thisisjersey.com

THEY say that to make a fortune in France today, all you need is a lot of money. But if it’s still in francs in a biscuit tin under the floorboards, you had better move fast, because the Banque de France will no longer exchange them for euros after 17 February.

IMAGINE, if you will, that you live far from Jersey’s madding crowd in a delightful cottage right on the water’s edge in the village of Arradon, on the beautiful Golfe du Morbihan in southern Brittany, in a house that’s been in your family for more than a hundred years and is so idyllic that it [...]

IF you read last month’s letter from you know where, you may remember me saying that we Beans, though in many ways an admirable race of course, were not best known for showering indiscriminate largesse on all and sundry. Rather the opposite, in fact.

AT FIRST I thought it must be a mistake, surely. Either that, or the same time-worn joke. But our Monsieur Météo on national radio made a remarkable, unprecedented forecast this morning. Yes, he predicted rain everywhere except in Brittany, would you believe?

IT had been an awful long time coming – 30 years, in fact – but there it was in my trembling hands at long last: the letter summoning me, a Brit-Anglo-Bean, to invigilate and therefore read the French GCSE dictation paper in this Dinan school.

NOW I don’t like to talk about these things when you might be having dinner, or have just finished and are now sitting contentedly in your armchair with your favourite evening newspaper, but Mme Masstairmann’s Uncle Pierre recently had to have an operation for, well, ‘hémorroïdes’.

IF you’re a regular reader of these letters, you’ll remember me saying not so long ago that the high-brow French do love to claim that they were actually the ones who thought of something first when some low-brow Johnny Foreigner subsequently makes himself a name and a zillion by transforming it into a workable proposition [...]

ARE you sitting comfortably? Good. Now here’s your starter for a sticky gold star, if not for ten. If four pens cost 2.40 euros, how much would fourteen cost?

VIVE la différence, eh! The difference between France and the UK, that is. And in these troubled times, Le Monde could think of no better way to illustrate the point than by reproducing a cartoon from The Independent.

NOW I don’t know about you, but although I yield to no one in my love and veneration of, say, Mont Orgueil when seen at dusk from the bar of the Castle Green, I have to confess that there are limits to my interest in much of the smaller print of history.