Confronting the new: Old School B&B is a hit, Fidelio misses

REVIEW: The Old School B&B, Fidelio at Longborough Festival Opera

It was all change to start of our seventh season at the Longborough Festival Opera. A new (to us) opera, and a new B&B, pushed us out of our comfort zone.

From our discovery of this magical operatic venue, we'd stayed on a neighbouring estate called Windy Ridge. It played an important role in our courtship, we briefly considered holding our wedding reception there, and our regular visits were the first tradition we established in our married life. I spent a poignant, and very special, Thanksgiving weekend at Windy Ridge with my mother just three months before she died. We were the only guests and the owner gave us the run of the place, treating us as ladies of the manor. Five years later, we hired the whole house out to stage a 1920s-themed murder mystery party for my husband's birthday; one of the best events we've ever hosted. We called it "the summer house". Windy Ridge was a special part of our lives.

But things change. The owner decided to retire from the hard work of hospitality, and we had to find a new home for our annual country house opera weekends. The Old School shows strong potential to step into the beloved spot that our departed summer house has left vacant.

This understated yet luxurious B&B is on the A44 just east of Moreton-in-Marsh. The building started life as a Victorian schoolhouse; the original, cathedral-like school room is now divided into two stories, both lounges for guests' use. The upper one, with its exposed beams, church-style window and overstuffed sofas is particularly lavish, and relatively private considering that there are only four bedrooms for guests. Bookshelves are stocked with plenty of tomes you're tempted to dip in to, glossy magazines grace table tops and board games are stacked beside the sofas. The bedrooms have a House and Gardens Magazine feel about them, all oatmeal and cream neutrals enhanced by gentle watercolours, crisp white linens and luxurious fabrics. Our bathroom had a big tub (with shower) and multiple windows letting light flood in. There's a lovely traditional garden out back with places to eat outside or snooze amongst the flowers.

It's the kind of place you could easily settle into for long hours and forget the temptations of sightseeing.

Hostess Wendy Veale takes care with the little touches, from dressing gowns and bottled water in a bedroom fridge to reaching out a fortnight in advance of your stay to offer local knowledge, restaurant reservations, etc.  She was mindful of our anxiety over moving to a new place and was tremendously helpful with refrigeration for our opera picnics, sorting taxis, booking overflow guests and generally giving us the lay of the land.

Come mornings, Wendy pushes well beyond the traditional B&B breakfast, though if you opt for that you will be both delighted by the quality (the eggs all come from an enormous chicken enclosure at the bottom of the garden) and embarrassed by the quantity. Even hearty appetites are likely to be defeated by the mountain of sausage, bacon, black pudding and fried bread that accompany the less sinful eggs and veg. The next morning I downshifted to smoked salmon and scrambled eggs, but could have selected from a broad menu including omelettes, porridge, "eggs royale", eggy bread (aka French Toast) or pretty much anything I could dream up. A groaning sideboard held the usual array of fruit, cereal, yogurts and juices, if you could make a dent in them. (Or cared to go continental.)

So we successfully faced the anxiety of change. We are looking forward to a return visit to our new Cotswolds home next month and hope to become regulars at The Old School in future seasons.

We were less enthusiastic about the new opera.

Fidelio was my least favourite of any production we've seen in seven seasons at Longborough. Given that I've raved with appreciation over almost every past visit, they had set high standards for themselves. The fault was partially with the opera itself, a bit with the performance and a great deal with the director's choice of staging.

While the singers were excellent (particularly Elizabeth Atherton's Leonora/Fidelio and John Paul
Huckle's Rocco) but the orchestra started out surprisingly timid. A shame, since the overture is the only memorable bit of this opera that most people will know. It sounded like a handful of key players were trapped in traffic and didn't make it for the start time. It could simply have been opening night nerves and a young guest conductor, Gad Kadosh, but it wasn't until the second act that the orchestra pit was delivering its usual rich sound.

None of our party of six had seen Beethoven's opera before, and we were all looking forward to it. We all left feeling a bit underwhelmed. While the plot is a good one ... plucky, faithful wife goes under cover as a man to find and spring her missing husband from political prison ... there isn't a lot of action to stage. It is mostly small groups of people singing at each other in a couple of rooms within a prison. A greater surprise from such a famous composer: the music is pleasant rather than memorable. Beyond the overture, there's simply not an aria that you'd walk out humming, much less demand an encore of. In fact, some of it seemed remarkably derivative. One of the most beautiful bits, where a duo becomes a trio and then a quartet, seems like a blatant rip-off of a similar scene in The Marriage of Figaro.

