I think I was always going to end up like this.

My first time in France was 1990, on a ferry from Dover to Calais. A beer cruise. That was the entire proposition. You got on, you drank, you arrived, you drank a bit more, you got back on, you drank, you came home. France was less a destination than a legal technicality that allowed the drinking to happen. I could not tell you a single thing about Calais from that trip. I could tell you a fair bit about the bar on deck five.

Then from 1991 to 1996 I was living in Germany, and every so often I would drive back through the Netherlands and down to Calais to catch a boat home. France, at that point in my life, was a corridor. Something you passed through with the windows up and a service station coffee going cold in the cup holder. No stopping, no immersion, no culture, no food worth the name, and certainly no wine, because I was driving and because at that age I thought wine was something your nan drank at Christmas.

Some of you reading this weren't born then. That's fine. It doesn't matter. France hasn't changed much since. France has also changed enormously. Both things are true and anyone who has been going regularly for thirty odd years will tell you the same.

What has changed most, I suspect, is me.

We are far more French than we like to admit

Before I get into the trips, let me lay out the case for why any of us feel that pull. Because I don't think being a Francophile is a personality choice. I think for a Brit it's closer to a genetic memory that eventually surfaces, usually somewhere around your fortieth birthday and usually while holding a glass of something red.

Start with the language. After 1066, Norman French became the language of the English court, the aristocracy and the legal system, and it stayed that way for over three hundred years. Depending on whose count you believe, somewhere between a quarter and a half of English vocabulary traces back to French or Anglo Norman. You can hear it most clearly on a plate. The Anglo Saxon peasants looked after the animals, so live animals kept their Germanic names, cow, pig, sheep, calf. The French speaking elite ate them, so the meat took French names, beef from boeuf, pork from porc, mutton from mouton, veal from veau. Class division, preserved in aspic, on your Sunday dinner.

And then there are the words we've simply stopped noticing are French at all. Rendezvous. Silhouette. Bouquet. Boutique. Cliché. Faux pas. Depot. Reservoir. Entrepreneur. Venue. Beige. Queue. Menu. We use them daily and think of them as ours. The British monarch's motto is still in French, Dieu et mon droit, God and my right. The motto of the Order of the Garter is Honi soit qui mal y pense, shame on him who thinks evil of it. The most English institutions we have are wearing French on their chest.

Law and government went the same way. Court, judge, jury, attorney, bailiff, verdict, felony, justice, all of it came into Middle English through Norman French. Parliament comes from parler, to speak. It is, quite literally, the talking shop, and has been since before anyone thought to complain about it. Sovereign, crown, duke, baron, chivalry, noble, all French imports.

British food culture would be unrecognisable without French technique. Auguste Escoffier came to London in 1890 with the hotelier César Ritz, took charge of the kitchens at the newly opened Savoy for eight years, and installed the brigade de cuisine, the hierarchy of executive chef, sous chef, chef de partie that basically every professional kitchen in Britain still runs on today. While he was there he invented peach Melba for the opera singer Nellie Melba. Modern restaurant dining in this country essentially starts with a Frenchman reorganising a hotel kitchen off the Strand. Every technique word we use is his language too. Sauté, braise, poach, purée, julienne, flambé, blanch. Every gravy and every bake in the British repertoire leans on the French mother sauces, béchamel, velouté, the humble roux. And our entire wine vocabulary, sommelier, terroir, vintage, champagne, was borrowed wholesale.

Even our buildings. When Henry III rebuilt Westminster Abbey from 1245, the design leaned hard on the great French cathedrals of the day. Which is a fun thing to have in your head, as I later would, standing in Reims and Amiens looking up.

And yes, before you ask, the shower. This one delights me. Primitive cold water contraptions had existed for centuries, but the modern hot, water efficient, multiple head shower is widely credited to Dr François Merry Delabost, surgeon general at the Bonne Nouvelle prison in Rouen, in 1872. He wanted something more sanitary and less wasteful than filling individual tubs for hundreds of prisoners, so he built a system that delivered hot water to several heads at once. The French army adopted it in their barracks through the 1870s, the Prussians copied it in 1879, then boarding schools, then public bathhouses, then eventually the rest of us. Every morning, you are standing in a French prison innovation. Delabost, for the record, never made a penny from it. There's a small street named after him in Rouen and that's about it.

