Thoughts on Europe’s totally obscure death spa.
I’ve been spending way too much time on compiling a family tree, because it’s an endlessly fascinating exercise, at least when you have a family as complex and weird as mine. Right now I’m discussing with one of my 32nd great-grandmothers, namely Conchenn Ingen Cellaig Cualain de Leinster, no doubt a delightful Irish lass and I wish I could spell her name in Irish, about the odd choice she and hundreds of others I’ve run cross in this exercise, have made. All of them, spread over almost a thousand years, have chosen to go to a town called Y in the Somme department of the Picardy region in France to die. If you’re going to believe the records, which is a stretch in itself.
In any case, there really is such a place. You can Google Earth it. Y is a commune in the Somme department in Picardie in northern France. Here’s its Google page: “The name is pronounced like the letter E in English. It bears the shortest place name in France, and one of the shortest in the world. The inhabitants [all 86 of them at the latest census] call themselves Ypsilonien(ne)s.”
So I’ve been forced to wonder how this breathtakingly obscure spot got to be a champion death spa among Europe’s cognoscenti, especially the women. Here are some of my thoughts.
The name translates to “There” in English. So when the kids ask “Are we there yet?” you know the answer will always be “no.” Why? (or Y?) because when you get There it turns into Here, so Y would have to change to Ici. Maybe that’s the secret of its attraction: You can never get there, so you don’t die. Is it a zombie haven hiding under the blandest possible rural obscurity?