Perhaps we would have appreciated the music more if we hadn't been so distracted by the staging. Without reading the programme or the reviews, my interpretation was a bit off piste. The stage is set with what's obviously a drug production factory. We open with a line of women packing drugs. They leave and Leonora's husband, Florestan, investigates the scene. The bad guy, Pizzaro, catches him. A fight ensues. Pizzaro gets shot and ends up in a wheelchair, Florestan gets thrown into a lower cell. Shift to Act 1, it's two years later and Leonora ... now disguised as Fidelio ... is working in the prison while the male prisoners (but not Florestan) stand around the back hooked to glowing lines that fed into a big, central machine.

My interpretation: Pizzaro was supposed to be managing a prison, but was making a mint by also running it as a meth lab staffed by the free labour of his prisoners. I thought the glowing lines showed the unfair robbery of labour from the prisoners for his nefarious ends. With this interpretation, the plot zipped along as an entertaining episode of Breaking Bad or Hawaii 5-O with a Beethoven soundtrack. Complete with shoot-out ending and a near death before the bad guys get their just deserts and the good ones live happily ever after. It was an enjoyable romp at the time, but all seemed quite lightweight. Leonora's great paeans to fidelity, which are supposed to be the emotional hook of the piece, got lost in a straightforward, fast-paced episode of a crime drama.

Afterwards, we learned that the glowing lines were supposed to be pumping the drugs IN to the prisoners, and it was all a big commentary on the unfairness of incarceration and the prevalence of drugs in the prison system. I think I'm glad I didn't know that in advance.

We also had issues with the lighting. The programme notes say they were going for oppressive gloom. Anyone who's seen a Caravaggio knows that you can do gloom, anxiety and drama while still bathing your main characters in light. The design here washed everything in a dim half-light so murky that one of our party with vision problems could see nothing at all of the second act, and little of the first. (I'm quite sure they jacked up the light for the press photo I've used here.) Perhaps unsurprisingly, our partially-sighted friend appreciated the music more than the rest of us.

I didn't hate Fidelio.

At the time, I was highly entertained. But I wasn't moved. My emotions remained untouched, both by the music and by the plot. I suspect that's not what Beethoven was going for. I'll give Longborough's Fidelio this: it's the first opera here from which I've emerged keen to take in another production, to see if I'd like someone else's interpretation more.

I am now a tiny bit nervous about next month's Magic Flute. Brace yourselves.

For a connoisseur's cut of Canaletto, it's the Queen's Gallery

It's good to be king.

Particularly if it's the 18th century, you're young, rich, and your nation is becoming the most impressive global power since Ancient Rome. That was George III's situation when he decided to beef up the Hanover family art collection. His ancestors hadn't been keen on the stuff ... music was their thing ... but No. III was different. And by a magnificent piece of art historical serendipity, one of the age's great patrons was liquidating his mighty collection just as George started shopping.

The collector, Joseph Smith, had been British Consul in Venice for decades. A visit to his palazzo on the Grand Canal was a "must do" on every aristocrat's Grand Tour, and Smith made a tidy sideline of selling art to them while they were there. He hung his walls with local artists, particularly an exciting discovery of his by the name of Canaletto. The English milordi would order their own versions of what they liked at Smith's. Canaletto made a tidy sum. Smith took a commission. And, naturally, he kept all the best stuff for himself.

Which is why, despite fact that the National Gallery's 2010/11 Canaletto exhibition has barely faded from memory (review here), it's worth making an effort to see Canaletto & the Art of Venice at the Queen's Gallery in London. There is a lot of Canaletto strewn through the country houses and museums of the UK, but in purchasing Smith's originals, the royal family ended up with the best of the lot.

You'll also benefit from an atmosphere a lot less crowded than the National's blockbuster. Though it's been 15 years since the Queen's Gallery re-opened (after a major renovation that tripled its size and made it one of my favourite exhibition spaces in London) it still feels like one of the capital's great, undiscovered secrets. You'll be able to ramble around in here with plenty of open floor space to appreciate the art in quiet contemplation.

