I hated French at school. The subject I dreaded more than any other, it was the only one I really tried hard to revise for at GCSE level, because I just couldn’t accept that I was so bad at it. I ended up with a C — a glorious future in the Foreign Office cut short.

This was even more impressive considering that my mother has a degree in French literature and her mother was an obsessive Francophile, my dad spoke fluent French and we had lots of French books in the home. To add to this, dad also spoke German, Spanish and Serbo-Croat, among other things, and once struck up a conversation with a bunch of Croatian builders who had been working on our building for weeks (much to their horror).

I sometimes wonder if the problem can be traced back to primary school, where my French teacher took a great dislike to me, for some inexplicable reason thinking me arrogant. At secondary school I was no better, and at one parents’ evening when mum asked my Lancashire-born teacher why I had such an aversion to French, he replied: ‘Madame, it is the natural condition of an Englishman.’

Yet as an adult I felt completely different. From my early thirties we started visiting France, taking that epic journey from Calais in our VW Golf with a baby in the back, naively unappreciative of the sheer size of the place (for Americans, about the same as Texas). I still remember the intense sense of tiredness and exhaustion after almost a day of non-stop driving, yet feeling we were towards the end — then seeing a sign showing that we still had another 500 km to go (ie roughly London to Scotland).

It was entirely worth it; it always is. I came to love visiting France, and taking in the sights and smells, the food, and especially the history. I even grew to love the language, a beautiful tongue that will always sound sophisticated and sexy to English ears.

A couple of years later I started French at night school. Before the birth of our first child, I had done a couple of terms of German in the evening, which was both easier and harder; the vocabulary was fairly straightforward, being so closely related (95 of the 100 most common words in our language come from Old English.) But when it came to the grammar, I just wanted to cry. (WHY do you need five different ways of saying ‘the’?)

But French is hard, I never reached proficiency, and I tried again a few years later, to no great success. I can read it reasonably well, but in conversations clam up, and for some reason all I can think to say is ‘Pour aller à la gare?’

French has always been a tricky language for English speakers to master, perhaps in part because of the residual love–hate