Shortly into your new life in the French countryside, you’ll quickly become acquainted with merde. More than just the default gros mot for adults and children alike, it’s an integral part of farming and a genuinely organic alternative to artificial fertilisers. You’ll also learn that while donkeys, mules and nicely brought up ponies will deposit their leavings in the same spot, horses and cattle won’t – and indeed delight in being as random with their night soil as possible.

Horse trailers are a common sight in France, and when you go to a competition you’ll see dozens – of all shapes and sizes. A few scary looking narrow ones (and some with suspiciously rotten looking floors) somehow make it there intact, but most of the randomly parked vans (French for horse trailer) are pretty smart.

Other than the offspring of Arab potentates, and like it or not, most of us spend a fair chunk of our lives at work. Spanning those years between sponging off mum and dad and latterly trying to remember your grand children's names and where you left your glasses, lie decades of graft. All the more reason then to try it whilst still at school – if only to find out what couldn't bear doing for five minutes, let alone forty years.