The bidet is also French, from the 1700s. Britain famously declined that one, and continues to, on the grounds that we are a nation that would rather not.

So the love was always sitting there under the surface. The quintessential British daydream is still a farmhouse in the Dordogne or Provence, a weekend of Bordeaux, and a slow wander round a local market. That is not a coincidence. That is inheritance.

The awakening: a hillside near Limoges

My first real experience of France, the kind where you actually stop and look at the place, came in the early 2000s. A friend's parents had moved out to the Nouvelle Aquitaine region, somewhere I could no longer find on a map at gunpoint. What I remember is flying into Limoges, driving for about an hour, then climbing a hill to a renovated farmhouse.

We ate on the patio in the evenings. When we couldn't be bothered with that we went down to the brasserie in the nearest village and ate whatever they were doing that day. And that was it. That was the whole trip. No itinerary, no attractions, no queueing for anything.

I loved it. The food, the wine, and yes, I'll admit it, the smoking with the wine, and the laughing, and the sitting outside long after the food had gone. That was where café culture landed for me properly. The deep, unembarrassed seriousness about food. The idea that different grapes make different wines and that this is worth caring about and discussing at length. The weather that lets you sit outdoors from lunch until it's dark without anyone bringing you a blanket and an apologetic look.

Eating outside became my default preference everywhere I went after that, which for about fifteen years in Britain meant a certain amount of disappointment.

Worth saying, because people get funny about it: Britain's full embrace of outdoor eating came after a plague. Yes, London had its spots, and yes, a few big cities had pockets of it before. But the national shift is recent and it's traceable to a specific piece of law. The Business and Planning Act 2020 came in that July and created a fast track pavement licence at a hundred quid, so pubs, cafés and restaurants could throw tables and chairs onto the pavement while Covid restrictions made indoor trade impossible. Roads got closed at weekends. Territory got marked out in planters and chairs. It worked so well that the Levelling Up and Regeneration Act 2023 made the regime permanent. So the next time you're sat on a pavement in Nottingham with a glass of something, you're enjoying emergency pandemic legislation that everyone quietly agreed to keep. That's a fact, not a vibe.

After Limoges came the French cookbooks. Then the French café music on the playlist while I disappeared into a three hour cook fest, coq au vin, cassoulet, anything with a long enough method to justify opening a bottle of Pinot Noir at the start of it and finishing it by the time the thing came out of the oven.

I never did take the French lessons. I remain emotionally scarred by dropping Welsh at school in favour of French, only to discover that my Welsh, which was mediocre, was still substantially better than my French, which was an international incident waiting to happen. Somewhere out there is a retired French teacher who once looked at a Welsh kid and briefly imagined a student who might one day read Flaubert in the original, and who instead got me, and my accent, doing things to her language that would have been prosecutable in a more sensitive era.

2018: down the Dordogne in a kayak, with Jimi and Andy

Then came the big one. July 2018. Ten days away, seven of them on the water, 121 kilometres, 75 miles, from Argentat down to Beynac, with Jimi and Andy.

There's nothing quite like kayaking for soothing the soul, and I say that as someone who has been doing it for years, whether that's the Dordogne or the Trent twenty minutes from my front door. It gives you two things that don't normally sit together. Long stretches of pure solitude where it's just you, the water and the noise of your own paddle, and then the shared laughter and camaraderie of being somewhere ridiculous with your closest mates. Add a campfire at the end of the day and you've got the full set.

Here's why the Dordogne is the river everyone picks. In 2012 UNESCO designated the Dordogne and its whole watershed a Biosphere Reserve, the largest in France, and it remains the only French river with that status for its entire basin. It is not a wilderness. It's a lived in, farmed, fished, castle infested valley that has simply been looked after for a very long time. And in July, in the middle of a proper French summer, we barely saw another kayaker. Seven days of near empty water, letting the current do the work through country that looks like nothing has happened to it in three hundred years.