And these are works that deserve the time and attention. Canaletto was a master of detail. There's no better place to appreciate this than the early galleries of the show, which are primarily pen and ink drawings. Here, you can see the grid lines Canaletto used to build his perspective, and the obsessive way he'd study particular elements of a building ... down to noting specific colours he'd use later. Here's where we also first encounter some of the pastiches of ruins and buildings, both real and imagined, he'd sketch to stretch his imagination. This style of painting, known as a capriccio, has always been one of my favourites. It was a real delight to discover Canaletto's photographic style grafted onto these fantasy worlds.

You're really here, though, for just one room. The largest space at the back of the galleries is a riotous jewel box of Canaletto's best. On the left wall, the twelve scenes of the Grand Canal, covering sections from one and to another, that Smith hung in his house as the ultimate sales samples. I have seen many versions of these scenes, but never a complete set, hung together, in geographic order. On the opposite wall hang five spectacularly oversized canvasses of Roman ruins. I wasn't aware he'd ever tackled the subject. Forget Venice. I would have been ordering one of these! The other two walls offer more spectacular scenery, mostly Venetian, including a fascinating view of an alternative design for the Rialto bridge that lost out to the one we know today.

Other rooms show off the work of Canaletto's contemporaries. Smith's eye didn't falter. There's more luscious stuff here, from historical paintings and romantic landscapes to more architectural scenes and some exquisitely lifelike character heads done in chalk. You've probably never heard of Zuccarelli, Ricci, Carriera and the rest. If it weren't for Canaletto's enormous reputation, you probably would have. These works are worth your attention, too.

One of the glories of the Queen's Gallery is that a full-price admission is good for a year. Meaning you can pop back whenever you like to have another look. I'll certainly be doing so.

Canaletto & the Art of Venice runs until 12 November 2017.

Exquisite Hokusai show redeems the horror of British Museum's American Pop Art

About half way through the American Pop art exhibit at the British Museum, with angst and disgust rising in equal levels, I was seriously considering cutting off our museum membership.

The show had started promisingly, with disturbing but relevant links to current events. "Repetition adds up to reputation" read the Warhol quote beneath his Marilyn Monroe silk screens. Prescient insight into much that is wrong with our present world. The art movement explored here, bridging the 1950s to the present day, reflects pop culture and consumerism back to us as a dark warning about our world. There are a few things here that are both meaningful and beautiful to look at: Ruscha's petrol station, Oldenburg's oddly compelling giant electrical plug, Haring's AIDS awareness cartoons. But most of the rest is menacing, angry, and .. in its lack of obvious artistic skills  ... begs the question: How is this art? And, more important to me as a British Museum member: Why is this here?

Hosted south of the river in Tate Modern, and positioned as a show about modern art as political protest, it might have worked better. But in this sacred ark of world culture, running under the title of American Dream: Pop to the Present, it was a dark embarrassment to both the British Museum and the United States. No wonder, when we moved on to American politics at dinner with friends later that night, I unexpectedly broke into gasping sobs. This stuff casts a long shadow of gloom and dread. If the point of art is to provoke emotion, then I suppose it's successful in its way.

My eyes, however, would like to find some beauty in art.

Thank heavens for Hokusai: Beyond the Great Wave in the smaller exhibit space upstairs. This show
is as lustrous and life-affirming as Pop Art was grim and soul-sucking. And it's not just pretty. In Hokusai's long life (1760-1849) he introduced many modern innovations to Japanese art, while his influence flowed westward to be seen in everything from Beardsley prints to post-war decorative fabrics. He even predicted the musician Prince's "symbol as name" phase, changing his name ... and thus the cartouche with which he signed his work ... multiple times throughout his career to encapsulate what he was trying to accomplish in each phase of his life.

Hokusai was a Japanese painter and print maker, most famous for his Thirty Six Views of Mount Fuji. We all know The Wave. (Officially, The great wave off Kanagawa.) Few realise there are 35 more scenes, rich with variety. There are landscapes from every angle, some with the mountain dominant and others where you really have to search for it. In some scenes, people go about their everyday lives so accustomed to the beauty they hardly notice. In others, they're on the mountain itself, climbing to find spiritual enlightenment. Hokusai uses simple, elegant lines and wry observation to bring people into glorious life. Flora and fauna are acutely observed. Colours are exquisite. In the example above, check out the fishermen fighting the sea in the blue twilight, with Fuji looming in the distance. If all this show did was to broaden our awareness of The Wave into its larger series, it would be a wild success.

