We have a French priest in the parish. After months of missing him, I finally got to chat to him in French one Sunday after mass. Since he was French, he was utterly indifferent and unsurprised by my knowledge of the French language but I felt a (probably sinful) sense of smugness.
Then a couple of weeks afterwards, the Princess and I met him in mufti on the street just after emerging from mass (which had been said by the parish priest not him, keep up there). He started chatting away to us in French and, I suppose, understandably enough, asked how mass was. “Fine, fine,” I said vaguely. “What were the readings?” he asked. Whatever hope I might have had of dredging up vague memories of the readings in English, I had none at all in French. An awkward silence followed. “How was the sermon?” he asked filling the gap. Alas, I had no idea and no recollection of that either. There’s a moral here somewhere, I feel.