We flew East Midlands to Limoges, which felt like a nice bit of circularity given Limoges was where my French education began twenty odd years earlier. Straight to the Lidl by the train station for wine, food and whatever camping bits we'd optimistically decided to buy on arrival rather than pack. Then the train out to Saint Denis Près Martel, then forty minutes on foot through country lanes to Camping Lot Les Granges, arriving at half eight at night straight into a French campsite party that was already well underway and had no intention of stopping for us. That set the tone.

We used Safaraid, the canoe company at Vayrac, and I'd recommend them without hesitation. They plan it, book it, provide the boats and safety kit, bus you to the start, and, crucially, move your luggage between campsites every day. They collect at half eleven and it's waiting for you by three. You keep your life jacket, paddle and waterproof barrel with you and everything else goes by road. That single detail is the difference between a holiday and an expedition. Paddling hours are nine until six, and you'll want all of them, not because you need the time but because you'll want to waste it.

The stages went like this. Argentat to Beaulieu, 18km. Beaulieu to Vayrac, 23km, the longest day, and one to pace yourself on. Vayrac to Saint Sozy, 18km. Saint Sozy to Souillac, 18km. Souillac to Saint Julien de Lampon, 14km. Saint Julien to Vitrac, 16km. Then Vitrac to Beynac, 14km, and done. Roughly four hours of paddling for every twelve kilometres, which leaves the rest of the day for exactly the sort of long lunch you came for.

You start up in the Corrèze, wooded hills, quicker water, a rapid called Malpas not far below Argentat which translates roughly as "bad passage" and which does a lot to focus the mind on day one when your dry bags are packed badly and your shoulders don't yet know what's coming. Then it opens out. Beaulieu sur Dordogne with its chapel above the bank. Limestone cliffs. Ancient stone bridges. Castles appearing over the treeline. The occasional riverside café that exists, as far as you can tell, purely to sell you lunch and a cold beer at the exact moment you'd sell a kidney for both.

And then the final day, which is the reason anyone does this. You come round the Cingle de Montfort with the castle above you, pass beneath Domme sitting up on its plateau, and then La Roque Gageac appears, a village pressed flat against the base of a cliff, officially one of the most beautiful villages in France and troglodyte in origin, because people used to live up in that rock face to get away from Vikings. Then Castelnaud on its hill, the hanging gardens of Marqueyssac opposite, the little château of Fayrac on your left, and finally Beynac in front of you, a fortress on a cliff that has been watching this water for nine centuries.

Worth knowing while you're floating past it in wet shorts. During the Hundred Years War this river was the border. Beynac held for the French, Castelnaud sat directly opposite and spent long stretches held by the English, and the castles changed hands repeatedly. So you are paddling, in a plastic boat, down what was for a century the front line between our two countries, and the whole thing has since been converted into somewhere you can buy an ice cream.

But it wasn't all quiet contemplation and heritage appreciation. Two things from that week come up every single time the three of us are in a room.

The first was Saint Sozy. Sleepy little village, and we rolled in to find it in full festival mode, which would have been perfect except there wasn't a cash machine within a country mile and we had nothing on us. Enter a group of Welsh expats and their French mates, who took one look at two damp Englishmen and one Welshman counting coins and adopted us for the evening. We were fed, watered and entertained until well past the point of sensibility. I've said elsewhere in this piece that the French are set up for hospitality in a way we still aren't, and that night is my evidence. Also, for the record, Bon Jovi is the universal language of international friendship. Every nation on earth knows the words. Test it anywhere.

The second was the little out of the way restaurant where we spent a good ten minutes butchering our way through an order in French, with the waiter listening patiently, until he finally cracked and said, in a flawless Bedford accent, "It's alright boys, I'm from Bedford, ain't I?" Half the hospitality staff in rural France are British expats. You will be humbled at some point. Accept it.

And then there was the penultimate night, at which Jimi's hair met its end. Shaved clean off before our return to Limoges, in a ceremony that seemed entirely reasonable at the time and which I suspect looked less reasonable at the airport. Camping trips have their own logic. Nobody has ever successfully explained it to an outsider.

The rhythm sorts itself out within about forty eight hours. Up, eat something you shouldn't, break camp badly, get on the water, paddle, stop on a gravel beach because someone's spotted a good one, swim, eat bread and cheese and whatever charcuterie survived the morning, get back on, paddle, find where you're sleeping, go and find dinner, drink more than is strictly compatible with tomorrow's eighteen kilometres, repeat.

