International – Page 7 – For the fainthearted . . .

Indifférence

Did French voters consciously abstain, or were they just indifferent to the claims and campaigns of Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen?

France has been a personal love since first visiting there in the 1980s. I regularly travelled there twice a year, in 2015, I visited four times. Now the Covid restrictions are past, I am going to Marseille for the European Rugby Cup final at the end of next month.

From the Belgian border down to Beziers, and from Brittany to Biarritz, many faces of L’Hexagone have been experienced, …

Living on your own wits

It was June 2009 and darkness had fallen as we reached a small town where the traffic was at a standstill. It was 6 pm and the curfew was being enforced – soldiers had blockaded the road to Bujumbura.

It was an anxious moment. My friend swung out into a short line of vehicles queued at a barrier where men with automatic rifles stood looking around uneasily. There was silence.

‘What will happen?’

‘We will see.’

Suddenly a barrier was lifted. A pick up with an armed policeman standing in …

An Englishman dead in France

9th April and another anniversary of the death of the poet Edward Thomas, tomorrow it will be one hundred and five years since his death.

A married man of mature years, he had not needed to go to war, but after much soul-searching had enlisted in July 1915 as a private soldier in the Artists’ Rifles, a battalion of the London Regiment. He had risen to the rank of corporal before being commissioned as an officer in the Royal Garrison Artillery in November 1916. He was killed on Easter Monday …

Heroes

Perhaps a hero was needed, an unlikely figure who would inspire people. A Russian-speaking Jewish comedian seems an unlikely figure to command hero status among working class children in west Dublin, but the image of the president of Ukraine dominates a banner they have made. Perhaps he will one day take his place among the pantheon of heroes.

In a West Country childhood, our heroes were mostly figures from magical stories. There were tales of people who had met Merlin, the great wizard, keeping watch should he need to rouse …

Silenced by the news

RTE Radio this evening broadcast Hamlet, Prince of Derry, a Hamlet for our distracted times, by the Stage Beyond Theatre Company.

The Twenty-First Century adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy included the voice of Paul Clark, as a newsreader whose reports provide a narrative for the play.

Anyone who lived in Northern Ireland during the Troubles will know how significant the voice of Paul Clark became, a man whose words could express the feelings that those of us listening could not have articulated.

When Paul Clark read “the rest is silence”, …

The skirl of the pipes

So Scotland come to Lansdowne Road on Saturday as Ireland seek to complete the Triple Crown. And with Scotland will come kilted fans. And with the kilted fans will come the pipes.

Bagpipes as a musical instrument seem to take many and varied forms, and the music they produce is similarly diverse, but for most people the mention of the pipes will probably conjure images of mountainsides covered in heather, of stone castles, and of kilted pipers whose music cuts through the pure Scottish air.

If music speaks to something …