My French lessons with Lord Nelson

Every Friday afternoon the foreign correspondent and I attend a French lady’s home for our one-hour French lesson. The foreign correspondent has lived happily in France for about 20 years with only ‘hallo’, ‘yes’, ‘red wine, please’, ‘same again, chief’, ‘keep it coming’ and ‘cheerio’. His wife is smoothly fluent and has been urging him for years to set himself the feat of learning French. It was at the end of January, when the subject came up during a four-hour lunch, that he surprised us all by agreeing that it was indeed high time. His one condition was that I make it a joint enterprise.

We have started from scratch as absolute beginners. So far we have had three lessons. In the first we learned the useful conversational gambit of asking everybody in the room how old they are. Our teacher is 65, gentle, elegant, intellectual and has a sense of humour — Dieu merci. We three sit down at a round table in her airy living room, our faces surgically masked. Last week I was last to arrive and found her and the foreign correspondent ready to go and each wearing two masks: a standard surgical mask underneath and one of those weird beaky jobs on top. Wearing two masks struck me as being as absurd as wearing two hats and I laughed, assuming it was a joke. It was no joke, however. Government advice was now double masks, they said sombrely. Had I not heard?

In spite of his spending most of his working life reporting from war zones throughout the world, the foreign correspondent (67) has not only remained stubbornly monoglot, but his English persona bears not the slightest taint of a foreign influence, least of all French.