But there's so much more.

From his earliest days, we see exquisitely beautiful and highly traditional images of deities, dragons and legends. Even here he's breaking away from the pack: a series on the adventures of the warrior hero Tametomo is filled with humour and has a clarity of line so modern it seems to be laying the foundations for manga. Another series of genre scenes originally commissioned by the Dutch East India Company shows him learning from European styles, playing with perspective and introducing the new colour of Prussian Blue into Japan (a shade that would transform his work). These also show his amazing ability to capture slices of real life. In one scene, a samurai stops to advise a boy and his father getting ready to fly their kite. In the foreground, two dogs are sniffing each other's butts. That sweet, achingly real touch of reality makes it feel like you could step through the frame and join the scene.

This is, indeed, a show worth having reading glasses to view. You will want to linger over prints to see what his tiny people and animals are doing. The drama and humour captured in deft brushstrokes is extraordinary.

Later, we come to a series of flower and bird prints suffused with a sense of profound peace. I could happily hang Weeping cherry and bullfinch above my bed and contemplate it nightly. Just when you think Hokusai may be getting staid in this category of stately flowers and perching birds, he surprises you with Carp in waterfall, a scene of remarkable action as the fish bob and weave through the pounding torrent. There are ghost stories and illustrated poems, portraits and temple decorations. Hokusai's gentle humour keeps rearing its head throughout.

We also get to see Hokusai the commercial designer, a reminder that he was extremely famous in his own time. There are designs for exquisite hair combs, fans and netsuke, some with the finished products beside them. It's no surprise that the Hokusai-inspired jewellery in the gift shop is some of the most beautiful I can remember associated with any British Museum show. Rather than splurging on that, however, I bought the show catalogue so I could pour over all the detail I'd missed.

Which leads me to the only drawback of this show: its thick crowds. You will spend far more time queuing to pay close attention to these modestly-sized masterpieces than you will actually get in their contemplation. Downstairs, my footsteps echoed through cavernous, mostly empty display spaces for the Pop Art show. I wonder if the visitor numbers are making management regret their decisions? Upstairs, you're packed body-to-body trying to take in hundreds of detail-rich objects in a small space.

Even without the crowds, there'd probably be too much here to digest in a single viewing. So yes, I will be keeping my British Museum membership. Because shows like Hokusai are more typical of the Museum's track record than the American angst. And because membership means I'm going to be able to pop in several more times before Hokusai closes 13 August. Like that other Japanese favourite, sushi, this art deserves to be savoured in many small bites.

Ten memories for a 10th birthday. Bencards Bites celebrates a decade

On the rainy, late May bank holiday of 2007, this former journalist decided to start writing for pleasure again. I was lucky enough to travel a fair amount and eat in nice restaurants. I went to a lot of museums and a fair number of theatrical productions. Embracing the relatively new concept of blogging to record those activities seemed like a good idea.

It's ten years later. It's the late May bank holiday. It's raining again. I'm still writing.

What a decade it's been. My archive stands at 635 articles. I've had more than 110,000 page views. The majority (about 60%) of my readers are in the USA, with about 20% in the UK and the rest coming in from around the world. I've reported from more than 25 countries. From the hundreds of meals reviewed, 24 restaurants have held Michelin stars. A handful more deserved them, and there've been plenty of humble local jewels worthy of celebration. There've been an embarrassing number of wine tastings, with in-depth vineyard exploration in famous regions of France, Italy, Germany and California. I've reviewed more than 20 operas and attended major art exhibitions across the US and Europe. Chelsea and Hampton Court Flower Shows turn up a fair amount, and there's always been a steady drip of English tourism punctuating the more exotic travel. Baseball and rugby pop up occasionally to balance the culture.

On the personal front, there's been a marriage, a parent's death, a world-shaking recession, two bouts
of cancer, two house moves and some job changes. You won't see much about the last, because I almost never use these pages to write about work.

To all of you who have read, liked, followed and shared me: thank you. I hope I continue to give you reasons to do so. I hope you'll do it more!

