PickPock

  Not a university and not for old people On a beautiful, hot afternoon in July of this year I was in the churchyard of a small village in south-east France called Seythenex. It’s on the side of a steep valley, with a mountain and a pine forest behind it. I had been in the village a few times before because my grandson goes to the tiny school (77 pupils) there, but although I’d seen the church countless times from the other side of the valley, where Max lives, and had promised myself that one day I would go inside it, I’d never done it. Today we were putting that right. The church did not disappoint. It’s like very many rural French churches: beautifully decorated “up at” what Philip Larkin called “the holy end”, but otherwise plain off-white apart from the Stations of the Cross in frames on the walls. The churchyard is large because, although the village is small, people have been dying there for donkey’s years. As I stood with my back to the church, looking across the mar...