere we could easily drive to, somewhere reasonably deserted (dog being somewhat antisocial) and somewhere not too expensive – Normandy seemed ideal.

This was definitely a low-key trip, lots of reading and walks along deserted pebble beaches, but it became obvious, quite gradually, that this area is quite heavily linked with impressionism.

Now, I will admit I’m not a massive fan of the Impressionists, the colour palette and lack-of definition just does not appeal to me, and it all seems too chocolate-boxy, so it’s a movement I’ve been content to be reasonably ignorant of. Exploring Normandy however made it quite difficult to ignore them so, with a Gallic (ish) shrug of the shoulders I have dipped a toe in. Just a little toe, and just a little way…

The name that kept cropping up the most often, in the area we were staying in, was Monet. It seems he was born just down the coast at Le Havre, and he drew a lot of inspiration from the landscape of Northern France. One of his famous works is of Etretat -somewhere we Velorailed to part way through the holiday

Etretat was a pretty seaside town – a bit touristy, but you could admire some of the beautiful traditional wooden framed buildings on the way from the train station to the sea front. Once on the front, the eye is immediately drawn to the iconic rock formations – prop for a million and one instagram posts…

But also inspiration for Monet

Further along the coast we also happened upon a beautiful church clinging to the cliff top at Varengeville

And it turns out Monet stayed at the village twice and was inspired by the dramatic setting.

I’m still not a massive fan of Monet but I do have more of an appreciation for his art having explored some of the region that so inspired him

August Reading Round-Up

And just like that, September is here.

I thought it would be an interesting idea to summarise the books I read in August – physical and Ebooks – with 3 sentence summaries. Synopsis, Pros, Cons.Keep it simple.

The Mystery at Dunvegan Castle by T.L. Huchu

Synopsis: Murder at a magician’s conference in alternative history Edinbutgh (Vol.3 in the Edinburgh Nights series)

Cons: The main protagonist in the Edinburgh Nights series, Ropa Mayo, is at her streetwise best in the urban setting of Edinburgh – something that was a little dimmed by the Island setting of this volume.

Pros: Huchu’s writing is superb as always and main girl Ropa is still an excellent central character

Synopsis: Central character Jamie has lost his Mum (who died when he was a baby) and struggles with an (unspecified) neurodivergent condition which is not supported by the strict Catholic school he goes to – until two teachers get involved in helping him

Cons: unrealistic and rose-tinted, tokenistic in many places.

Pros: interesting idea and it’s always good to hear different voices in fiction

Synopsis: struggling white writer steals manuscript from dead successful Asian American writer friend.

Cons: too many in-jokes about the publishing process

Pros: hilarious, cringe-fest of a car-crash that you can’t help binge reading to the end.

Synopsis: last copy of an obscure book is hunted by a number of sinister characters

Cons: overly long

Pros: Engrossing dark academia-esque romantic epic

Briefly, A Delicious Life by Nell Stevens

Synopsis: the story of Chopin and George Sand’s visit to Mallorca, as told by the resident teenage ghost.

Cons: It’s not actually a very interesting interval in the life-stories of Sands and Chopin – nothing happens!

Pros: Stevens writing is engaging and assured and promises good things to come.

Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens by Shankari Chandran

Synopsis: Cosy but also hard hitting story of immigration and racism in Australia, and the civil war in Sri Lanka

Cons: The mix of serious subject matter sits a little uneasily with the ‘cosy’ setting of the nursing home

Pros: Chandran is excellent at describing the almost casual nature of a lot of racism, and how embedded it is in Australian culture.

A magical, matriarchal book, protected by women, ends up in the care of a Librarian at a quiet convent; a Librarian who must protect the book from men of the patriarchal, Christian faith who would destroy the message it contains.

Cons: Too much time spent on the preamble.

Pros: Any book which writes about the divine feminine is a winner to me!

Synopsis: an artist, estranged from her family for leaving her approved marriage and following her heart, returns to her native Norway and becomes obsessed with her mother, their shared past and possible reconciliation.

Cons: the stalking behaviour could be triggering

Pros: heart wrenching expose of multi-generational trauma and family relationships.

Synopsis: Narcissistic female photographer persuades damaged and vulnerable men to pose for her explicit photographs

Cons: completely unlikeable main character and thoroughly unpleasant violent and sadistic descriptions

Pros: Clarks writing is assured and compelling and keeps you reading in spite of yourself.

