Watching the endless French television coverage of snow Oop North - I suppose the northern France equivalent is pays des ch'tis - it occurred to us that our grand return to France had originally been planned for March 11.
Needless to say, I would not have been so quick to complain about attention to the weather reaching overkill had I been among the hundreds trapped and going nowhere for many long hours on a glacial autoroute blocked by snow and jack-knifed lorries.
But I came early, as those paying attention will recall, and Mme Salut avoided Sussex and the north of France altogether when she followed this week by flying over them from cold but snow-free Stansted to warm Marseille.
So from the smug, unwintry half of France south of the Loire it does look excessive to devote the first half-hour of a 40-minute news bulletin to the weather, leaving hardly any time even for puffs of smoke, albeit black at that stage, from the Sistine Chapel chimney.
The old bore would now launch into a stream of memories of when winter was always winter and we just got on with it. How we'd be up at 6am to do our paper rounds, trudging through several inches of snow to deliver newspapers that had effortlessly found their way into the shops from far-off London or Manchester. And that we'd then be off to school, which was reached on time by the buses that were naturally still running or on foot if we lived closer.
In the days of free school milk, a punishment far worse than the cane involved sadistic teachers putting frozen bottles on the hot pipes to defrost. Being made to drink the semi-warm, lumpy and nauseating results was true child abuse.
But I wouldn't dream of falling into that life-went-on-then sort of generational point-scoring.
So I will just remind you of the opening lines of a Sandy Denny song (No End). They have appeared here before but bear repetition:
They said that it was snowingIn astounded tones, upon the newsI wonder why they’re always so surprised’Cos every year it snows
* Habemus Papam!
* And why, the people of Le Lavandou (well two or three of them) were asking today, is it Pope Francis for the English-speaking world, just as it was Benedict XVI, but François and Benoît, respectively, for the French? Is it just a Douvres/Dover, Londres/London thing or is there more to it?
The newsagent thought Benedict wouldn't work in French because it was mainly a girl's name, though I certainly know at least one male Benedict. That would not apply to Francis in any case. And we don't change other people's names to suit national variations.
The only thing I can think of is that since the Italians get Francisco and the Spanish Francesco, the Catholic church is just being very, well, catholic, about it. Answers on an electronic postcard ...
Photos from the Vatican's official site
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