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.

Yes, that is indeed just a poor anaemic little four there, dear reader, not a misprint for forty, never mind 400.

And Arsène Wenger (he’s the French manager of Arsenal, for those of you who’ve been in a coma for the last decade or so) raised more than a few Gallic hackles when he said on TV that he hoped England would win the cup because of all the heart-warming public manifestations of national fervour he had seen, like all the flags on the houses and cars.

The only time we’ve ever had anything like that in France was the day they won the cup in 1998. Not before, or since.

Actually, I was in England when he said it, accompanying 75 Year 8s over Dartmoor in pursuit of King Arthur and his Knights, the Hound of the Baskervilles and the rather less nippy Agatha Christie. And the kids were also surprised by all the patriotic enthusiasm, even if they did turn away to snigger at what was, to their neutral eyes, groundless optimism.

One thing they didn’t understand, though, was why you weren’t flying the Union Jack. Because as far as the French are concerned, les Anglais and les Britanniques are one and the same thing (just as they are to many English people, the Scots, Welsh and Irish might like to mention).

Now it’s amazing how often anyone who knows anything feels the need to bore everyone else with it and, you’re right, we teachers are almost certainly the worst offenders of the lot. Fair cop. So I gathered them all round under the four countries’ snapping flags on Torquay seafront to explain the difference, probably telling them more than they really wanted to know.

(Talking of flags, if you read last month’s Letter, you may remember me mentioning how our Minister of Justice, Michelle Alliot-Marie, who all likes her subjects to call her Mam, à la Queen Mum, was going ballistic. First of all, because a photo of man wiping his derrière on the tricolour had won the politically incorrect category in a national competition, and then because legally speaking, there was no way you could touch him for it, not that I’m saying you’d want to, of course. Well, dear old Mam’s just rushing through a law against any ‘outrage au drapeau français’ and the said affront will now cost the culprit a 1,500-euro fine.)

Anyway, where were we? Oh yes, on Torquay seafront, boring my pupils with the Cross of St George. But they were definitely intrigued by their three mademoiselle classmates who came scuttling back along the promenade giggling hysterically after a trip to the public loos, where they had made a startling discovery: that ladies and gents, and presumably men and women, and even boys and girls too, can be described as male and female in English.

Because the two terms do exist in formal, scientific French as ‘mâle et femelle’, but are only ever used to talk about animals, not humans, and then only in reproductive contexts, like Durrell.

In popular French, though, ‘mâle’ can also mean a sexually attractive or potent man, as in a ‘un beau mâle’, but to call a woman ‘une femelle’ is to reduce her to . . . well, one doesn’t, does one?

‘Put’ and ‘bite’ cause similar problems for teachers of English here, being slang for a prostitute and the, er, male member respectively. Yes, Mme Masstairmann and I were strolling down David Place one sunny summer morning a few years ago and she nearly fell off the pavement when her eyes alit on the bright shiny name of a new café: The Big Bite, no less.

‘Confortable’ is another word that’s never used of people, either, only of furniture, cars, clothes, situations and so on. Nor is the verb ‘visiter’, which is only used for places you go to see and physically explore, like castles or exhibitions or tourist resorts or whatever. So you will be careful how you tell your French friends that you often spend your Sunday afternoons visiting your in-laws, won’t you?

But there I am, slipping into terminal teacher mode again, aren’t I? Sorry about that.
Mind you, it was as her teacher that I took 11-year-old Anne-Sophie into the NatWest in Totnes high street to change the obsolete fiver some charming shopkeeper had just slipped the girl in her change – something that happens every time we cross the water.

Now I know that when Jersey shopkeepers see a French ‘professeur’ and his school group on the pavement, they nudge each other and say, Watch out! Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (as do the traders in St Malo when your kids darken their shop-fronts, incidentally). But using duff dosh to stitch up foreign visitors in general and children in particular does seem to be a distinctly Great British tradition.

Never mind. We were soon back in Dinan safe and sound. God was in his heaven and the ‘marronniers’ (chestnut trees) were in full bloom. Yes, a ‘marron’, or chestnut, is also media jargon for seasonal stories and features that you can repeat year in, year out, virtually word for word.

In late spring they are all about losing a few kilos and toning up your tum for public exposure on the beach, and that’s soon followed by acres of advice on how to get a frazzle-free tan and how the Brits in their shorts, sandals and dark socks must be France’s worst-dressed visitors.

And at the moment, it’s the annual highbrow debate sparked by the Baccalauréate philosophy paper, the traditional curtain-raiser to the A-level exam season for the 500,000 upper sixth-formers feverishly breaking out new biros to chew on.

Among the questions they had four hours to answer this year were: Can art dispense with technical mastery? Must we forget the past to have a future? Is it the historian’s job to judge? Can scientific truth be dangerous? Is a happy life a life of pleasure?

And is a happy life still possible anyway, after France’s humiliating performance in the World Cup? Actually, the morning after their elimination, I quietly asked my classes to stand, put their hands together and bow their heads and, as they sneaked puzzled looks at each other, wondering what on earth was up, I solemnly announced: ‘Two minutes’ silence for French football.’ Arf! Arf!

‘The whole world is laughing at us,’ one front-page headline sobbed in the wake of their débâcle, because they do indeed think that the whole world lives with its eyes riveted on France, just as they also think that God is French.

Whereas we Brits know that God’s and the planet’s eyes are permanently on us, don’t we, and that He is English, too.

But let’s not forget that the French national emblem is the cock, a fighting bird that likes to sing from the very top of the dunghill, making it the only creature in the animal kingdom that can be right in the, well, mire and still find plenty to crow about.
Kenavo!