thisisjersey.com

FIRST the good news: our second daughter Fleur has just passed her driving test! Yes, the letter announcing the thumbs-up arrived this morning.

AMONG the author Jules Renard’s better-known quips is one about the husband who staggers home hopelessly drunk and is sitting there by the fire watching all the familiar domestic objects floating gently round him when his wife tells him he had better get himself off to his bed. ‘I’m just waiting for it to drift [...]

THEY’RE a funny lot, the French – and not at all sporting, you know. For instance, a week before the World Cup started, the English had already bought 100,000 match tickets while only a miserable 4,000 had found any grudging takers here.

HOLD the front page! ‘Jesus hit by a car in Massachusetts’. Well, that was the headline in the local paper, anyway, after a man was knocked down on a pedestrian crossing in a place called, would you believe, Belcher. And police checks confirmed that the poor chap’s name was indeed just that, only with bells [...]

NOW I hope you’re not having your dinner right this minute (and if you are, should you really be reading at the table anyway, even if it is your favourite evening newspaper?), because this first bit’s not for the squeamish.

NOW what’s all this that I hear about Monsieur Sarkozy and France’s Première Dame, Carlita to her hubby, each having affairs?

It’s been a chilly old winter, hasn’t it? So before she put my big new woolly jumper in the machine for the first time, I told Mme Masstairmann to make sure she had a quick look at the washing instructions, because you can’t be too careful, eh?

GOOD grief, January again, which, you may remember if you read last month’s Letter, was what some grouch grumbled on New Year’s Eve while the champagne corks were still fizzing around our heads at my in-laws: Mme Masstairmann’s tribe down in the Finistère on the blustery western tip of Brittany.

SO how was it for you, then? Christmas, that is. Very nice but very quiet? And have you got the last of that mince pie out of the carpet yet?

OH WELL, that’s another autumn gone and never mind what Keats said about the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness because, despite my best efforts, Dinan ‘yoof’ still couldn’t care less. Well, not about conkers, anyway, which I’ve been trying to teach my pupils for a quarter of a century now.