It’s cold up there. Lots of snow – so much so that the road is impossible to use from October to May or even June! Nowadays, this isn’t a major problem, thanks to the Great St. Bernard Tunnel which now runs right through the mountains, underneath the road. The tunnel, unlike the original pass, can be used all year round, thanks to special avalanche shelters at either end which stop it becoming blocked by the snow. You do have to pay a hefty toll to use it, but that’s probably preferable to dying of frostbite when you get trapped on a snow-blocked pass, or suffocating under a sudden avalanche.

Such has been the fate of numerous unfortunate beings throughout history, who did not have the option of using the nice dry tunnel (opened in 1964). Avalanches, extreme cold, and drifts of up to 40 feet spelt death for vast numbers of travellers who should probably have stayed at home in front of the fire and watched the soaps, or whatever equivalent pastime they had in those days.

Enter the heroic monks.

In the 10th Century A.D., one St. Bernard of Menthon, having rejected his rich and noble background to preach the Gospel to the people of the Alps, founded a hospice for travellers at the highest point of the pass. Either they named the pass after him in tribute, or his name was a really cool coincidence. In any case, he and his band of merry monks became mountain rescue action heroes of the highest magnitude. Voluntarily, they went out in horrendous snow-storms in search of hapless victims of the unforgiving Alpine weather, giving them food, extra clothing, and assistance back to the warm and cosy hospice. Injured and ill travellers were nursed back to health, and the dead were retrieved to be given respectful burials instead of being lost forever in the white peaks.

Oh, and there were dogs! Guess what they were called? Well, the most famous one was apparently named Barry, but yes, he was indeed a St. Bernard. Barry saved the lives of over 40 people throughout the course of his brave doggy life between 1800 and 1814. He is a national hero, and his body (stuffed, upright and slightly creepy) remains on display to this day in Berne’s Natural History Museum. One tale of his bravery tells of the time that he climbed up to an icy ledge which no human could even attempt to reach, and edged his way across it inch by inch to get to a small boy who was half-buried in the snow. With a series of warm, gentle and persevering licks, he woke up the child, who wrapped his arms around his rescuer’s furry neck and was carefully dragged off to safety. Lassie’s got nothing on Barry.

Sadly, and in closing, I have discovered that the thing about St. Bernard dogs wearing little barrels of brandy around their necks is all made up. Apparently, if a person suffering from hypothermia were to drink alcohol, it would speed up the heat loss rate from their body, thus making the situation much worse.

Damn science – always there to spoil a nice little story…

My number one favourite thing about France is (and has always been) its language. I love the accent, and I love the sexy, smooth, soft sounds of the words. I studied French from age 11, right the way through until the end of my first year at university, when I was about 19 or 20. At that time, I was practically fluent, thanks mainly to ‘Skippy’, my serious and very strict GCSE/A-Level teacher, whose constant pushing and drive for perfection turned out to be a good thing despite my moans and groans to the contrary when I was translating long, difficult passages and conjugating twenty new verbs per day. Secretly, I loved it. It was such a pleasure to be able to put my hard work into practice, and chatter away in another language, or read a book in it. It is a beautiful language, and I’m sad that I’ve let my knowledge of it fade away.

I was recently very surprised to discover that at that the time of the French Revolution, the French didn’t actually speak French. I’ve had to go and read up on this, because it seemed somewhat odd to me. Didn’t Richelieu set up the Académie française over a century prior to the Revolution?! This was a very official body that was put together in order to preserve the French language and protect it from the horror of anglicanisation. I distinctly recalled writing an essay discussing this for an A-Level History exam, by the way, which is how I know all this. It’s not that I am a learned authority on the subject, in case I appear to be trying to give that impression and someone attempts to catch me out.

Anyway, I have now looked into the matter and discovered that French was very much the “educated” language throughout the 17th and 18th centuries – which basically means that hardly anyone outside of the main cities could speak it, let alone read or write it. France was full of dialects, and at the time Richelieu set up the Académie in 1634 there were serious concerns that “proper” French would gradually die out. The Académie’s purpose, therefore, was to strive for the purification and preservation of the language. It still exists today, and presumably still has to work quite hard given the constant introduction of English words. The French vocabulary is surprisingly small when compared with English, and, put quite simply, French speakers often don’t have the right word! So they “borrow” the appropriate English word, hence the curious “franglais” that you’re likely to hear if you spend enough time in the company of French people.