I'm planning to punctuate this 10th anniversary year with a series of "10 Best" pieces, picking some memories out of my archives. Today, we'll start with my personal choice of 10 favourite pieces. I've chosen some of these because I think they contain my best writing. Others mark a significant point in history. In every case, the topic and memory is particularly important to me. If you didn't catch these the first time around, I hope you'll consider a trip down Bencard's Bites' memory lane.

1.  On My 50th: Five lessons for a well-lived life Written from the heart, on a beach in the Maldives. Shared further and faster than anything I'd written before.

2.  On food and friendship Stung by a Michelin-starred dinner I didn't think lived up to expectation, but surrounded by the love of friends and mourning the impending departure from the country of two of them, I ponder the value of the intangible.

3.  Adversity tempered by tradition, travel and friends ... Joanlee's eulogy Written as a speech for my mother's memorial service, I still read this every year on the anniversary of her death.

4.  Musical pondering on Valentine's Day Better late than never. In advance of the first Valentine's Day of my life spent in mutual true love, I discuss the role of music in celebrating that glorious state.

5.  The wedding report Maybe not the best writing in the archive, but absolutely the biggest event. And proof that, as time passes, straight reportage of the big moments of your life leaves a magical legacy.

6.  Lessons from a beauty queen A friend becomes a major player in the world of beauty pageants, and I'm forced to confront my own ignorance as I learn how worthy these events can be.

7.  On Harry Potter and communal culture As the last Potter book came out, I mourned the passing of shared cultural experience ... when most of us used to consume and discuss the same thing at the same time.

8. At last, it's ours. Roots sink deep as we move into our marital home. Amidst the packing boxes I
confront my deep sense of place and need to surround myself with family memory.

9.  Want to feel better as the world crumbles? Try Puccini. As the recession deepens and my mother sickens, I understand the purpose of operatic tragedy. In a word, it's schadenfreude.

10. It really is a GRAND Canyon The helicopter tour is the climax of our trip to the American west, and one of the most breathtaking experience of our lives.

Is there any category you'd particularly like to see me tackle in a Top 10 list in the coming year? Let me know. Meanwhile, please keep reading. Thank you!

Nope, it's not Chelsea. It's Bencard Gardens, year five

I didn't make it to the Chelsea Flower Show this year. If I had, I would have enjoyed some of the warmest, sunniest days in my history of attendance. I chose, instead, to enjoy my own garden. As my patch enters its fifth full summer since being carved out of the featureless stretch of a new build's back yard, I can proclaim myself satisfied. 

I'm getting the hang of the light and soil conditions. My anchor plants have bedded in. (Well over half my plants ... and the vast majority of those big, showy anchors ... come from Hardy's Cottage Garden Plants. I'm incredibly lucky to have this nationally-famous grower a short drive away.)  My hard landscaping has softened. Chelsea week is a great time for taking stock, so here's an inventory of how my little patch of the green and pleasant land is coming on.

The pond continues to be the heart of the garden and is now fairly self sufficient, with four types of waterlily, grasses, iris, oxygenators and other marginal plants sharing space with fish and frogs. Much of my inspiration and all my best pond plants have come from Waterside Nursery. I was originally concerned about getting plants by mail order, but they've never let me down. The water hawthorn in the top pond is so rampant I now pull about half of it out each spring, it still gave me a lovely spread of white flowers nodding above the water's surface this year.  In the lower pond, the water cress has been blooming for well over a month and the first water lily came out today. The glass flowers in the top pond are a new acquisition from our recent French holiday. The bed edging the pond is my best in the garden, which is no doubt because it gets the most sun.

A closer shot of the pond-edge bed shows off my new-found appreciation for matching orange with purple. The geum and Siberian Iris have been spectacular this year.

Here are my glass flowers and the blooming water hawthorn up close.

Just to the right of the pond, my other bed is framed by steps on both sides going between the top and bottom patios. The bluebells and forget-me-nots were so rampant this year I think I'm going to have to do some serious digging to thin things out. They may be drowning out other perennials. It's hard to see. Certainly the monkshood and a towering chrysanthemum are coming out with a vengeance, and last year's alliums have returned. Possibly a bit smaller, but still beautiful.