And you get fitter every day without noticing. That's the bit nobody tells you. By day four you're paddling stronger than you did on day one while simultaneously eating and drinking like a man with no future. Somewhere in the middle of all that there's something more profound going on too. The rhythmic dip of the paddle is close to meditative, and you get a clarity out on the water that you simply don't find within range of a phone signal.

Eight years on and it's still doing work at a table. That's my measure of a good trip. Not the photographs. The fact that we're still telling it.

If you want to do it yourself

Book it through Safaraid at canoe-kayak-dordogne.comand let them design the itinerary.

Ours was ten days including travel, July for guaranteed heat.

Take cash. Rural ATMs are scarce and the one time you need one, there won't be one, as Saint Sozy taught us. Shops keep proper French hours, nine until twelve and three until seven, so plan your supplies around that or go hungry with dignity.

Get everyone a sit on top kayak. You can start out in two man canoes if you like, and the entertainment value is genuinely high, but so is the capsizing and so is the divorce rate. Efficiency low, comedy high. Your call.

Keep your life jacket on. French rivers are deeper than they look. Pull the boats well clear of the water's edge overnight, and take a small padlock and chain for them.

Pack a waterproof jacket even in July, quick dry shorts, river shoes, factor fifty and more of it than you think, a head torch, rope for tying boats and drying clothes, and one shirt and a decent pair of shoes so you can walk into a restaurant looking like a person rather than a survivor. Take a small guitar if anyone can play. Take bin bags. Don't kill bees, you'll feel guilty for days.

And implement the twenty yard rule immediately if anyone in the group snores. Pitch their tent twenty yards away. Your sleep matters more than their feelings and they'll get over it.

Don't overthink it and don't over plan it. Just book it.

Closer to home

Because I should say it in a Notts magazine: you don't need France to do this. Our annual trip is Bleasby on the Trent, camping at Boat Lane Campsite, which Olive and her partner run, and it's a simple, perfect spot with the river a stone's throw away and, crucially, campfires allowed. That's where my Russian roulette curry gets an airing, the one seasoned with bird's eye chillies distributed at random, so that in the dusk nobody knows who's about to get one until the screaming starts.

The routine is Friday afternoon arrival, tents up, fire going, bottle of red. Saturday we're sluggish, but after breakfast the boats go in. Paddle upstream to Gunthorpe and the Unicorn does a very good lunch before the current carries you home, or go downstream to Fiskerton and the Bromley, which is equally good but involves paddling back upstream afterwards, which is a considerably worse idea after three pints than it sounds at eleven in the morning.

The Trent isn't the Dordogne. You would not swim in it. But it's a lovely river to paddle and Bleasby is fifteen miles away.

2023: the World Cup we didn't watch

More recently there was the trip I took with Ant around northeast France for the Rugby World Cup in September 2023.

The plan, and I use the word generously, was to attend no actual matches. None. Not one. Instead we'd move between towns and watch the games in bars, on the basis that being in France while France hosted a World Cup was the point, and the rugby was more of a scheduling device. We were there to soak up the atmosphere like cultural sponges who had forgotten to pack any actual culture.

The first night we camped. It was also the last night we camped.

Saint Quentin, in the Aisne. Middle of the night, a huge tree came down and landed squarely on my car. Squarely. The location of which could very easily have been our tents, had I not decided at the last minute to move them, a decision that was less strategic genius and more "this spot looks a bit less muddy." It's the kind of near death experience that makes you reassess your priorities, specifically whether camping under dodgy looking French trees counts as adventure travel or as an elaborate suicide attempt with a groundsheet.

We switched to budget hotels the next morning with the enthusiasm of men who have recently been shown something.

