Downsizing is a slow process. As you pick up items and remember where and when and why you acquired them. And then think of a few reasons for not throwing them out. So too with books. Many books hold associations, both of places and of people. I remember reading four volumes of George Orwell’s Collected Essays on a beach at Vsar, in what was then Yugoslavia, in the summer of 1975, the year that we got married. And I remember reading Le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl during an IATEFL conference at Groningen in 1984. [About which I remember little else.]
As regards remembering, I wonder how many friends from the Lyon Anglican Church [now trading as TCL] remember Richard and Caroline Travers. They were/are Australians, from Melbourne, who worshipped with us in Lyon for several months in 2008.
Clearing out a few books, very slowly, I came across Richard’s book The Tennis Courts of Lyon, Les jeux de paume de Lyon. It is a beautifully produced book of some 140 pages, printed in two colours, black and sepia in China, and published by Oryx Publishing of St Kilda, Australia, in 2012. Three hundred and fifty numbered copies were printed. Mine is number 199, a signed copy.
We enjoyed having Richard and his wife with us in Lyon in 2008. He is/was a medical practitioner, a consultant, who was on a sabbatical. And we appreciated their leaving gift which enabled us to buy half a dozen copies of Mission Praise music book. In a wonderfully incestuous/it’s a small world way, Richard and his wife lived for six months in an apartment close to the Saône, which was [before or after] also lived in by another visiting church couple, an American academic from Texas and his Mexican wife. I can’t at the moment recall his name. But it transpired that he was authoring an academic paper, probably epidemiology, with Jean-François, the husband of Viviane Jusot. Viviane was visiting Lyon one time from Niger, where they were living, and she and the American met wholly by chance in the rue de Créqui chapel on a Sunday morning.
Lyon Church Weekend, with George Lings, 2006
My interest in real tennis is limited. But it is too attractive a book, and too niche a topic, for me to simply pass it on to the OXFAM bookshop. If anyone in Lyon is reading this and knows of a good home for the book, please let me know, And I will gladly send it to you. Otherwise I will make enquiries of the Real Tennis Association of Great Britain.
Envoi
We are rushing through Lent. The Six Nations ended with an exciting game in Paris. England’s performance, their best of the season by miles, probably means that Steve Borthwick will keep his job. The day that our boiler went on the blink was the first day of the year when we had overnight snow. But the flowering cherry tree in the front garden is in blossom. And the magnolia stellata will follow very shortly.
March 2026
Through a glass darkly 