Synopsis: The town of Lud cuts itself off from Fairy influence with devastating consequences.

Cons: None of the characters are particularly likeable of engaging and the book does go on a bit!

Pros: drawing heavily on folklore this is very readable in places.

So that’s August summed up, and now for September…

Les Beaux Arts

Still reliving our earlier trip to Paris.

We were trying to avoid crowds because youngest child gets anxiety when in amongst hordes of people, and I, well, I’m not really a people person and as I get older I find my tolerance decreases and irritability increases apace.

So what to do in a city famous for it’s Art, when you are trying to develop at least a veneer of cultural appreciation, but when you are making a conscious effort to avoid the usual suspects? So, no Louvre, no Musee d’Orsay, no Musee de Cluny, no Centre Pompidou…you get the idea.

Think outside the (cubist?) box.

We started our trip with a visit to the Musee Banksy on the rue du Faubourg Montmartre. It was practically empty, and we had plenty of time to explore it at our leisure (although we did end up going the wrong way round the exhibition at times as we failed to understand the significance of the occasional set of footprints on the floor). I don’t think it really made any difference.

We did ‘exit through the gift shop’ but we didn’t buy any of the (slightly over-priced) souvenirs.

On our second day we were around Porte de Clignancourt and then the back streets of Montmarte. Obviously the Sacre Coeur is a work of art in itself

And the streets of Montmarte are full of ‘artists’ busy doing portraits of tourists. We avoided this like the plague. Instead we found ourselves in cemetery of Montmartre, a peaceful haven, full of beautiful tombs to individuals and families both. Being an absolute Goth at heart, my soul is stirred by a good graveyard, and I can spend hours admiring the stonemason’s art and reading inscriptions to the dearly departed…

Day three saw us walking over the Pont Neuf towards Le Marais, and what a vision awaited us on the far side…

Yayoi Kusama in all her glory at the Louis Vuitton store. Did I love it? No, it’s a bit too gimmicky, and collaborations between artists and high-end fashion houses always just seem like an exercise in self promotion and commercialisation. Was it fun? Yes, indeed. It’s hard to see this installation and not crack a smile.

Heading further towards Le Marais, we took a detour to 59 rue de Rivoli, an artists commune, somewhat incongruously situated near some very expensive shopping areas. Unfortunately the studio was closed when we were in the area, but the outside alone is worth the visit.

I just loved the anarchic nature of these works!

Of course, this doesn’t include the wonderful architecture (secular and sacred) that is everywhere in Paris, nor the beautiful examples of Art Deco work in the metro stations, which could easily be a blog post in themselves

Art deco metro (spoilt by the nearby McDonalds)

Just sublime.

A Taste of Paris

A couple of weeks ago I took youngest child on a 5 day trip to Paris. Ostensibly the visit was to practice her French speaking skills for A-levels and Uni admissions tests, but I also wanted to take the chance to deepen my appreciation for the culture of the city, which I’ve visited several times on the tourist trail before.

We decided in advance that we were going to avoid most of the tourist hotspots and try and experience more off-the-beaten-track parts of the city – no Louvre, no Musee D’Orsay, no Champs Elysees. That being said, I couldn’t take her to Paris and not show her the Sainte-Chapelle – a stunningly beautiful remnant of medieval Paris within the Palais de la Cite

Constructed between 1239 and 1248 under Louis IX, the chapel is an awe-inducing invitation to sensory overload. The stained glass is sublime, the blue painted ceiling with gold fleur-de-lys evokes the heavens and induces an air of serenity (if you get there early enough, before it becomes too crammed with tourists) appropriate for it’s original use as a home for Louis’ collection of relics (including the crown of thorns).

The gilded flying buttresses help to draw the eye ever upwards and help to reinforce the sense of height . The blue of the stained glass is intense, the panels of the Rose window, depicting St John’s vision of the Apocalypse, just beautiful.

The crowds at the Chapelle are horrendous. We pre-booked for the earliest entry, but even then the Chapelle quickly fills up with people taking selfies, standing, gazing into their cameras rather than admiring the architecture directly in front of them. Our policy is to gaze – in real life – if necessary then take a photo to remind us of the moment, and then put the phone away and actually experience the act of looking at these beautiful works of art.

May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest