Samantha and I have been together ten years this week. Which is nice.

When I was a kid, school dinners were school dinners. They consisted of meat pie (what sort of meat exactly was never really discussed), potatoes and vegetables that had been cooked with reference to a calendar rather than a kitchen timer. You ate what was in front of you, and if you were lucky there was some weird psychedelic dessert like blancmange, sponge pudding with pink custard or (and I admit this may have been a speciality of my school) ginger sponge with a lime sauce that looked disconcertingly like the stuff you use to make bubbles when you do the dishes.

Nowadays, things are different. In the UK, nutritional standards for school dinners were done away with in the 1980s – and you can guess the result. Add the fact that costs have been cut so far that the average spend per child is about €0.50 per day, and it’s perhaps no wonder that British kids aren’t just being fed food that doesn’t do them any good; they’re being fed food that will shorten their lives.

Take Bernard Matthew’s infamous “Turkey Twizzlers”, which are sort of extruded slaughterhouse sweepings covered in a bread-like substance, deep fried and fed to the nation’s future. They’re 21% fat, which is quite an achievement when you consider that Turkey is by nature quite a lean meat.

Tell me that’s a good food and I’ll tell you you’re wrong. They’re such awful things that even the Scots (who famously have the worst diets in Europe) have banned them from their schools. The English, of course, are dragging their feet.

Incidentally, the army spends four times that amount each day to feed its dogs.

Nutritional standards were reintroduced in 2001. But in a typically new-Labour weasel fashion, it was only incumbent upon schools to make healthy food available. There was nothing about making sure the kids actually ate it (despite schools being in loco parentis and so responsible for their children’s welfare), and there was no requirement even for a system to monitor what kids actually were eating. Genius.

So what happens is that the middle class parents make packed lunches for their kids, getting ripped off in the process and having lots and lots of marketing pushed their way for high-fat, high-sugar products like Dairylea Dunkers (fatty cheese spread with salty breadsticks) and the dreadful Sunny Delight. But at least they get a choice. The poor kids are forced to take the school meals, and because the tastes you develop at an early age stay with you for life – they’re stuck with a palate that never develops beyond processed food (ask yourself why young people seem to prefer crap like Budweiser and alcopops over more sophisticated drinks).

I’m quite interested in all this at the moment because Isobel is off to the ecole maternelle in September and will be having her lunch at school. We went down to the school the other day, and noticed the menu for that week was posted next to the front door.

Here’s what we learned. French kids sit down to a four-course meal every single day. It’s nutritionally balanced, and it sounds very tasty indeed. If your French is up to it, you can see what’s on offer here. Just choose one of the schools from the drop-down menu.

I also found out, by talking to my colleagues, that kids have food appreciation languages in the infant school, and that the teachers at least have wine with their meals at the lycées.

Obviously school dinners are school dinners – and I’m sure the stuff will taste a lot less good than it sounds. That’s after all the nature of mass catering. But doesn’t that sound a little more agreeable than Turkey Twizzlers and Sunny bloody Delight?

No smoke without fire

I have a theory that the cost of living, if you aggregate everything, is pretty much the same all over the world. Take the comparison between Singapore and Sweden, which are at two ends of the spectrum in terms of how their economies are run.

In Sweden, you pay a lot of tax - up to 50 or 60%. But that means healthcare is pretty much free, the transport network is very heavily subsidised, and it's generally not as expensive as you might think.

In Singapore, you pay next to no tax (15% or so income tax, 2% sales tax and that's about your lot). But things like rent and health insurance and eating out anywhere posh are horrendously expensive. In the end, I had about the same amount of money left at the end of every month over there as I did when I was in Stockholm.

One exception seems to be the UK, which is getting horrendously expensive for everything from the price of housing to the price of petrol to things like broadband internet access, which seems to be betwen two and three times the price I pay here in France.

But I had a bit of a shock on Saturday, when I bought a smoke alarm. I'd been worrying all week since I heard the story of one of my colleagues, who had a fire in her building, two floor below where she lived. Fortunately she wasn't in, and apart from a bit of smoke damage no harm was done. But the woman that was asleep in the flat below her was killed. It made me realise that you can take all the precautions you like in your own place, but living in the situation I'm in you're dependent on other people.

I tried Castorama (our local DIY superstore) and a couple of supermarkets without any luck. In the UK there's been a terrific amount of publicity regarding smoke alarms and how they dramatically improve your chances of survival if there's a fire in your home. As a result, you'll be able to pick up a smoke alarm for under a fiver in any supermarket, DIY store or similar.

In France it seems there hasn't been the same interest, and this one cost me £40. I know I'm getting old, but I didn't have to think about it. The chances might be infintitessimal, but can you imagine how I'd feel if I didn't buy one and something ended up happening to Sam or Isobel?

Toilet Humour

This internal email was forwarded to me by a friend who'd better remain nameless. I think it speaks for itself:

We have the situation where someone deliberately blocked toilets in both of the Gents situated in the Office area of the factory, sometime between 2.00 and 2.30 pm this afternoon (Wednesday). If you heard a lot of "rustling" (as almost a complete roll of paper was unwound from the roll and stuffed down the toilet in each case) I should be very interested to hear from you. Call XXXX from an internal phone, anonymously if you wish.

Despite its nature it would be appreciated if you would pass this message down to anyone not on E Mail.

Thank you for your assistance in helping to identify this obviously disturbed person.

It raises all sorts of issues, doesn't it?