Saint Quentin deserves better than being the place where my car got flattened, so let me make amends. It has one of the finest squares in northern France, and on it a Hôtel de Ville completed in 1509 in flamboyant Gothic with a heavy Flemish accent, its facade carrying around 173 carved figures of medieval town life. Behind that facade is the twist: the town was wrecked in the First World War, and when they rebuilt the interior in 1925 and 1926 they did it in full Art Deco. So you walk in through late medieval stonework and end up in a 1920s council chamber. The town has something like 3,000 Art Deco facades as a result of that rebuilding, which makes it one of the great overlooked architectural towns of France. The basilica is the second largest religious building in Picardy after Amiens Cathedral, it took three centuries to build, and it has never actually been a cathedral. In July and August they dump sand on the main square and turn it into a beach. We missed that by about a fortnight, which is probably for the best given the mood.

From there we looped southeast to Reims, and that's where we watched the opening game of the tournament, France against New Zealand on Friday 8 September. France won 27 to 13, in a heat that was punishing even for the players, and the city went up. Watching that in a café in Reims, surrounded by French people losing their minds, is about as close to the point of the whole trip as we got.

Reims is a beautiful city and I'd put it on anyone's list. Notre Dame de Reims is a masterpiece of Gothic architecture and it is, in a very real sense, where France was made. Thirty three kings of France were crowned in it, the last of them Charles X in 1825, and it was here that Charles VII was crowned in 1429 with Joan of Arc standing in the room. Clovis, first king of the Franks, was baptised on the site back in the fifth century. It was shelled to pieces in the First World War and painstakingly restored, partly on American money, and it's been UNESCO listed since 1991 along with the Palais du Tau next door and the Abbey of Saint Remi. Go and find the Smiling Angel on the facade. Then go and sit in Place Drouet d'Erlon, which is the long café and bar spine of the city, and have a drink under the fountain. And obviously, it's Champagne. The stuff is made and stored in chalk cellars under your feet.

Then we looped back north to Amiens, which I hadn't expected to love as much as I did. The cathedral there is the largest Gothic building in France by volume, close to 200,000 cubic metres, roughly twice the size of Notre Dame in Paris, 145 metres long with vaults over 42 metres up. It was built between 1220 and 1288 to house what was believed to be the head of John the Baptist, brought back from Constantinople during the Crusades, and the pilgrim money that relic generated is what paid for the thing. UNESCO listed since 1981. On summer evenings they light the west front to recreate its original paint scheme, because these buildings were never meant to be bare stone, they were meant to be gaudy, and seeing it done properly rewires your idea of what a medieval cathedral looked like.

Behind it is the Quartier Saint Leu, canals and cafés and low coloured houses, and beyond that the hortillonnages, floating market gardens cultivated on a watery maze of channels since Roman times and still farmed today. They call it the little Venice of the north, which is the kind of thing every town with a canal claims, except here it holds up. Jules Verne lived in Amiens for the last thirty four years of his life and is buried there. Eat a ficelle picarde while you're at it, a crêpe rolled around ham, mushrooms, shallots and cream, then baked. It is exactly as good as that sounds.

Then further north again to Lille for Wales against Fiji on the Sunday, the opening game of the Welsh campaign. Wales won 32 to 26, and won it by the width of a fingernail, having been 32 to 14 up and then hanging on while Fiji threw everything at them. Semi Radradra dropped the ball with the line at his mercy in the final play. Dan Biggar got man of the match. Wales made 248 tackles that afternoon. Fiji made 70. You could feel that in the bar.

I should confess we watched it in an Irish pub. We were rushing around Lille trying to find anywhere with the game on and we took what was going. It was a French Irish pub, if that helps, which is its own genre and a fine one. We made friends, obviously. That's the thing about France during a World Cup, everyone is looking for someone to talk to about it.

Lille itself is a proper city and criminally under visited by us lot given it's an hour and a half from London. Flemish architecture, a huge square, Vieux Lille full of good places to eat. Brasserie La Chicorée at 15 Place Rihour, a stone's throw from the Grand Place and right opposite the metro, has been going since 1903 and is open effectively round the clock, which is a dangerous quality in a brasserie. Their oysters are particularly delightful, and the local stuff, carbonnade flamande and potjevleesch, is worth ordering even when you don't fully know what's coming.

We had a great few days. A tree fell on my car and we still had a great few days. That's France for you.

Now: Paris, then the sea, with the boy

Which brings me to the thing we do now, and the reason I'm writing any of this.