So, it seems that in 1789, the Académie fouded by Richelieu had been fighting a long, difficult battle for 155 years, as although the French language was still alive, it wasn’t spoken at all by around half of the population of France! Worse still, only 12 or 13% of the nation spoke it fluently and in a way that would have met the Académie’s standards. Mind you, after an increasingly exasperating decade or so in the lol-land of the UK, where it is apparently acceptable to use txtspk and call it “proper” English, I can see how easily such a situation could come about. Apparently, French was never spoken outside of cities – and even there, it wasn’t unusual to find that people in the suburbs didn’t speak it.

And so, until very recently, the French did not speak French. I think this is fascinating – much more so than battles and wars and politics and suchlike, at any rate. It was only really in the 19th century that France became more united as a nation, leading to the need for a common language, and thus consolidating the use of French. Or perhaps it was the other way around, I can’t quite get it straight in my head. Feel free to explain it to me. In any case, In the century or so after the Revolution, there gradually emerged a clearer concept of a united nation, a French citizen, and a common language.

So now the French do, in fact, speak French. I like it when things all come together in the end.

And yet Northern Ireland is so young in years that the history books really only go back to the early 20th century – so of course, they’re dominated by the T-Word. I have no desire to get into this. I detest it with a passion, and it is one of my main reasons for always having longed to move away. You can keep your Michael Collins and your Edward Carson; your Ian Paisley and your Gerry Adams.

No, for me, the key figure in the history of Northern Ireland lived long before there was even such a country as “Northern Ireland”. And his name was Fionn mac Cumhaill… perhaps better known as Finn McCool.

Every child in Norn Iron knows the tale of Finn. He was a giant, and a clever giant at that, having accidentally swallowed a bit of the Salmon of Wisdom as a young lad. He also had a fierce temper. One day, he had a flaming row with a rival, and, roaring with rage (as giants do), scooped up a clump of earth to throw at his enemy. Fortunately for the rival giant, Finn’s aim was terrible, and the clump of earth missed its target and landed in the middle of the Irish Sea. Today, it’s known as the Isle of Mann. (A stray pebble also landed with a splash, and is now called Rockall – it’s the world’s smallest isolated rock.) His action left Northern Ireland with a permanent gaping void in the landscape, where the angry giant scooped up the clump of earth. We call it Lough Neagh.

Finn’s main legacy, of course, is the Giant’s Causeway on the north coast of Ireland – another result of that temper of his. He built it as a series of stepping stones to Scotland, so that he wouldn’t get his feet wet as he crossed over to fight his enemy, a giant called Benadonner. Now, the historical records get a little blurry at this point, as some claim that it was, in fact, Benadonner who built the Causeway. Personally, I tend to believe that each giant started building from his own side, as the rest of the story makes no sense otherwise. Obviously it makes complete sense if you’ve got all the facts straight.

So anyway, Finn and his lovely wife, Oonagh, are making their way across the Causeway when they see Benadonner approaching in the distance. Finn gets a bit of a shock: Benadonner is one hell of a giant! He feels slightly less confident about his chances of pulverising the Scottish ogre, and yet he can’t back down from the fight. Irish pride and all that.

In a stroke of genius, he gets Oonagh to cover him with a blanket so that he can pretend to be his infant son. “How would this help matters?” I hear you wondering. Well, put yourself in Benadonner’s giant boots. If you saw a baby the size of a giant, and discovered that he was the son of the fella you were on your way to beat up, wouldn’t it strike a little bit of fear into your breast? “Look at the size o’ the wean!” thought Benadonner in something approaching terror, “If the bairn’s thon size, whit’s the da no gonnae be like?!”.

And poor old Benadonner, exposed for the coward he really was, took to his heels and ran all the way back to Scotland in a blue funk, tearing up the Causeway as he went (which is why it no longer stretches across the sea). In such a hurry was he that he even left one of his boots behind on the path!

And this is The Sister and me on that very boot…