 On the lower patio, leading to my office door, the fig in the blue tub is flourishing. The box planter on the left should be a tower of flowers by high summer.

The hosta walk is looking great. And full. I need to start considering how I could anchor more to the wall.

 On the other side of the hosta walk's pergola, rose Generous Gardener is just coming into bloom.

On the stairs between the top and bottom patios, I have herbs, lettuce and cucamelons planted in pots. At the top left, my patio raspberries have set fruit for the first time since I bought them in 2015.

I haven't decided how I feel about this experiment yet. Inspired by all the meadow planting at Chelsea shows past, and especially by the herbal lay in Jekka McVicar's garden last year, I've tried my own. It's not bad, but I think I need more varieties of grass to really make it work.

At the end of my bottom path, near the back door, my espaliered apple (Worcester Pearmain) has set the most fruit ever. About a dozen spotted so far ... much better than the single apple I harvested last year! Hand pollinating with that paintbrush seems to have helped. Turns out this corner really doesn't get enough sun for a bumper harvest, but does mean that I can underplant with more hosta. And lavender, which sends up scent when the back door hits in.

I haven't bothered much with the spaces around the front of the house, with the exception of this hosta bed. I'm very happy with the mix of varieties, and especially with the enormous Sum and Substance in back with the allium coming through its leaves.

I'm working to establish a balance between flowers and stuff I can use in the kitchen. The shot above shows a montage of my edibles. Clockwise from top left: Mediterranean herbs a few steps from the back door; peas, cucumber, courgette (zucchini) and borage in the main bed, exotic mints in pots and regular mint and dill right next to the back door; what were supposed to be winter potatoes failed miserably for the November harvest, but are now coming on with fervour; baby apples; more courgettes set to grow up the pergola and my new Semillon grape vine; a few punnets of strawberries on the way.

I'm particularly happy with some of my planting combinations. Purple and pink remain my anchors. From left to right: Siberian Iris share space with a double-flowering geranium and sea thrift ... though plant-wise I may be most delighted with the alien-like spread of the sempervivum at the bottom; rose Sceptred Isle shares space with forget-me-nots and a rust-coloured verbascum; pink geranium and white tradescantia mix with nigella that's now freely re-seeding every year.

The biggest difference this year, however, is that some of my anchor plants have finally reached a glorious maturity. The centaurea (top left), the water lilies and the rose will keep blooming most of the year.

Not quite a Chelsea Show Garden ... but enough to be very proud of my achievement.

Forget Halloween. If you want to see the English in costume, head to Rugby Sevens.

I've come a long way since attending and writing here about my first rugby match eight years ago. I've developed a working understanding of the game and been to a range of international matches. I've travelled to see England play in foreign territory, become an Army-Navy rugby regular and can comfortably consider Twickenham home turf. While nothing will ever displace baseball as my top sport, rugby is now solidly in second place.

This is partly because it's a great game: fast-paced, dramatic, easy enough to follow without much understanding, but complicated enough on the next level to offer a lifetime of further study. Partly because my husband loves it. And partly because every rugby player I've ever met is a gracious, gregarious, charming gentleman. But it may be mostly because of rugby fans. They love their sport, they're gracious to the opposition, and they consider every game to be an excuse for an enormous party.

Which takes me right back to London Rugby Sevens, where I started my journey. A faster game. A bigger party.

The organisers have expanded the celebratory atmosphere this year by adding a festival of food, with more than 40 food trucks in the car parks and fields west of the stadium. We never got there. Between our usual champagne breakfast to gather our troops in Clapham, and a thrilling series of matches that saw both the Americans and the English doing well, what time we had in Twickenham was spent beside the pitch. (Or waiting in very, very long queues for drinks.) But we got the definite impression that you could now enjoy the party without tickets, watching the action on giant screens as you meandered around the festival outside. We may try that some year.

As they added the food festival, they removed a theme. This was a shocking turn of events. Rugby ... and particularly Sevens ... has always had a fancy dress element. Word on the street was that organisers had eliminated the theme to cut down on rowdiness. Fat chance. First, the rowdiest rugby fan is generally a model of slightly drunken courtesy, nothing close to the legendary disruption of the football fan. Second, the best way to ensure that the English do something is to encourage them not to.

