THIS MAN’S LIFE
AGREAT sadness arrived at our house last Wednesday morning. Our family woke up and discovered on looking out the window that the expected snow hadn’t —
sadly — arrived. My four-year-old daughter was particularly let down. She associates Santa with the snow and I think she thought Mr Claus was coming back.
Me, I associate snow with Jane Birkin.
About 25 years ago I was sitting in Paris with the voice of Je t’aime... moi non
plus, the actress who in 1966 caused a mini-scandal with her role in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow-Up, fashion muse — Hermes named the Birkin handbag in her honour — and the muse of a certain Serge Gainsbourg; she told me “Serge told my sister, ‘The day I die, I will come and get your father.’ Daddy died four days after Serge.”
The snow was falling heavily outside the kitchen window of the 6th arrondissement home of the woman who personified the 1960s as much as Marianne Faithfull or Twiggy did.
The honorary Gallic Englishwoman (she was born on December 14, 1946, in Marylebone, London) fussed over me, enquiring how strong I wanted my coffee, and whether I wanted toast with the scrambled eggs and bacon for lunch.
Typically, Jane had a story to go with the bacon. She recalled the first time she met Francis Bacon in Paris.
She was out with her husband and her father when she spotted the Irish-born British figurative painter at a cafe. Despite her protestations, neither her husband, Serge Gainsbourg, nor her father, David Birkin, believed it was him.
Jane was so certain that Serge told her, “Well — if it really is him, go up to him then and ask Monsieur Bacon for three autographs.” “Three!” laughed Jane. Serge gave her a $100 note, her father a modest piece of paper, while Jane had a piece of paper for her own autograph. And with that, the gap-toothed gamine goddess was dispatched to the artist’s table.
“Can I ask you a question?” Jane muttered nervously. “Are you Francis Bacon?” To which Francis Bacon replied, to her great satisfaction, that he was. That was not all, however. Jane then told him as proof she needed him to sign all the pieces of paper.
Which the creator of Fragment of a Crucifixion and the ‘screaming’ popes duly did.
“He looked very sad. He had a boyfriend who had committed suicide not long before,” Jane recalled, in that whispery voice of hers, handing me the cooked lunch as the snow thundered down in the French capital all those years ago.
Jane had a swing in her garden; birds were taking refuge from the snow on it.
The icon of the Swinging Sixties went out in the snow to feed the birds with pieces of toast and egg.
It would have made a perfect painting by Monsieur Bacon.
What would make a wonderful painting for me was the heartwarming sight last Saturday afternoon in the Dublin mountains.
In particular, the apparition of my cherubic daughter on a little pony trotting ever so gently around a field with a gang of other, similarly angelic little kids trotting on their little ponies behind her.
She loves it. And I love that she loves it.
She looks so cute in her little riding boots and her helmet.
It’s so lovely to see them enjoying all that nature has to offer, instead of being stuck into iPads, smartphones, TV and technology in general. Afterwards, we went for a walk in the mountains.
It was a wonderful hour amongst the trees and the plants — and the birds and possibly other creatures looking on at us. (We were hoping to see The Gruffalo.) It just seemed good for the soul.
We will be making this walk part of our weekend routine.
As the late environmentalist John Muir once said, “In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.”
At 6pm, we drove to Johnnie Fox’s pub in nearby Glencullen. We had our tea here. There was Irish music playing.
My daughter had a quick jig on the stage and then ran off again to finish her soup.
It was chicken soup for the soul in the Dublin mountains.