LOURDES manages to be bustling yet peaceful at the same time. With five million visitors a year, its shops, hotels, and cafes are busy and the streets teem with people who look as if they are on holiday.

But there is an absence of unnecessary noise and a distinct calm amid the throng. For Lourdes is all about bringing relief, or hope, or release to the 300,000 ill and infirm who visit the shrine each year. Most of the other visitors are here to help the sick.

With so much illness and human suffering to meet the eye, Lourdes should be a depressing place. Instead, it is quite uplifting.

John and Eamon are two of the Glasgow squad in Lourdes this week to act as brancardiers. This French word means ``stretcher bearer'', but their duties can be anything from fetching a cup of tea to pushing a wheelchair.

They have been coming to Lourdes, during their holidays and at their own expense, for more than 15 years. John says he gets more back from the experience than he could ever give. Like the time a young man dying of cancer took him out for a pint to cheer him up. Eamon says that even after all these years he is not sure if he knows what to make of Lourdes, but he keeps coming back.

Down in the hot and steamy basement laundry of the Accueil Notre Dame, the hospital which houses the sick, a retired Glasgow teacher is spending her Fair holiday washing and ironing soiled clothing and sheets. Others are scrubbing the floors of this aged institution.

It is difficult to believe in apparitions of the Virgin Mary and in miraculous cures such as the 65 claimed for this French grotto, but there is no doubt about the many small miracles of human kindness which occur daily.

A visit to Lourdes is described in the guidebook as ``a plunge into spirituality to find oneself''. The Glasgow brancardiers have prescribed for this cynic a physical and bracing plunge into the bath at the Lourdes grotto.

There are 17 baths cut into the rock and they are filled with the water from the very spring uncovered by St Bernadette nearly 150 years ago. The baths are mainly for the very ill but able-bodied pilgrims can also go through the process. I am sure the Glasgow boys' main concern was for my physical and spiritual wellbeing and the fact that the water is freezing (or ``fresh'' as the guidebook describes it) had nothing to do with it.

The book also says that to take a bath is ``only an exterior sign of what God asks of us. Thus a confession well made is preferable to a bath''. I must confess that I was put off both by the low temperature and the fact that the water is changed only twice a day.

The Lourdes holy water is prized for is healing powers. The spring produces 122,000 litres each day, which is just as well considering the prodigious quantities carted away in containers by pilgrims.

St Bernadette herself said: ``It is not the quantity that counts.'' This is also the philosophy of a well-known Glasgow chap (no names) who promised quantities of Lourdes water to friends back home but did the sensible thing of taking only a little and diluting it with Loch Katrine's finest.

I saw an Edinburgh man showing an equally fine example of conservation when he set off for the grotto on the last day of his trip with a recently emptied whisky half-bottle as his container. This seems an appropriate juncture to mention the Irish impact on Lourdes. The presence of many visitors from the Emerald Isle is to be expected. But a plethora (or should that be a begorra?) of Irish bars? A Tara hotel? O'Flynn's Tea Shop? They're all there.

Not to mention the St Laurence O'Toole Little Flower religious souvenir shop, complete with shamrocks on the sign.

I imagine that this St Laurence O'Toole might have been a bit of Irish mischief, perhaps based on that actor in the film Lawrence of Arabia. But no he was a Dublin martyr, said a lady in the Irish bar at the Hotel Astoria.

This is the very bar, by the way, where the Nolan Mother, who gave the world the Nolan Sisters, once entertained the guests.

Yes, there is laughter in Lourdes. Much of it from or occasioned by the young people. Cardinal Thomas J Winning recalls sharing a lunch table with some Glasgow youngsters, not yet teenagers and very unused to the French food being served. A seafood dish, served in the shells from which the clams had come, was particularly confusing for one boy. Observing the Cardinal tucking in he asked: ``Why are you eating out of the ashtray?''

When I said earlier that Lourdes was a quiet place I was not including the Italians. It is in their nature to be voluble, even when queuing up to visit the grotto itself.

Every 15 minutes or so the Tannoy system issues a loud ``Sssh'' which can only be meant for our Italian cousins. The only other loud noise encountered at Lourdes is at a charismatic service in the huge underground basilica, where the rhythmic music and hand-clapping would not disturb the quiet Lourdes air. It was all a bit frenzied as priests and nuns swayed or whirled around with the faithful in great circles to the upbeat sound of hypnotic music.

All this is meant to stir the emotions and break down barriers, but it looked to this veteran of the staid church of the 1950s like hocus-pocus meets the hokey-cokey. Dancing with nuns was never on the agenda.

The processions around the shrine are more formal but offer a much more moving spectacle. Except that they are not for spectators.

I was standing watching when I was berated by a dapper elderly French gentleman of military bearing with the leather braces symbol of the brancardier. I didn't follow all of what he said but the gist of it was that I shouldn't be standing there when I could be helping push a wheelchair.

Lourdes can be a lonely place for those of little faith.