The France Profonde column in Prospect Magazine was born four years ago, but I’d wanted to write about France ever since I moved here many years before that – to show France from another angle, through English eyes, unavoidably, but if I could, and with my French family, closer to the French.

With humour, but without mocking – there are enough doing that already.

Trying to avoid bald comparisons, too – they arouse the Colonel Blimp in all of us, and they’re misleading: even when we use the same word – education, culture, prime minister – they’re not the same. Like cars: same machine but one drives on the left, the other on the right, so even though they follow the same road to get to the same destination, the driver’s view of the journey is different. But of course, the chances of one crashing with the other are far greater.

The British press has, naturally enough, a terrible reputation in France: showing my French friends that’s not inevitable is satisfying too.

The monthly column in Prospect has evolved into this. Like any off-spring, this blog resembles what has gone before but has its own life, independent of both Prospect and, I hope, me. It’s a blog, not a pulpit: it will only work if other people leave their contributions, politely, modestly, to create interesting conversations with people we don’t know on a shared theme, updated regularly or left with suspension dots………