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.

Yes, take a stroll around any horse-chestnut tree this side of the Channel and you’ll find yourself ankle-deep in bright, shiny, unmolested virgin conkers and in no danger at all of getting gob-stoppered by flying stones or branches or plummeting schoolboys as they fight to get every last one down for the morrow’s battles royal in the playground.

Worse still, I was even warned off by the head this year because last season the little whatsits undid the knots in their strings and sling-shotted their munitions across the crowded yard at break time, Year 7s in pitched battle against Year 8s, a bit like Agincourt re-enacted, only the French call it Azincourt. Funny how they can’t even get the names of their own towns right, eh?

No, Nurse wasn’t at all happy, the school’s ‘infirmerie’ being besieged by whimpering kids with nose bleeds, black eyes and assorted ‘oeufs (eggs) de pigeon’, the attractively coloured bumps and lumps that form on one’s skull after a direct hit.

They’re not really a very sporting people, the French, I’m afraid. Mme Masstairmann had always thought she was – volleyball in winter, surfing in summer, the Mont St Michel marathon last year – until she realised that many a Jerseywoman did all that and more, and all before lunchtime on a Saturday, too.

They’re not even very good at cheating, either, as the hand of Thierry Henry proved yet again the other day against Ireland. And when did you last hear so many kettles calling pots black, or see so many people who live in glass houses hurling so many stones?

And yet it’s not for want of practice. Way back in 1929, Marcel Pagnol struck a national chord that vibrates to this day in Marius, one of the great French comic plays, when, caught ‘en flagrant délit’ in a bar-room game of cards on the Marseille waterfront, César sadly reflects that, ‘If you can’t even cheat with your friends, what’s the point of playing any more?’

In fact, the French don’t even have their own term for ‘fair play’, the standard translation for that being, well, ‘le fair-play’. The expression was first imported at the end of the 19th century along with the new English fashion of muddied oafs enjoying outdoor sports and games. Mind you, they were slow out of the blocks then too, the first FFA Cup Final only taking place in 1918, 14 years before Olympique de Lille were crowned the first professional League champions, in 1932.

The Académie Française did try to replace ‘fair-play’ with ‘franc-jeu’ in 1973 in another Canute-like attempt to cleanse if not stem the rising tide of franglais impurities but it’s never caught on, no more than ‘fin de la semaine’ ever looked like replacing ‘le weekend’.

Insult was added to expat Irish injury the other night by the match commentators and, even less forgivably, the journalists on the main evening news the next day referring to the team in green as Irish or British, as if the terms were interchangeable.

They do this all the time with English and British, too, some of them mixing in a dash of bad faith just for good measure. In a Six Nations rugby match, the English kicked off, the receiving Frenchman was tackled, nothing dirty albeit slightly late, free kick, nothing to get excited about, but TV’s Monsieur Rugby growled, ‘Première brutalité britannique’.

Yes, depending on the commentator, I sometimes turn off the sound on the box and switch on crackly, medium wave Radio 5 Live because if we’re going to get all one-eyed about all this, let it at least be a British one, I mean English, eh? And it’s funny how the partiality doesn’t seem to jar so much – what am I saying? I don’t even notice it at all – when we French (I’m a dual national) are playing anyone else but England. Allez les Bleus! A mort l’arbitre!

Actually, a national icon and one of the worst of the lot, or the best depending on your point of view, has just retired after no less than 11 World Cups and 1,300 TV matches. Thierry Rolland is, or was, the beauf’s beauf, a beauf being popular French for a beau-frère, a brother-in-law, but one of the narrow-minded, opinionated, know-it-all bigheads that every family has to put up with.

Yes, if Monsieur Rolland is to be believed, this complex world’s really a very simple place: your Bulgarian’s a cheat, your Italian an actor, the Belgians are rough, Brazilians nonchalant, and the Irish fiery redheads. And another eternal truth is that there’s always at least one bearded bloke in every Argentinian team.

Then there’s the refs, my goodness, the poor refs. ‘Monsieur Foote (a Scotsman), vous êtes un salaud!’ he once cried. Now I won’t translate ‘salaud’, pronounced sallow, not least because your favourite evening paper wouldn’t print it if I did, so let’s just leave it as being an unkind and, to the best of my knowledge and belief, entirely unfounded remark about the parentage of the man in black.

Several of his pearls have entered the language as clichés, stuff like ‘they were cut down like flying rabbits’. Or ‘The wind’s blowing clockwise’, and ‘The Dutch are bringing on their sub, Cocu (which also happens to be slang French for a two-timed husband). And a very warm Bonsoir to his good lady wife.’ Then, during a terminally boring game, a weary ‘Pass me a biscuit, Jean-Mimi.’ Yes, I could go on for ages yet, and Mme M would say I generally do.

A Gallic cross between Kenneth Wolstenholme and Eddie Waring and now considered to be too old and too un-PC, he’s finally been shoved off the screen, almost literally, and replaced a hungry new generation of two-dimensional commentators: young, squeaky clean, encyclopaedic technicians totally lacking in any humour or feeling for the flavour and texture of the game, and anoraks to a man. So, love him or hate him, and it would be impossible for any sporting expat Brit or Bean not to do both, it’s difficult not to mourn Rolland’s professional passing.

Oh, well! Soon be Christmas, which, regular readers may remember, is one of my personal mantras whatever the time of year whenever I’m in need of a wry pick-me-up. Apparently, the French plan to spend an average of 650 euros on presents, food and festivity. That’s 50 euros more than you Brits but still well short of Luxemburg’s 1,150 – what do they know or have that we don’t or haven’t got? – and 3.5 per cent down on last year but at least that’s a smaller drop than 12 months ago.

Père Noël will be bringing books mainly and a third of the presents will be second-hand, which is twice the European average. Well, money’s tight but there’s also the planet to think of, too, and 12 per cent intend to sell their presents on the net after Christmas, again twice the Euro-average.

And what’s this I hear on Radio 4 about ‘them’ trying to improve the quality of the jokes and mottoes in your crackers? That’s rather missing the point, surely. Good Lord! One suggestion was, Life is a dog and not just for Christmas. What is it? The economy? The weather? Something in the water?

Anyway, a very Joyeux Noël! to you from Mme Masstairmann and me. It’s just a pity we can’t be there on The Rock with you. Oh, well, here’s to Absent Friends, eh?

Kenavo!