The sun is breaking through the Norman clouds and our village looks more than usually lush and green.
Jean-Michel, our delinquent, dairy-farming neighbour, no longer has a tractor. He can no more trail the liquid manure from his farmyard along the lanes. His only piece of heavy machinery is a mis-shapen, blue Renault 5 with no rear seats so he can carry hay. The roads are miraculously clear.All should be set for a wonderful summer, except that dark deeds are afoot in the Norman hills. Two crimes, one banal and unsolved and one disturbing and unreported, have blighted our pastoral idyll.When we are in the village, we visit the horses in Jean-Michel’s dead-tractor-strewn fields above our house every day, sometimes twice a day. Grace, our youngest child, regards the animals as part of her extended family.There is a vast, brown stallion, Geronimo, recently restored to polite society after a long spell in solitary confinement; there is a big, light-chestnut mare called Elisa; there is a black mare with a foal; there are two small, brown mares and two frisky adolescent stallions Grace has given her own names to some of the horses.

The two ageing, brown mares, are – or were – Sharon and Tracey.A few days ago, Sharon, or Tracey, was found dead in the field: not just dead but horrifically mauled. Most of her face was torn away.Jean-Michel, 30-something, bearded, unwashed, as frail and ragged as a scarecrow, has been greatly upset by her death. Usually, whatever befalls him, he carries on in a state of cheerful, muddled indifference.The old, chestnut mare, actually called Jupiter, had belonged to Jean-Michel since his childhood He learnt to ride on her. Jean-Michel and his charming and unlikely partner, Marie, give different explanations for the death.Marie is a tiny, 50-something grandmother, with bright red hair, always dressed with a touch of urban elegance. She can often be found in leather boots and a silk scarf, wading through the swamp of the farm yard. She believes the old brown mare was attacked, by someone or something.No predator in Normandy is large enough to do such damage to a grown horse. There are deer and wild boar in the forest beyond the horses’ fields but nothing carnivorous bigger than a fox There are no packs of wild dogs in the neighbourhood.

Marie believes Jupiter was killed by a person, or persons, unknown.Jean-Michel scoffs at this theory He blames Geronimo. The big stallion is the softest horse in the world with humans but has a string of previous convictions for assaults on other horses.He believes Jupiter fell and was injured during some kind of horse-play, possibly while resisting the unwelcome attentions of Geronimo. Her face, he explains, must have been torn away later by carrion crows or by small predators. Hmm.Marie’s theory – an assault by humans – is the more disquieting but the more plausible. I suspect Jean-Michel knows as much.But who would attack a horse in this way? And why? Eighteen months ago, someone left poisoned meat for Jean-Michel’s many noisy but harmless dogs: two died.That was part of a byzantine village feud, which concerned, the muddy state of the roads; Geronimo pushing another horse into a neighbour’s vegetable patch; and allegations that Jean-Michel’s misdemeanours were being covered up by another neighbour, the deputy mayor of the commune, to whom he owes money.Jean-Michel owes many people money. Plain white vans with menacing-looking young men often call for him and find him, as usual, missing.

Would someone, shades of The Godfather, half-sever a horse’s head over a village feud; or more likely a quarrel over money? Maybe they would.The other blight on our rural tranquillity was a burglary at our home. The thief, or more likely thieves, parked outside the house in broad daylight with a van and trailer and removed a cooker, a fridge, a vacuum cleaner, a television, an iron, a child’s electric piano and a coffee machine.Jean-Michel saw the van and a young man with red hair but assumed (reasonably enough) that he was working on the house. He is convinced he had seen the man before.The local gendarmerie brigade made a big, one-day show of investigating this major crime (there are few burglaries in the area). They took fingerprints and foot prints and asked for the names of all people who had worked on the house.Then they did nothing. Two months after the event, they have yet to interview the chief witness (Jean-Michel) or any of the people on the list.The relationship between the gendarmerie and rural people in France is an odd one.I was brought up in an English village with a locally born village policeman who knew where and when every apple had been stolen (mostly because they were stolen by his son).The gendarmerie is part of the French military and a caste apart: a strangely unaccountable, unpredictable and, sometimes alien presence in the French countryside.I asked Marie if she had reported the horse’s strange death to the gendarmerie. She looked at me as if I was not just foreign but half-witted.”You know,” she said.

“Around here, we don’t like to talk to the gendarmes too much.” Jean-Michel, it is true, is usually in trouble with the gendarmes over something or other (but he is no thief and definitely not a suspect in the burglary).I have had exactly the same reaction when I have used the G-word to other, impeccably law-abiding, residents of the village. Reported crime is low in rural France but many things go unmentioned to the gendarmes.Country people have their own way of issuing warnings, collecting debts and settling scores.. 8 July 2000

8 July 2000
Italian bars, restaurants, offices and even hospitals may never be the same again. If a draft law passed by Italy’s cabinet today is approved by parliament, that age-old Italian pastime, smoking, will be outlawed in almost every interior space except private homes.Italy’s 16 million smokers, who have always belligerently dismissed anti-smoking legislation as an infringement of their civil liberties, may find themselves confined to a sort of smokers’ Siberia, either out in the cold or in a stuffy cupboard sized space distant from their offices. The law will apply even inside Italy’s jails, where smoking is one of the few privileges allowed.The Health Minister, Umberto Veronesi, an oncologist, said he was not “on a crusade” but he simply wanted to protect 44 million people from the scientifically proved risks of passive smoking.The legislation would bring Italy, where even hospital corridors are lined with cigarette butts, into line with its northern European neighbours.