For the last couple of years, the summer holiday has started the same way. Eurostar out of St Pancras, about ten days, three days in Paris, then a train north to the Normandy coast for five days on a beach, then back to Paris for a couple more days before coming home. Two hours and sixteen minutes, city centre to city centre. That's the whole journey. You walk into a station in London and you walk out of a station in Paris, no airport, no transfers, no plastic tray, no standing in socks at six in the morning wondering where your belt went. About twenty minutes of that is spent under the sea, which the boy still finds more impressive than most of the actual attractions.

In Paris we stay either central or out in Neuilly, and the three days go roughly like this.

The Paradox Museum at 38 Boulevard des Italiens, near the Opéra Garnier, is an easy win. Ninety odd optical illusions and trompe l'oeil rooms over three floors, about ninety minutes of walking on ceilings and shrinking your family and taking photographs that look like they've been faked. It's silly and it's brilliant and children love it.

Then a couple of days at the Jardin d'Acclimatation in the Bois de Boulogne, which is the sleeper hit of Paris with kids. It's small but superbly run, around forty attractions across nineteen hectares, plus a water and fountain feature where they can paddle, which during these recurring heatwaves is not a nice extra, it's the entire strategy. It's also older than you'd think. Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie opened it in October 1860, inspired by the London parks they'd enjoyed as guests of Queen Victoria, making it the first leisure park in France. LVMH own it now and gave it a full restoration in 2018. It sits right next to the Fondation Louis Vuitton, so one of you can go and look at art while the others go on the flying chairs.

The trick with kids in Paris, and I'd stand by this anywhere, is to give them a solid block of running about in the middle of the day so that you have earned the right to a long dinner in the evening. A morning of museums followed by an evening of restaurants is how you end up with a miserable child and a ruined night. Amusement park in the afternoon, boat on the Seine as you're winding down, then out to eat, and everyone is on the same side.

Then it's over to Gare Saint Lazare and north.

The first year we went to Cabourg. Trains from Saint Lazare to Trouville Deauville take a shade over two hours, and then you change onto the little branch line for Dives Cabourg, another half hour, about sixteen kilometres up the coast. Cabourg is a Belle Époque seaside resort on the Côte Fleurie with about four kilometres of fine sand, and the Promenade Marcel Proust running along the seawall in front of it, said to be the longest pedestrian promenade in Europe. It's named after Proust because Proust spent every summer there from 1907 until the First World War, staying in the Grand Hôtel, which was built in 1907 and is still sitting there on the sand at Les Jardins du Casino looking exactly as it should. He renamed the town Balbec and put it in À la recherche du temps perdu. You can ask to see room 414, done out in period. The main street behind the front is lined with restaurants and bars and the whole place has that slightly formal, slightly faded, entirely lovely quality that French seaside towns do better than anyone.

This year, the heatwave year of 2026, we went to Trouville sur Mer instead, which means no change at all, straight through from Paris Saint Lazare in about two hours and a quarter. We stayed at the Cures Marines, right on the beach.

The hotel is worth a paragraph on its own. It's housed in the old Trouville casino, built in 1912 to a design by Alexandre Durville and intended to be the largest casino in Europe. It was a military hospital in the First World War, an Allied headquarters after the D Day landings in the Second, and from the 1950s the west wing housed a seawater therapy centre called Les Cures Marines, which is where the name comes from. Then it sat dark for years. Accor took it on and reopened it in 2015 as a five star hotel with 103 rooms, a thalassotherapy spa, and a restaurant in what is effectively a ballroom facing the sand. It's the sort of building where you walk in with wet feet and a bucket and spade and nobody minds.

Trouville itself is my kind of seaside town, because it is still a working one. Twenty seven or so trawlers land into the port and supply the eleven stalls of the covered fish market by the water, and the town is the leading mackerel port of the lower Seine. Population of about five thousand, which quadruples in summer. The beach has been known for centuries as la Reine des Plages, the Queen of Beaches, and the wooden boardwalk along it, the Promenade des Planches, was laid in 1867 in azobé wood, the first boardwalk on the Normandy coast. It's now called the Promenade Savignac after Raymond Savignac, the great French poster artist, who retired to Trouville and lived there until his death in 2002. His work is displayed along it, and the benches carry the names of the writers and artists who came here.

