Look, isn't that Camilla with the duty-free Malibu?

I counted them on, and I counted them off. Hundreds of British cars leaving the ferry at Boulogne and all bar a few sporting the old- style GB stickers. This is a shocking indictment of New Labour Britain - as a matter of principle I refused to leave the country before managing to track down one of those pretty stickers with the stars round them: the other ones simply shriek Euro-sceptic.

Holiday phobics are apparently another casualty of the work-obsessed Nineties, but I'm with Princess Diana on this one. Why take one, when four will do. While she has been jetting around in private Harrods' planes, Camilla Parker Bowles was spotted leaving Britain for Malaga on a charter flight. The pro-Parker Bowles campaign is stepping up; this was obviously a blatant PR move to show she has the common touch and can breathe in the "stench of humanity" like the rest of us. I hope she was properly briefed on Malaga airport etiquette; on the return journey she will need to equip herself with a toy donkey and respond to the call of duty free with a bottle of Malibu.

Apart from my stand on European Union car stickers, I'm not sure my family has contributed much to Anglo-French relations. It's strange, isn't it, but whereas English spoken in a French accent is considered charming and sexy, the French are completely intolerant of any deviation from perfect pronunciation and grammar. Every time my four-year-old sweetly uttered "merci", some French waitress would make a terrifying gargling sound back at her because she was not rolling her r's in the required manner. But it's the butchers who really cut you down to size. Having been caught out before by those innocent-looking Tesco-style chickens (you pick them up and suddenly these scary claws and heads unfurl from underneath the body like something out of a John Carpenter movie), I thought I'd play safe at the Super-U meat counter and ask for half a kilo of mince. "Bah! Les Anglais," sneered the butcher, delivering a long tirade to the rest of the waiting customers about how English people only ever buy mince.

Humiliating - but sadly, probably true.

For the children the main stumbling block to an "entente cordiale" was the French people's unsentimental attitude to animals, particularly the tendency to get on talking terms with their meat before eating it. At the 17th century "chambres d'hote" farmhouse where we broke our journey, the charming owners introduced the children to their four rabbits. Believers in the hard knocks school of life, we couldn't let them dwell under the illusion that the lives of these floppy-eared bunnies, lolloping happily in their free-range run, were quite as idyllic as they looked. Perhaps it was this harsh truth that caused the diplomatic incident at dinner. The meal started well - our hosts joined us and the Dutch couple who were also staying - but just as we were silently savouring the delicacy of the filo-wrapped chevre, one of the children broke wind. Now this was not an abrupt emission that could easily be disguised by the scraping of a chair leg; it was more of a symphony, really. Nathalie and Bruno gamely made some remark about their dog, but as he had died since we were there last year, this was not convincing. I, meanwhile, was stunned into silence - my keen sense of directional hearing had led me to the culprit (who has asked for anonymity) and it was not who I expected. "I fart all the time, and you never write about it," my 10-year-old, reading over my shoulder, has just protested with a true sense of sibling injustice. Quite.

My file of I-know-a woman-who-danced-with-a-man-who-danced-with-a-woman- who-danced-with-Tony Blair stories is coming on nicely. I'm not sure whether being vaguely in the same south-west area of France for our holiday counts for much, but now to add to my dinner party status, already elevated by my daughter's godfather's best friend playing in Ugly Rumours with the Blessed Blair at Oxford, I can divulge that on his way down to Tuscany Tony stopped for a coffee in my best friend's boyfriend's family village ... Bragging apart, though, the reason the Blairs and I steer clear of the more popular coastal areas is the topless bathers. Ever since my eldest son asked in a loud voice why French women's "boobies" go up while mine go down, I have avoided places likely to result in comparisons. I got my come-uppance, however, in one of the fascinating and educational grottes which proliferate in this area of France ("If you don't behave, well go to another grotte," was our holiday refrain) - while the guide was tiresomely pointing out stalactites that supposedly looked like cauliflowers, the Virgin Mary or Princess Diana, my four-year-old declaimed her own interpretation of the wrinkly, pendulous appendages hanging down from the ceiling. Five years of breast-feeding, and this is the thanks I get.