So about that trip to France, then

Yeah, well, I’m going. For six days. (Only six days.) With my mother. (Just my mother.) We’ll be staying in a convent. (Yes, an actual working convent full of nuns.) And while we’re there, minding our own business, more than quarter of a million people will be arriving in the same town to watch some race thing or other. Can’t you just picture the fun we’re going to have?

Here’s the back story: my Mum, the Dowager Empress, is the youngest of nine children. Only two others are still alive, both sisters. One of them — the eldest, turning 97 in July — just happens to be a Catholic nun in France. And this year, she’s celebrating her 75th Jubilee of nunhood. Nunship. Nunience. Nunnerousness. Nunerosity. I could go on all day.

Back in March, the Dowager Empress received a card in the mail, inviting her to the “special Jubilee celebration” on 6 June. And although she’s not yet at the carbon-dating stage of advanced decrepitude, she’s still somewhat senior to be contemplating a NZ-France trip on her own. She’s never been there before and she doesn’t speak the lingo. So Your Correspondent, drawing on the experience of three holidays in France and six years of high school French, offered to take her. It took three days to book flights from New Zealand, flights from Australia, train fares from Paris and travel insurance for us both …

… and it’s all for a lunch.

Yes, superheroes, we’re travelling from the Antipodes to France … for lunch. I can live with this, though, having experienced first-hand the type of slap-up meals this convent puts on (it is French, after all). The Dreamboat and I were served a bloody yummo three-course lunch with wine at the afore-mentioned convent when we visited back in 2006.

The fact that I’ve been to the convent once before and met my aunt fairly recently is gong to make things easier for me but it’ll be a very emotional experience for the Dowager Empress and her sibling. This is the first time they’ll have seen each other in 60 years — and it’s probably the last time they’ll see each other in their lives.

The contrasts are amazing — two women, born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, whose lives couldn’t have been more more different. One left home at 18 to join a French convent, was imprisoned by the Germans in WWII, lived in constant fear of arrest in Spain during the Franco era … and the other sailed across the world at 28 to marry the fiance who’d emigrated to NZ three years earlier, and raised four children.

Then you’ve got the setting — on the one hand, thousands of people taking part in the noise and fanfare and spectacle of a massive public sporting event … and on the other, this deeply intimate and poignant reunion taking place in the hush of a convent on the Rue de la Solitude (the “Road of Solitude”).

Part of me is dreading this trip, part of me is excited and another part of me can’t believe it’s real. I do know that once I’m there, I won’t regret it.

Hopefully, the magazine that’s just agreed to buy the story won’t regret it either.

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