Still Life

‘I dreamt of those sparrows,’ Carol said, the flush of last night’s wine still on her. She’d had a tough time of late and this was her first holiday in years.

They’d be the ones flitting about the nave at Vezelay. We didn’t expect to find birds in a church in our squeaky clean age, but what could be more natural, the commonplace and the numinous, made one. Like the pilgrims who gathered there a thousand years ago, a scruffy noisy crowd one moment, awestruck, the next. By the bells and by the image of the Risen Christ at the entrance to that wonderful nave.

‘We’ve lost our sense of wonder,’ I said, just as the line of grey-blue hills parted to reveal our first vineyard, the young shoots of vines calling down the sun.

Carol sat up. We turned a corner and sprawled across the road was the mangled body of a fox or hare. ‘Oh God!’ She buried her face in her hands.

Sometimes you just can’t win.