1st July 2018

The most compelling image of the week was not the football but the one of Prince William standing silently, with outstretched arm on the ancient, biblical stones of the Western wall...
Today in France marks the burial at the vast, domed Pantheon on Paris’s left bank of a remarkable woman, Simone Veil. As a survivor of the Holocaust, she and her family joined the 76,000 Jewish people forcibly expelled from France during WWII. Who’d have thought, back then in the worst of times, that a slim, slight woman would rise in France’s patriarchal society to become France’s choice today to be placed amongst the country’s ‘great men’.
....How fitting, then, that in the very same week that Prince William drew the world’s attention to the Holocaust by visiting the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem, that a resilient French Holocaust survivor and champion of the Jewish people, should at last be remembered for her achievements. That is why I wrote Lamplight and Vichyssoise - one small step by me too, lest we forget.