GOOD Lord! Is that the date already? Only seems like five minutes since I was walking out of the staff room here in Dinan at the end of June after breaking up for the summer holidays.

And an all-singing, all-dancing end to the school year it was, too. For the first time in a long time, our kids didn’t get any serious hassle from the local yoof on our annual trip to Jersey, Guernsey or England.

Over the years, I’ve come to feel more like I’m riding shotgun than master i/c and I’ve more than once been mightily relieved to see the 7th cavalry in the shape of your boys in blue come charging round the corner by the Oxfam shop.

Mind you, we teachers did get a barrage of Francophobic verbals walking past this pub near Portsmouth one evening but my colleagues’ patchy English meant they missed the finer points and their attention was diverted by the slick of vomit, anyway. Sacrés Britanniques!

Then the school’s exam results hit record levels, again, and daughter Fleur passed her baccalauréat too. Bravo! But that’s a distinction few sixth-formers here escape these days. Yes, the national pass rate rose, yet again, to 86 per cent, and 55 per cent of those got ‘une mention’ or honours.

The Minister of Education duly cried Cocorico! – literally, cock-a-doodle-doo, funny how even their animals speak French, eh? – but also meaning Vive la France!

And if you’ve ever wondered why the cock’s their national symbol, it’s because it always sings from the top of the dunghill, so it can be right in the, um, muck and still find plenty to crow about. The universities are humming a worried tune, though, because just getting your ‘bac’ entitles you to a place on the course of your choice, whether you’re up to it or not.

One Breton lecturer reflected that fifty years ago students were filtered and orientated as they entered secondary school, admittedly too soon, but the selection and attrition now take place in the first year of ‘faculté’.

He’s observed a significant drop in the basic skills, too, and last autumn initially gave 12/20 for one essay which showed a reasonable level of knowledge and thought, before dropping the mark to eight when he went back and totted up fifty speling misteaks.

Elder daughter Morgane has also been a bit fraught. She spent the first semester of the final year of her translator’s degree course down in Portugal, returning to Rennes University in February at the start of a three-month lock-out strike by lecturers and students fighting new reforms.

The humanities and social science students there have always been the first to hit the streets, even before any NUS directive from Paris, and no academic year is now complete without significant disruption, which is why they’ve lost a quarter of their 22,000 students in five years.

Exasperated, the Min of Ed cut up rough, too, and said that finals would take place regardless, but the icing on the gâteau was Morgy being told she couldn’t sit them anyway because she’d only been to three lectures in Rennes all year. And whose fault was that, for goodness sake?

We even considered seeking legal advice but they relented, she crammed the course work off the internet 24/7 for five coffee-fuelled, rage-driven weeks and landed her BA, and with a ‘Mention’, too. But when they offered her a Master’s degree place in September, she said, Merci, mais non merci, and is off to Costa Rica for a gap year working as a multilingual interpreter.

And she can go without the millstone of big debts that British graduates face, too. University is free here, and the very hard-up get the few minimal grants, but we still we had to find her the 900 euros a month she needed to survive in the Breton capital without a part-time job.

Many students get by on less, but Fleur’s now off to Paris and that will come a bit pricier.

In the meantime, we’ve been off to the beach between the showers and I’ve told Mme Masstairmann not to spare the sun-block because Brittany’s the French region most affected by skin cancer. Yes, Bretons are culturally and genetically Celts and they tend to burn rather than brown.

Then there’s the weather which is often less than dazzling and even a bit nippy with the sea breezes, so they tend to forget that the UV rays still get through, anyway. And it’s an essentially rural and coastal community with lots of people working outdoors, too.

The medical advice is to use cream and cover up and a quiet counter-revolution on the sands may go some way to limiting the damage. Yes, young Frenchwomen now consider going topless to be so very 20th century, not to mention vulgar and even indecent. Only old ladies bare their busts now, said this teenaged girl on the box, defining old as over 30, if you don’t mind.

‘Hypocrisy!’ cried one bare-bosomed 40-something, though. ‘We fought for the right to drop the top in the name of women’s liberation. And, anyway, I don’t like the strap marks.’
Apart from that last little lapse into coquetry, she may have a point, another mere chit of a girl admitting that a cleverly chosen two-piece was a lot sexier and much more of a tease for the boys.
Kenavo!