1968

In Paris, students were rioting  - presumably as a break from snogging or pontificating about Sartre and Voltaire - and NASA were close to putting a man on the Moon. But I couldn’t have cared less - it was the Summer holidays, my dad had a silver Cortina estate and he was taking us to France. By way of Hovercraft (quick, bumpy and reeking of broken duty- free perfume bottles and vomit), we hit les routes nationals.

The Ford’s pvc seats bubbling in the afternoon heat, we headed south and by evening made it as far as Arras. The only hotel still open was on the main square and the only dish served was the plat de jour – haricots vert with half a pound of garlic and a slice of something dead. The beds were three feet off the ground, had the suppleness of concrete and were alive with bugs. I ate every scrap of food and slept like a king.

With only the odd unscheduled detour into some dusty village to find bread and fuelled by camembert and overripe peaches, we eventually made it to the Massif Central. And it rained. A lot.

But it was my first trip abroad and the start of a love affair with all things French – DS Citroens with strange yellow headlights, solex mopeds with their engines loosely bolted to the front wheel, vans with corrugated iron sides, scary hornets the size of hummingbirds, pissoirs, cobblestones, diablo fraise, little dogs being carried around shops, café’s full of the stink of cheap gitanes and coffee and the exquisite pleasure of watching kids troop off to school on Saturday mornings when you wouldn’t have to. 

A lot’s changed since – the cars are anodyne and safe, mopeds are plastic Korean imports, the pissoir has morphed into a coin operated and painfully hygienic Tardis, gitanes cost €6 a pack and you can only smoke outside.

But France has still managed to keep most of what first attracted us ardent Francophiles – and with péages, budget flights, accessible provincial airports and the TGV it’s now a damn site easier to get to the bits you like. And there’s still a nationwide garlic addiction and the Camembert goes as runny as ever it did. And the hornets are still bloody big