Not ill — just naughty

Apart from the weather, the food and the landscape, one of the great joys of visiting France is to witness the behaviour of the children there, which is in such contrast to the noisy, aggressive, defiant, whingeing, tiresome selfishness of all too many British youngsters. Even when surrounded by families in a French restaurant, you can still hold a conversation without being constantly interrupted by puerile screeching, crying, charging and table-thumping. And whenever I reach the Channel Tunnel terminal at Calais on the return leg of a trip to France, I know from the din of temper tantrums that I am once more approaching the land of the spoilt brat.

Yet, according to influential psychiatric opinion, the badly behaved child here deserves our sympathy rather than our condemnation. For the seven-year-old boy yelling his head off or kicking other children is actually suffering from a worrying medical condition, known as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, or ADHD.