The French couple did not speak much English so I rattled on in my best French, thinking I was doing a fine job.

She asked the usual question, how long had we lived in this lovely house? And I assumed she was assuming we were Irish and it had been in our family for generations.

Guests always like to think this and I don’t like to completely disabuse them of it. They’ve come to West Cork for an authentic experience so I massage the Englishness out of the BB and me as best I can, on a customer service basis.

My usual shtick poured forth, therefore, in my best French. And my best French ought not to be too bad. I once lived in France, in a village near Orléans. I was 18 and had fled home at the first opportunity, as young people used to do in those days.

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I was not able to take up a place at university, because I failed to get into my first choice. Ludicrously enough, I sat the Oxbridge exam from a desk in a school in Coventry thinking that maybe I would be the one person from Coventry that year who they let into Oxford.

I sat in the drama studio and I wrote possibly the worst English lit critical theory essay ever produced, because my........

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