‘I hope that you are paying your regards to the Black Madonna!” exclaimed one of our priest writers, when he learned that I was spending my post-Easter-Octave break in Catalonia, staying with friends in the hills above Barcelona. He had just bumped into the Herald’s editor at the Venerable English College on the Via di Monserrato in Rome; it was a strange confluence of coincidences, for at that very moment I was at Montserrat proper and about to do just what he expected.
In fact I was having an ice cream, because entry to the basilica at Montserrat is by timed ticket and my hour had not yet come – mainly because the place was packed. With a companion I had driven round the hairpin bends that zigzag their way up the bizarre-shaped mountain, with its numerous pinnacles at the top like a row of higgledy-piggledy crocodile teeth. Others – hundreds of them – had done the same, or come by bus, or cable car, or funicular railway.
