The French couple did not speak much English so I rattled on in my best French, thinking I was doing a fine job.

She asked the usual question, how long had we lived in this lovely house? And I assumed she was assuming we were Irish and it had been in our family for generations.

Guests always like to think this and I don’t like to completely disabuse them of it. They’ve come to West Cork for an authentic experience so I massage the Englishness out of the BB and me as best I can, on a customer service basis.

My usual shtick poured forth, therefore, in my best French. And my best French ought not to be too bad. I once lived in France, in a village near Orléans. I was 18 and had fled home at the first opportunity, as young people used to do in those days.

I was not able to take up a place at university, because I failed to get into my first choice. Ludicrously enough, I sat the Oxbridge exam from a desk in a school in Coventry thinking that maybe I would be the one person from Coventry that year who they let into Oxford.

I sat in the drama studio and I wrote possibly the worst English lit critical theory essay ever produced, because my hand was stiff with nerves.

What no one told me was that having put down Oxford, Teddy Hall, where I then had a bad interview with a lady with hairy legs, I ruined all my other choices. Irrespective of how much Hairy Legs didn’t want me, which was a lot, I think, East Anglia and a few other top places then said: ‘Naff off if you think we’re taking Oxford’s rejects.’

This was how it worked then. I didn’t get into my second or third choice and, in those days, you threw your toys out of the pram if only Keele said yes to you.

So off I flounced to France, having consulted the Lady, which was then the bible of au pair jobs, while I put through another application for the following year to go to Royal Holloway – first choice, only choice. And it worked. They said yes.

I lived with a family in Combleux, where I was a very good nanny to their lovely baby but a very bad au pair in every other respect, because I was 18 and clueless. But I did perfect my French.

I still imagine I can speak it fluently. So I rattled on to the couple from Nîmes and they nodded, looked occasionally confused, but otherwise made polite noises.

This is what I thought I said to take the edge off our Englishness, for she was so enamoured with Ireland that she had been all the way to Kerry to buy a tin whistle, and was playing it in her room every day.

So this was my explanation of the BB and me, which I confess veered between French and English as I scoured the depths of my vocabulary: Mon mari, I said, was Italian on his mother’s side, French and German on his father’s side. Moitié-Moitié.

But his mother left his father when he was very young and his seconde mère, deuxième mère sorry, was Irlandais, from Donegal. He was brought up by an Irlandais mère.

I didn’t say in Donegal. I did specify Balham and Brighton. Then I explained that I am half-Italian, on my mother’s side. So a vrai mixe. We lived for years in London and now we are en Irlande because mon mari likes the idea of returning to his deuxième mère’s Irlandais roots (and we want an EU passport, but I left that bit out).

A few nights later, it was the BB’s birthday and we sat on the patio with a pavlova. The guests got out of their minivan, returning from their day trip, and I asked them to join us. We had a very merry time and the conversation in Franglais rattled on a treat, with the BB doing his ridiculous thing of speaking very slowly in bad English as if that makes him comprehensible to foreigners.

There then followed a diatribe in which she listed everything the English have ever done wrong

We touched on the subject of all the places they had travelled to and England reared its head. Her face turned to thunder and she shouted: ‘Je déteste les Anglais!’ Her little grey husband, curled in his chair, shrank further and nodded balefully.

There then followed a diatribe in which she listed everything the English have ever done wrong including two world wars, where their actions were somehow bad even when they saved the French, and the famine in Ireland.

She shouted and shouted about how much she detested les Anglais until I started to get scared that she knew we were English and had deceived her, and she was about to take a dessert knife and slash us to bits – for Agincourt! And then I realised my years-old French had been churning out a load
of cobblers.

They were so sure we were Irish born and bred that they wanted to charm us by denouncing the Brits. I looked at the BB and he looked at me. We sat in silence for a few moments, and then he shouted out: ‘Putains! Yes? Pigs! Eh! Les gros pig! Yes?’ And he started making oinking noises.

‘Roast beef!’ I shouted, thinking let’s get off the subject of pigs, for that might be a bit much. But it was fine. The French people were clapping for joy, then stuffing pavlova down their faces with renewed gusto.