Postcards from the Edge

Tuck into the burgers of Calais

The French port is relaunching itself as a seaside resort. Mary Kenny can’t wait to swim – and eat – there

Calais is anxious to counteract its image as a sad port with depressed migrants trying to cross the Channel.

It’s ‘relaunching itself as an attractive seaside resort’, with a €46m (£39.4m) renovation of the seafront and the leisure facilities. The municipality is hoping that British motoring tourists crossing to France will stop off for a visit, rather than just rushing off southwards.

Calais already has a stunning, sandy beach, with civilised facilities such as shower areas and public changing huts, seldom provided at the British seaside. It’s well worth a stop-over.

Calais has some excellent restaurants, a decent bookshop in the Espace Culturel on the Boulevard Jacquard, and an old Notre-Dame church where General de Gaulle was married. It also has a fine Rodin statue, The Burghers of Calais, in front of the Town Hall.

The Burgers of Calais might be a handy name for a hamburger joint, but gastronomic friends recommend Au Côte d’Argent by the docks for an exceptional dining experience.

I’ve enjoyed staying at a fine old hotel, the Meurice, with 18th-century adornments and an air of charming tranquillity; and it’s near a small Beaux-Arts museum.

The Calais municipality is seeking to give the town ‘a Californian flavour’, with wooded boardwalk, skatepark and solarium, from where you can view the White Cliffs of Dover.

Calais is never going to be Meghan and Harry’s Santa Barbara, but it’s good to see it promoting its attractions. I hope to get a swim on golden Calais beach over the summer season.

We live in an age that often favours women rather than men – to compensate for past patriarchal dominance. So it’s little surprise that the famed Scottish explorer David Livingstone may have to share his place in history with his wife, Mary Moffat.

The importance of Mrs Livingstone is being highlighted in the David Livingstone Birthplace Museum in Glasgow, reopened at the end of July after renovation. Mary was an ace African linguist and experienced traveller who provided the crucial context for hubby’s achievements. She is now seen as deeply significant in increasing his renown.

I see this as part of a movement seeking to rescue wives from obscurity. Feminists have tended to ignore wives, regarding marriage as patriarchal oppression: women should be seen as independent achievers, not mere spouses.

Paradoxically, the status of ‘wife’ has been revived by the LGBT movement. While the role of ‘partner’ gained currency among straights, lesbians are most insistent on calling a spouse ‘my wife’.

Mrs Livingstone may be the first of many historic wives to be given the credit they deserve.

The Rev Ian Paisley often claimed the European Union was a Papist plot – and now the Vatican has put Robert Schuman, ‘the father of Europe’ on the road to Catholic sainthood. Schuman, an Alsatian who died in 1963, launched the embryonic EU by reconciling France and Germany in 1950. He has been made a Venerable by Pope Francis, on the grounds that he lived a life of ‘heroic virtue’.

If he can deliver a couple of miracles, he will be the first politician to be canonised since Thomas More, made a saint in 1935. Schuman was by all accounts a pious man and generous to the poor.

There are currently five British candidates for sainthood, including City financier and humanitarian Andrew Bertie; Elizabeth Prout, a Victorian nun who cared for destitute women in the Manchester slums; John Bradbourne, who ran a leper colony in what was Rhodesia; Margaret Sinclair, an Edinburgh lass who worked in the McVitie’s biscuit factory; and Cornelia Connelly, who had five children before becoming a nun and establishing a teaching order in Sussex.

Brexiteers may wish to champion the UK contenders!

The Irish Free State, launched in 1922, established a Senate which was packed with old Southern Unionists, distressed by Eire’s exit from the United Kingdom (some having been burned out of their stately homes by the IRA).

But many of these senators were knowledgeable, and some were colourful, contributors to the new state, such as the whiskey magnate Andrew Jameson; the Sligo landlord and Old Etonian Shakespearean boffin Bryan Cooper (daringly, for the time, divorced, and remarried to a divorcée); Sir Henry Greer, who knew everything about horses; the Countess of Desart, a Jewish philanthropist; Henry Guinness, the brewer; Sir Horace Plunkett, agricultural expert; the Earls of Kerry, Granard and Mayo; and the poet WB Yeats.

A fascinating assemblage, and I’ll be talking about their part in the foundation of the Irish state at the West Cork History Festival on 6th-8th August. Many other, more distinguished contributors – Roy Foster, Fergal Keane and Paul Bew – will be speaking; all accessible via Zoom.