Aged 13, we were unleashed to do as we pleased in the countryside. This may be a bit too ooh la la for some
When the Macrons visited Britain last week, the talk was mostly of the Bayeux Tapestry and immigration. No one said very much about the French president’s suggestion, buried in his speech to parliament, that a new Anglo-French exchange programme be established – something Emmanuel Macron regards as vital, post-Brexit (since 2016, 50% of British schools say they’ve cut back on such visits, while in France an ever larger number of students go instead to Ireland, which is still an EU member state).
But I was listening! Some part of me wonders if the old school-style home stay is fit for purpose in the era of mobiles and helicopter parenting, a feeling based largely on my own experiences in the field, which were – ooh la la – slightly alarming.
My school participated in the Yorkshire-Lille Exchange, a programme possibly based on somewhat old-fashioned notions about the industrial norths of both places.
In the event, no sooner had I arrived than my penpal’s family were driving us through the night at 100mph (we girls slept in the Peugeot’s boot, sans seatbelts) to a town near Montélimar called Crest, where they liked to spend the summer holiday au naturel.
And there, aged just 13, we were unleashed to do as we pleased – our tent was a pointed 20-minute hike from the parental caravan – except in those moments when they put us to work.
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I learned pitifully little French but an awful lot (too much) about a boy called Sylvain, who wore a huge silver identity bracelet, and also how to pluck and gut a pigeon in 30C heat on the side of a dusty, pine-clad hillside.
It’s hard to know what to say about the sale of Jane Birkin’s battered prototype Hermès handbag, which went for £7.4m at auction in Paris last week. It seems obscene to me, and all the more so when you consider that the singer and actor liked to plaster it with Unicef and Médecins du Monde stickers. She had sold the tote – designed originally to her specifications – to raise funds for a French Aids charity in 1994.
But, like my mother and my grandmother before her, I will admit to taking handbags extremely seriously. A good one can be a lovely thing, though that’s not quite my point.
It’s the psychology of the bag that interests me, its inner darkness so oddly expressive of a woman’s independence, its mysterious recesses traditionally turning up both the unexpected and the genuinely useful: a Fox’s Glacier Mint, a corn plaster, an allen key – and, in the case of Mlle Birkin, a handy pair of nail clippers.
Unlike some, I find it hard to believe that Wes Streeting’s plans for the NHS app will transform our lives, putting a doctor in our pockets (or our handbags). For months, I refused to download the app with the cringey name Evergreen Life, which a message on my GP’s switchboard has long insisted would speed up the making of appointments (it links to the NHS’s).
But last week I gave in, only to be informed that my surgery was “offline”, and I would receive no response until … when, exactly?
Twenty-four hours later, I rang again (I was on hold for 23 minutes, during which I heard about the virtues of Evergreen Life seven times). Why, I asked, do they tell patients to download the wretched thing if the surgery doesn’t use it? “Well, we do disconnect from it sometimes,” said a voice. So could she help instead? “We’ll see,” the voice replied. “But bear in mind, we’re multitasking here.”
Photograph by Getty
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