For Patrick Leigh Fermor: Caveat Lector...

The monastic refectory reader - the Lector - has a simple task: keep the troops entertained with the book of the week whilst they nosh; speaking loud and clear and avoiding any subliminal resentment to creep into the voice as you watch your dear brethren eat their fill, you the while feeling pretty darn peckish. Nothing quite like a daily eight hour fast to sharpen the dullest appetite.

The Lector's task though is not quite so straightforward as it might, at first, appear. The book will have been chosen by the Abbot as seemly and uplifting. It may well be both, but that does not preclude it from being deadly dull and atrociously written, nigh on impossible to read aloud. Brownie points, though, are not to be gained by letting such weaknesses get the better of you. A textual sow's ear you may well be given by the boss, yet a literary silk purse you must gift to the boys.

You are not to read so slow that folk nod off into their soups, nor so fast they choke on a fish bone trying to keep up. The voice must be loud enough for the deaf 'uns not to be continuously barking "What? What?", nor yet so strident and hectoring that the rest of us clap our hands over our ears in self-defence. Rhythm, cadence and intonation all must be firmly in the middle ground too: you are not auditioning for Hamlet, but neither will you be forgiven for droning.

Preparation, as in so much, is key. The Lector is expected to have read ahead and mentally, if not audibly, rehearsed. Names of obscure 5th century Greek saints will trip lightly off the tongue, not be stumbled over. Poorly written paragraphs will have been so conned as to seem veritable Proustian marvels of pellucid prose.

Occasionally, even, you may have to cull and to censor. The book will be a secular volume. It will be soundly orthodox - no temptations against the faith - but, dealing with humans in all their many frailties, there will be passages best left alone. If, say, the subject is Irish historic struggle for independence - a natural Catholic favourite - it may well be necessary to make mention of the cause of Parnell's downfall, but without inclusion of any biographic or graphic detail of his particular shenanigans with Kitty O'Shea. This is less prudish, more pragmatic: no point in reminding most monks about what they've left behind; no point, either, puzzling the more virginal sort over what they never knew in the first place.

To fail to plan is to plan to fail. As much a truth in monastic life as in other business. One day, as one sat noshing not lectoring, young Bro. Kevin got up to read. The book was one well-known to and much loved by myself, Patrick Leigh Fermor's 'Between the Woods and the Water'. It was also a personal favourite of the Abbot, he and Paddy having been long-time chums, the fellow a not infrequent guest of the monastery.

As Bro. Kev began to read, his lack of preparedness became at once all too apparent. Not merely his endless failure to grapple with some pretty tongue-twisting Mitteleuropa family names and complex aristocratic titles, or even his utter inability to do justice to the limpid beauty of the writing. There was an elephant trap coming, but some two pages down his path, of which he was clearly blissfully unaware.

Patrick, the guest at some Hungarian schloss, was out for the day with the Count's younger son. Two late teenagers having fun with gun, with hiking and some swimming. Late hot summer it was, the labourers busy in the fields gathering in the harvest. As they emerged from their river dip what should greet them but two strapping peasant women, weary from work and seeking diversion.

You can see where this is leading. Sadly Bro. Kevin, not having read ahead, did not. As, though, he ploughed on it became all too clear from his rising colour and his faltering voice that the penny was slowly dropping. The boys having met the girls, the convenient hay ricks being to hand, only those utterly enrapt in their cottage pies du jour could possibly not have caught the inevitable drift towards the reef of lasciviousness.

What was a man - a hapless Lector - to do as the community, as one, leant forward to catch the next sensual sentence? Grind to an embarrassed halt was the best young Bro. Kevin could muster as his eyes flashed desperately down the page seeking the next seemly paragraph. By now the eyes of the whole community were bent on the floundering fellow. Imbued with fondest charity for each other as we all always were, there is nothing quite like watching one of our own take a pearler to arouse the deepest interest and, one dare say it, happiest glee. Happens to us all from time to time, and no harm when this time it is another's turn for the odure. Good for the humility we would say if pressed.

"Later that evening the Count and I..." broke finally from Bro Kev's lips, as he arrived at last at a passage safe enough to share. The rapids shot he had lighted on the calmer waters of a typical PLF discursion on the historic battles once fought in sight of the very schloss, the outcome of which had decided the fates of peoples and states for generations.

How the meal ended is not recalled. Quite probably with some indigestible cheese. Certainly with Bro. Kevin bolting for the safety of the kitchen and his reserved mess of pottage. Possibly even a sound rebuke from the Prior for his avoidable mishap. Stuff of monastic legend though it became, so thank you dear Patrick for that gift of mirth you so unintentionally gave to Quarr that day. Your presence there was never forgotten and, whilst monks remain, never shall be.

Slip Sliding Away...

A note just in from my Australian actress chum asking if I am still feeling "...lower than a snake's pudenda". She does, indeed, have, as befitting her type - Antipodean and thespian with it - a certain sharp and direct way with words. Sets one thinking of course. Why is one so glum and for so long? How does a snake cope with the whole genitalia close to the ground thing? Along those lines - bit, though, like the old poet Donne: "parallel, Though infinite, can never meet..." I mean you can't really afford to mix the two can you: the puzzles of serpentine anatomy and the mystery of man's moods? That way would indeed madness quite lie.

You could, of course, merely take it for what it is - exempla of Divine Providence at work. On the one hand a snake's burden is - in part - to preserve what dignity and comfort it may whilst on the slither; on the other a man wrestles with the glums as best he can. The serpent, being but sentient not sensible, does not brood; the man though - through, dare one call it the curse of consciousness - does.

Pre-lapsarian, of course, one might say the boots were on other feet - the man a simple, happy-go-lucky gardener and all round help-meet; the wily serpent all dastardly plotting and scheming. (See Holy Writ - or Milton according to taste - passim.) Not that there were any boots way back then, not even Wellingtons - though presumably it must have rained in Eden, so they would have come in handy. And did the serpent ever have feet, even before being struck and stripped down by the Almighty as an eternal slider not stroller? That's the trouble with questions - one merely leading to another. Bit like a good beer then. But not such fun.

Setting, then, aside the whole serpent conundrum, how goeth the man? That the sufficient unto the day challenge set from Down Under. In short and simple, the resounding answer would be a 'yes', one is still bloody - or perhaps far worse bloodless - blue. Could one go that bit further and give any account why so if so? Perhaps, though to list the reasonable and proximate causes would be both lengthy and lowering. Reasons to be cheerful - as the song goes - would be a better bet; quite as taxing but surely elevating not enervating?

Might even give a go, one guesses. First off then, health? Check. Actually, no, that's where, at once, the whole enterprise begins to fall apart. By and large one as much doesn't as does have it and what one does have is less than either it once was or, indeed, what, other circs. prevailing, it could have yet been. Drawn a bit of a blank there then. Best left alone, in truth, that one.

Then again, why is this being mentioned at all, why not preserve the long held silence? It has just come to me - because the very notion of being dragged across the dirt like an adder's fanny has made me chuckle. I am amused. The rest can go hang. For now.