ARE you sitting comfortably? Good. Now here’s your starter for a sticky gold star, if not for ten. If four pens cost 2.40 euros, how much would fourteen cost?

‘Er, I’ve never been able to do that kind of sum, I’m afraid,’ the former Education Minister immediately confessed on a prime time news-cum-chat show the other day, much to the delight of the nation’s YouTubers ever since.

Not that he was all that embarrassed, really. Quite the opposite. This is a high-brow, highly cultured nation where if someone calls you an intellectual, the correct response is to blush modestly and say: ‘Merci’.

So it’s actually rather chic to admit that you’re ‘nul en maths’ as it shows you’re really just a regular, loveable sort of bumbler after all.

What worries me, though, is that I seem to be the only one on this side of the Channel who cares that the former Min of Ed is the bozo who was once in charge of one of the nation’s biggest budgets. Yet the only time their innumeracy seems to bother the French is in the kitchen, when the cookbook gives quantities for four people and they’re expecting seven for supper.

Or when there are lives on the line. One leading hospital in Paris has been urgently testing the simple arithmetic of all its medical staff after a spate of incidents caused by incorrectly adjusted doses and treatments.

Ironically, our ex-Minister was actually on the box to talk about yet another new maths syllabus in primary schools, an umpteenth reform, and Lord knows they do need to do something toot-sweet, and the tooter the sweeter. A recent survey found that only three pupils out of ten arriving in first-year secondary could work out the price of 20 articles if ten of them cost 22 euros.

By the time they reach the age of 16, after nine years of compulsory schooling, for goodness sake, that figure does indeed rise, but only to a paltry six out of ten, and half of them still don’t know how to calculate an average, a percentage or even the area of a rectangle.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m no maths geek myself. No, when I was at Hautlieu in the Sixties they wouldn’t even let me take the O-level because you had to pay half a crown or whatever per subject and they told me to save my money because I didn’t have an earthly, not a snowball’s.

And every time I offered to help my daughters Morgane and Fleur with their maths homework, they always fell about laughing (‘Nice one, Dad!) or sighed impatiently and shouted: ‘Maman!’ Then, maddeningly, Mme Masstairmann would swan in from the kitchen with floury hands and waltz them through the most impenetrable numerical gibberish.

However, I would like the record to show that the language was against me as well. The French will talk about ‘un triangle-rectangle’ when what they really mean is your right-angled whatsit. And they insist on putting points where we put commas and commas where we put points, unless it’s the other way round, like 1.000 or 10,5 f’rinstance.

Okay, fair cop, I can’t do all that fancy abstract stuff, anyway, never could. Maths and I parted brass rags the day the teacher started talking pi R squared and even when it is in English, it’s still all Chinese to me, as the French say.
Mind you, let the record also show that I do frequently stagger la patronne and the girls with my very English agility in mental arithmetic, stuff that would have the three of them reaching for their pocket calculators, which were just a space-age dream when I left Hautlieu.

But then like most of my generation, I did spend my primary school life religiously reciting my tables and doing stuff like multiplying four tons five hundredweight six stones and seven ounces by eight-and-a-half rods, poles or perches, and all with no external assistance whatsoever beyond an HB pencil to chew on and the odd rap on the knuckles for sloth.

But your measures weren’t even metric, Mme M scoffs. Nor does she thank me for pointing out that avoirdupois is, in fact, French.

And apart from an infuriating tendency to be always a quarter of an hour late, the French do seem to manage time alright despite the fact that there are 60 minutes in their hours, 24 hours in their days, seven days in their weeks and so on. Yes! Just like ours, eh?

The present Minister of Education is not so hot at figures, either. ‘The future of our schools won’t be written in chalk,’ he revealed triumphantly this week, ‘and we need to go fully digital within three years.’
So each school must name its IT geek to liaise with the area education office. That’s 12,000 new teachers when 16,000 retirees aren’t being replaced, for a start.

Then the average computer in a French school is now seven years old, and while British schools already boast 450,000 of those new magic, electronic internet blackboards, France has only 17,000. No, you read it correctly – 17,000.

But never fear, my dears, because the minister also announced special one-off grants to each school for new equipment. Yes! Between 500 and 2,500 euros to splash out on these all-singing, all-dancing boards that cost between 1,000 and 5,000 euros a go, and that’s without the computer to run them. So it really is all our Christmases come early, n’est-ce pas?

Actually, our school’s very first new superboard was installed last month and we were all invited to go and admire this wondrous innovation, if not to touch it. It was a strange sensation which reminded me of the day way back in 1960, 50 years ago now, when we kids all stood silently on the pavement watching the house where the people inside were watching the first TV in our street.

The lady finally invited us in, five at a time, for five minutes, mind, to watch a fuzzy bit of Robin Hood that looked as if it had been filmed through an egg-slicer. It was fantastic, which is more than can be said for the geek putting the magic blackboard through its paces for us. As he unwittingly showed, a duff teacher will still be a duff teacher, whatever the electronic wizardry.

OH, well, never mind. Soon be Christmas, which, regular readers may remember, is also one of my mantras all the year round whenever life’s getting just a bit too stern and earnest, only this time it’s actually true. And I don’t know about you there on The Rock, but I can’t help feeling that people here were saying ‘Christmas is early’ much earlier this year.

Talking of which, one leading French bank has been in big trouble and apologising humbly to the public, not for anything like obscene bonuses or dodgy advice on savings or pensions, but for actually telling the truth in one of their TV commercials, which they have since withdrawn.

Yes, the ad showed this man and his thirty-something son walking into one of their branches and the dad says: ‘I’ve got some bad news for you, lad… Father Christmas doesn’t exist.’

Hundreds of indignant parents complained that the brutal revelation had traumatised their smaller cherubim, despite the son insisting on the way back out that, ‘Yes, he does, Dad…at Crédit Mutuel.’

Now I don’t where you stand on all that, but here’s wishing you all a very Joyeux Noël, anyway! I only wish we could be there on The Rock to share it with you. Still, I suppose there are worse places to spend it than at what my two Paris-based daughters call ‘home’ – aka Dinan.
Kenavo!