I can't remember seeing this level of costuming at previous events. Lacking a theme, fans drew from the whole spectrum of fancy dress. The ancient world was magnificently represented, with Romans, Greeks and Egyptians en masse. There were computer game heroes, dinosaurs, animals and enough pirates to staff a decent-sized navy. Musketeers cut a dash, while the Vikings ... both male and female ... looked best prepared for the day's crazy fluctuations in weather. Many fans of team USA, unsurprisingly, went down the cowboy route, with at least one Uncle Sam and a Statue of Liberty popping up.

It is one of the enduring mysteries of the English that they do Halloween so badly, and rugby fancy dress so well. On October 31st I will open my door to a procession of children wearing a narrow range of commercially available costumes. For the vast majority, it will appear that their parents have put no effort at all into the holiday beyond driving to the grocery store and grabbing whatever fits out of the seasonal aisle. The hand-crafted outfits, nods to current events and clever group costumes so common in the States are extremely rare here.

And yet that's exactly what you see when the grown-ups head to Rugby Sevens. Four girls behind us came as the central quartet from the Wizard of Oz, complete with an impressive home-made tin man costume and Toto on Dorothy's Radley handbag. I spent a genial time waiting for beer with Ares, the god of war. His friends had coordinated carefully so that each came as a Greek or Roman deity, taking such care that they had both Dionysus and Bacchus in their host so that both guys who wanted to could come as the god of wine. Evidently their dates came as
maenads. A sphinx cleverly constructed from boxes accompanied a togate crew. I suspect the most photographed group of the day, however, was Donald Trump and his suited security agents, all in character as the president spouted trademark lines and the agents cleared a path through the crowd.

And us? I am ashamed to confess that we were so busy, we didn't get around to coordinating anything. We wore ... rugby shirts. Note for next year. Must do better.

French 1st communion is a magical right of passage, with an unexpected St. Louis connection

I hadn't been to a Roman Catholic First Communion since my own.

That was a distant age, when Richard Nixon was president, Roberta Flack's The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face was No. 1 in the charts, I wasn't allowed to watch the news because it was dominated by Vietnam and I had to be torn out of bell bottoms and a macrame vest to don my angelic white dress and veil. Honestly, I don't remember a great deal about the ceremony beyond being made a big fuss over. It never occurred to me just how significant a milestone it is.

Today, watching my godson at the centre of his own ceremony, I wondered anew at the magic of this right of passage and felt a sadness for the growing numbers of non-religious families who have no such formal event for their own children. That's perhaps a controversial stance to take in a world where any discussion of religion is increasingly incendiary. But it's not actually the religious element I'm focused on here. It's the beauty of a ceremony that provides what's perhaps a child's first formal gateway to adulthood. It puts an eight-year-old at the centre of a special day, but ... unlike the giddy madness of a child's birthday party ... is a day infused with gravity, structure and responsibility.

I was enchanted by the ceremony, even though my French wasn't up to deciphering the fine points of the sermon.  Every child had a specific solo role: reading things, helping the priest, carrying things in procession. As a group, they acted out the gospel. Two hours later, they'd reverted to screaming banshees tearing about the family garden, but for that wondrous hour they were pictures of earnest concentration and budding maturity.

I felt the beauty of continuity and tradition. The next time someone moans about disaffected youth, I'll smile and think of these kids.

I also, to my complete surprise, found a link between my home town of St. Louis and Annecy. Throughout the ceremony, I contemplated the mosaics above the altar of a saint who'd already been pointed out to me as Francis de Sales and a nun in a habit that looked remarkably like the 19th century costume of the Sisters of the Sacred Heart (the RSCJs) who'd educated me. Back in St. Louis, I knew that the city's second-largest church ... a neo-gothic masterpiece on the South side of the city, was named after de Sales. What was the link, and why did that nun look so familiar?

The lady in question was Saint Jane Frances de Chantal. She and de Sales were both Annecy natives and worked together to form a new group of nuns: the order of the Visitation of the Virgin Mary. In the mid-19th century the order founded convents in St. Louis and St. Charles. Just like the RSCJs, they'd come from France to serve a community with deep roots in French catholicism. The RSCJ tradition survives at my alma mater, Villa Duchesne, while the Chantal-Sales connection carries on a few miles up the road at Visitation Academy, from which my aunt graduated. It's a small world.