And the dividend forecast is.........

"Don't tell anyone," said my mother in little more than a whisper as she sent us off to Sunday school. "But we may be rich."

By the time (later that day, Monday at the latest) we knew we were not rich at all, we'd told everyone, starting within minutes of that parental plea for discretion.

Dad had won the football pools, or rather he and three people from work had won shares of a full dividend. In a town like ours (Shildon, Co Durham) a pools win was guaranteed to change lives quite dramatically, split four ways or not.

The only trouble was that everyone else, and everyone else's syndicate, seemed to win that Saturday. So many draws had been played out on the football grounds of the nation that his ultimate fortune was four into 32, not four into a million.

This tragic childhood memory came back for some reason while I was watching a French quiz show called Le Mur.

Inevitably, it is an imported idea, probably from America, and it involves one contestant battling against a wall of 100 rivals, arranged in groups according to employment or interests (les Bikers, for example, les Beatles -impersonators, that is - or les Gymnastes).

There is a succession of general knowledge questions, with the correct answer given in each case among three choices. The individual player can climb towards 200,000 euros, eliminating members of the wall as he or she goes along whenever they, responding to the same question, press the wrong button.

I can imagine it would seem ghastly on American or even British TV, but it somehow works, at least for me, in French.

This is partly because its success requires a lot of people to behave inanely with football-style chanting, cheers and boos and one of the things I like about the French is that they never mind making fools of themselves provided they have fun doing so.

Even the fact that Mme Randall rather fancies the presenter, Benjamin Castaldi, grandson of a one-time French golden couple of film Simone Signoret and (adoptively) Yves Montand, fails to put me off. And when a stout ambulancewoman called Catherine won the top prize after a brilliant performance, I was as chuffed as if I'd won it myself.

I realise that even 200,000 euros - especially since, if I understand the rules correctly, half goes to a participating viewer - is not the stuff of serious wealth. Most of us would see it as a pretty tidy sum, however.

But it must have been that sharing element of the game that put me in mind of the day I thought I belonged to a pools-rich family. Dad was sharing his winnings with others, and the total jackpot was in turn being divided among thousands.

Despite this early gambling setback, I became a regular pools punter. It took me not merely years but decades to win my own first dividend on the pools.

In Le Mur fashion, you may guess where I was when I discovered the extent of my windfall:

a) Doorstepping Jeremy Thorpe in north Devon

b) Watching Sunderland Reserves, away

c) In Colditz Castle

Et la bonne réponse - after plenty of drum rolls, gasps, impertinent chanting from the wall - est la réponse C. I had been reporting on an old comrades' reunion and had just finished dictating my carefully constructed story from a phone deep inside the castle.

I'm in there somewhere
Picture: EL ALBERTO

"Never mind your story," barked Richard Savill, a friend sitting in the office back in London and in need of urgent clarification from the organiser of the newsroom pools syndicate. "Was it Vernons or Littlewoods?"

Happily it was Littlewoods, and instead of something like my dad's long-ago £32 being split 19 ways among colleagues (Vernons was cheaper to play, and accordingly meaner with its prizes), we had £5,700 between us - or £300 each.


Spend, Spend, Spend? Not quite. Enough to pay a car repair bill here, a holiday deposit there, and better than a kick in the teeth. But take it from me, it hardly changed our lives.

Ségo: it's tough being a woman

However you look at it, Ségolène Royal's television audience - a peak of just under 10.6 million viewers, an average of 8.9 million - proves she is a remarkable draw.

Picture: François Lafite

The average was comfortably higher than the ratings for her rival Nicolas Sarkozy's similar broadcast, itself described as a record for a political programme in France, two weeks ago.

Many people will have tuned in expecting, a lot of them hoping, to see Ségo stumble and fall. But she will take huge comfort from the figures, believing the massive penetration will help her rise above media, opposition and even Left Bank intellectual disdain.

Some will remember mention here of her steeliness and ambition being seen as faults, whereas in a man they'd be hailed as virtues.

This notion surfaced again the other day when she reacted sharply to questions about the abrupt resignation, allegedly over funding of her programme, of an economic adviser.

It was certainly an eyebrow-raising moment, and poor PR, but the writer of one column I saw couldn't resist adding that she was too quick to reveal herself as hard. Sarko seems to get off much more lightly when he makes ill-considered ripostes.

Last night, she argued that running for the presidency was harder for a woman, that no man would have had his competence questioned as constantly as has happened to her.

It was a long programme but I felt Royal did reasonably well after a ponderous start (not her fault; the first questioner was allowed to ramble for ever).

