Chants

The Better Half's predecessor was somebody with considerable musical interests, particularly choral music. Before I came, Marie-Paule had invited the BH to a soirée at her house just outside Montauroux, where her choir colleagues had picked up their scores and sung divinely. I was a bit 'cold turkey' for music, and felt that here was an experience which I could do with too.

The occasion arrived. Marie-Paule had organised a private concert in the gated community where she lives, not far from the Lac de Saint Cassien. Coming from afar, we arrived too early, and ended up chatting with what turned out to be the musicians. The public, who arrived in dribs and drabs, were another matter. We were young, indecently young... We really felt that without Zimmer frames we were nobody.

The gated community, by the happenstance of economic rent, had excluded anybody productive below the age of about eighty. Mind you, the gerontocracy must have been paying through the nose for all the things which were once cheap (hedge trimming etc), but which are now really expensive. That said, they were super-sympa, sprightly, and an advert for how to grow old productively and gracefully. Hope we end up at least as positive as them.

Before the concert, the Better Half had had a vague premonition that the texts were going to be a bit too religious for her liking. But things looked theatening when we saw that the musicians had glued an icon of Mary Magdalen next to their sound system. The Blessed MM occupies a special place in the Catholic weirdo pantheon, in very knowing counterpoint to the Immaculate BMV.

The concert was presented by the singer, who introduced the proceedings with a well delivered, but totally cringeworthy message of peace and love. The doves, or mangy pigeons if we are frank, should have been crapping themselves with joy and light. Certainly, celestial violins and angelic choirs should have been echoing around the well-guarded and gated community, protecting it from the jeunes beurs in nearby Montauroux.

Despite the cynicism, and despite the welling nausea provoked by the 'bons sentiments', sung in French, Aramaic, Tibetan, etc (but all sounding extremely franco-français), we had to admit that the female singer had an exceptional, one could almost say absolutely angelic voice, which gave an undeserved cachet to the archicrap, Joseph-Dreamcoat, Hair, mid-sixties/seventies, Scouts d'Europe psycho-peace drivel which was offered. Some of the hymns were offered to the Dalai Lama. It sounded just like the smart and slick stuff for the right wing, pro-Israeli, American Christian right, etc., which was also intoned, mercifully with reasonable musicality, in great quantities. No criticism, mind, just a vague feeling that we were submitting to paid-for, calculatingly feel-good stuff, rather than something totally involuntary (because really true) and from the heart.

After the concert, which, despite the melic charms, seemed to last far longer than necessary, there was a supply of cakes and quiches. I wasn't hungry, so I talked with the so-called composer, who compared himself unselfconsciously with Mozart and Berlioz, and, bizarrely , Paul McCartney. Despite the megalomania, he offered to show me how to play his 'udu', a kind of tuned percussion made of terracotta, shaped like an amphora, but with a fist sized hole on the side. A couple of minutes playing this really neat instrument really made me forget the longueurs of Mary Magdalen and stirring plastic Olive Branches. So, though not converted to a message of peace and love, I was totally smitten with a strange thumped ocarina.