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?

Not that she needed any advice about domestic chores from the likes of a man, never mind me, but even she did a double take when she read: La machine lave le rhume avec les couleurs aimées – the machine washes the head-cold with beloved colours?
It sounded more like one of those BBC radio messages to the French Resistance in the Second World War – the ones that always started with frying pan noises and then the solemn, tensely-awaited announcement: Ici Londres.

But when Mme M checked the GB version on the label, she was advised to ‘machine wash cold with like colours’, which was admittedly more to the point but also far less poetic somehow. So it’s another case of only two cheers for computer-assisted translation, I’m afraid.

Actually, my Breton in-laws have often wondered what sort of gossip and even slander I scribble in all these Letters From You Know Where, but when they log in to This is Jersey and click on ‘translate this page’, they find the resulting French version even murkier double Dutch than the original was. Yup! C’est du Chinois, they all cry: It’s Chinese.

Now although I’ve been a court translator myself for years, I’m not really in any position to cast the first pierre here either, because there’s hardly a day goes by without me getting an uncomfortable reminder of my own linguistic fallibility.

Like last night, when I popped into my local garage to fill up and the mechanic called me over to explain to this Brit visitor that his joint de culasse was duff and done for.

His what? A fat lot of good I turned out to be ,and I slunk away home, dug out my Robert et Collins bilingual and discovered that the said J de C is in fact a cylinder head gasket, which undoubtedly left me better informed but also none the wiser.

Anyway, Mme M salvaged my winter woolly in one piece and it was still the same size and colour, too, because although the La Patronne’s got me reasonably house-trained, I have to admit that she’s the one who always does the washing, as do most Frenchwomen, along with 80% of all the other domestic chores, too.

But I never ask her to iron anything – life’s too short, isn’t it? Or only for weddings and funerals, anyway, and then only the bits people can see, like collars, cuffs and shirt-fronts, that kind of thing. You just have to remember never to take your jacket off.

Mind you, a few years ago she did get so insistent on the equitable division of labour around the home that I finally threw in the dish-cloth and we took on a cleaning lady. That took care of indoors and as for outdoors, I’ve always felt that it’s very selfish of a man to have a garden that’s larger than his wife can handle, so I just cut the grass and leave all the clever stuff to her.

However, I would like the record to show that, like most Frenchmen – I’ve got dual nationality – I do pay full lip-service to the principle of the total equality of the sexes, and the further up the social ladder you get, the more equal things become, or at least the less unequal they are.

But Mme M wasn’t the only Frenchwoman to laugh out loud when the government somehow managed to keep a straight face as they announced that although they had finally decided not to ban the burqa, the Muslim veil worn by only 300 or 400 women in France, equality between men and women was one of the fundamental principles of French national identity.

Of course it is, and always has been, and only the nit-pickers would point out that the Revolution in 1789 may have got rid of the monarchy, the aristocracy and all unearned rights and privileges, but there was never any question of giving women equal status with men as citizens.

France was also one of the last European countries to give them the vote, in 1944, and it was only in 1965 that married women were allowed to open a bank account in their own names. There is still no French equivalent of Ms, as opposed to Madame or Mademoiselle, and one Frenchwoman dies every two or three days as a result of domestic violence.

And they’re still ridiculously under-represented at all levels of government and in the middle and higher spheres of industry and public life.

Working women are far more likely to have jobs with awkward hours, greater tedium, inferior status, subordinate roles, little or no autonomy, repetitive tasks, uncomfortable postures and interminable periods in front of a computer screen or at the sharp end dealing with the public. So it’s hardly surprising that they’re 22% more likely to suffer from repetitive strain injury and 40% more subject to stress-related illnesses.

In fact, I was sitting as a judge in an unfair dismissal case at the employment tribunal the other day and one witness, the lady in charge of all the cash-desk staff at a 70-till hypermarket, estimated that around 60% of the ‘girls’ (her word, not mine) were on tranquillisers and anti-depressants or other damage-limitation drugs of one sort or another.

And the Full Monty cherry on the gâteau is that Frenchwomen are still paid 20% less than men of similar age, experience and qualifications doing comparable jobs.
But that average figure hides wide disparities from sector to sector, the male-female salary gap being zilch in teaching where Mme M and I work, for example, but soaring to at an astonishing 120% in the legal profession, those ardent defenders of all that is just and true.

Nor are things likely to get any better in the foreseeable future. In fact, they might even be getting worse. Forty years ago French women’s libbers fought for the emancipation of women and gender equality, but those same women, now in their sixties, are today crying Haro! against the subtle but more sinister side-effects of campaigns for a greener, more eco-friendly world.

Yes, the new naturalist ideologies have resulted in an exaltation of feminine identity, pressure for a return to the model of the mother at home and, more prosaically, to breast-feeding and washable nappies. And who’s going to have to give up their job or at least go part-time to do all that parenting, feeding and washing? Right! But don’t you want to do what’s best for your children, dear?

Yet their younger sisters don’t seem to be listening, because France has the highest birth-rate in Europe, around two children per mum, and also the fewest women with no kids – only 10%, a figure which has hardly changed since the war, compared to 18% in the UK and 26% in Germany. In fact, nearly four out of ten well-qualified German women are childless.

Good grief! It’s all enough to make a woman want to change sexes, isn’t it? But the government’s only just repealed the law that said that transsexuals were, by definition, mentally ill, never mind do anything else to make their lives less of a legal nightmare. So there’s a few more long hard gender battles to be fought there, too.
Anyway, La Patronne’s calling so I’d better jump to it, eh!
Kenavo!