And they all came here. The painter Charles Mozin turned up in 1825 and effectively started the whole thing. Eugène Boudin painted here. Monet painted his first seascapes here. Alexandre Dumas arrived in the 1830s and called it the most picturesque village in Normandy. Flaubert came in 1836 as a teenager, fell hopelessly for an older married woman, and spent the rest of his career writing her into things. Proust stayed at the Hôtel des Roches Noires. Marguerite Duras loved it so much she bought an apartment in the same building and came back every year from 1963. There is a statue of Flaubert by the casino.

Across the estuary is Deauville, which is glossier, richer and has the racecourse and the film festival. Trouville is the scruffier, warmer, more bohemian one, and it's the one I'd send you to with a family.

How to actually do a French beach holiday, according to me

These are beach holidays. Plan the day around the sea and the sand and nothing else.

Go to the market or the supermarket in the morning. Get bread, get ham, get cheese, get tomatoes, get whatever fruit looks embarrassed to be that good. Make jambon and cheese baguettes on the beach. Take a bottle of Pinot Noir or a decent Bordeaux, take water, take too much of everything. Sit there for six hours. Swim when it gets too hot. That's the day. That's it. Nobody needs an itinerary.

Then head out in the evening for dinner, and here's my controversial position: don't agonise over which restaurant. Don't spend forty minutes on your phone cross referencing reviews while your family stands in the street getting hungrier. In these towns it is all, broadly, good. The big touristy ones on the front have wider menus and the small ones have shorter ones, but the quality is more level than you'd expect, because the supply chain is the same, the boats are the same, the standards are the same, and the cooking traditions are centuries deep. Walk about, find the place with the vibe you like, sit down. You'll be fine.

The one non negotiable in our house is poulet. The boy is properly fussy, so anything with chicken on the menu is a safe harbour, and in Normandy that's easy because one of the great local dishes is poulet vallée d'Auge, chicken Normandy, bone in chicken braised with bacon, onions, apples and dry cider, finished with cream or crème fraîche. It's magnificent. And for the fussy ones, you just ask for the sauce on the side. No French waiter has ever once looked at me strangely for asking. They have children too.

What gets me about these towns is what they do with basic ingredients. Radishes and cornichons scattered over a board of cheese and charcuterie and suddenly it's a thing. Herring and potato salad on every starter menu, fresh and wholesome and filling and better than it has any right to be. Seafood platters pulled out of the water that morning, served with proper chips, cut and cooked in the building. Butcher's cuts and steaks to die for. Everything salty and simple and made with a couple of hundred years of practice behind it.

Try sitting at a restaurant on the front in Trouville watching the sun go down, after a bowl of moules marinière and most of a bottle of red, without feeling slightly ethereal. You can't. I've tested it repeatedly, under controlled conditions, for research.

Why France, if you've got kids

Because it removes the friction.

You can be in Paris in two hours sixteen from central London with no airport in the equation. From Paris, the entire country is on a train from a mainline station, and the Normandy coast is another two hours from Saint Lazare. Ten days, three cities and a beach, and the longest single journey your child has to sit through is about the length of a film.

Because you can genuinely combine things that don't normally sit together. Food, wine, beaches, sea, and city life, alongside actual things for children to do. Amusement park and Michelin ambitions in the same day. A morning on the sand and an evening in a room where they've been cooking properly since before your country had electricity.

Because it's set up for families in a way we still aren't. Children in restaurants at nine in the evening is normal, not an act of provocation. Nobody sighs.

And because, for me, it's a soft landing every time. It's twenty one miles from Dover to Calais. Twenty one. It's us, it's them, it's different, and it's the same, and after thirty odd years of going I still get the same feeling stepping off the train that I got on the beer cruise, minus the hangover and plus a functioning appreciation of grape varieties.

So yes. I'm a Francophile. I've made my peace with it.

And if those pesky Russians ever do invade, it's a quick hop back to Blighty to bunker down in your nearest Wetherspoon's, Lloyds or Slug and Lettuce. Or, for me, Bistrot Pierre. Or the Ivy, if I can get a booking.

Profite bien de ta journée, people.