She made the right noises (for the left, so to speak) on youth unemployment, pensions, small businesses and the disabled. And she refused to be wrong-footed by questions about the Parti Socialiste "elephants", not least what role if any she would hand as President Royal to her partner François Hollande, the general secretary.

The moment when she walked over to console a wheelchair-bound man, in tears as he described living with MS, could have been embarrassing but wasn't. It looked a genuine gesture, but I suspect it will also have done her no harm.

I found her a little less assured on the presidency itself - "I think I am ready" hardly had the ring of confidence - and on that thorny issue of how she will pay for her programme. But Sarko has unanswered questions in that area, too.

François Bayrou, the centrist candidate who has been steadily improving his showing in the polls, is an interesting sideshow. I simply do not believe the poll that found he would beat either Ségo or Sarko if he made it through to the second round, but he is capable of inflicting damage, especially on her.

Royal's best bet, provided she can finally sort out her unimpressive campaign team, is that those 10.59 million viewers - isn't that 10,589,000 more than are canvassed in the average poll? - liked not only what they saw, which is usually the case, but what they heard, too.

France in flashes.....8

Soon I will be leaving Paris, but not France. Two-and-a-half years in the City of Light is not much of a milestone but it's the longest I've lived anywhere outside London since the 1980s.

Thanks to this Parisian phase of my life, and indeed to living in France generally,
I am able to start listing - in no special order - a few of the things I now know.

It is a work in progress; the number in the headline will change each time I have a flash of inspiration and want to add something and - as now - I may bring it to the top of the blog.

New thoughts will always appear first in the list but the earlier comments from readers are at the original posting.....feel free to find inconsistencies with what I wrote in 2003.




************** WHAT I KNOW NOW **************

* Paris may not, despite a former colleague's insistence, be the City of a Thousand Bad Restaurants. But I am up to double figures and truly believe London now has a distinct edge on quality, variety and service - though not always value.

* Provincial France is still streets ahead for eating out. But my search for a good Indian restaurant seemed doomed to failure until I stumbled the other night upon Le Royal Shah Jahan at Enghien Les Bains, where 95 (Val d'Oise) meets bad old neuf-trois (Seine St Denis). Easily the best I've had in France. It was our friends' fallback idea after their first choice, at Argenteuil, turned out to be full.

* The French press is more decent - and more dull - than its British counterpart. One (French) theory, heard again today, holds that the country has just two seriously good daily papers: L'Equipe for sports lovers and Mon Quotidien (plus stablemates) for kids.

* Anyone who voluntarily leaves a proper job in France, even a job he or she loathes, is considered mad unless there is something immediate fixed up.

* From the millionaire to the man on the Boulevard Masséna tram, French people know how to appreciate good food. The mountainous plateau de fruits de mer served to my table yesterday could have been ordered at either end of that spectrum (and indeed was, though I'm not saying which).

* And at both ends, they know how tipping is done at the restaurant in France: sparingly or not at all, and without hint of self-consciousness.

* People who insist you should never dine in or near railway stations don't know Paris. Two of my best eating experiences have been at the Brasserie Terminus Nord directly opposite Gare du Nord and, complete with fabulous arty decor, Le Train Bleu inside the Gare de Lyon.

** Châtelet is probably the grimmest of Métro stations unless you are going through without stopping, but if you do have to change, alight or board there, it also has the best buskers on the system.

* When a Parisian receptionist welcomes you with the question: "Is someone behind you?", this is not because she assumes such a nice person would surely have friends queuing up to accompany you. It's her way of telling you to close what you thought was an automatic door, and sharpish.

* Charles de Gaulle airport is not, repeat NOT, the least user-friendly place in the world to fly to or from. Not quite. But getting to terminal three offers a strong challenge to that view.

* Toulon, the nearest town of any size to where I'll be living come January - at least in the short term - has been placed bottom or second bottom in league tables for economic activity, employment, culture and heaven knows what else. Have I made a dreadful mistake? The eastern city of Nancy, which I have never visited, came top in one of these palmarès des villes.

* Policemen on roller skates and - when deployed as traffic cops - bicycles will always look like something out of a French farce.

* Marks & Spencer should be ordered to re-open its Paris store. Don't take my word for it; ask a native Parisian.

* The French are not the worst drivers in Europe and probably not even the second or third worst.

* It is therapeutic to swear in English at psychopathic drivers who try to mow you down on green at pedestrian crossings. But this is not advisable if you happen to be having a mobile phone conversation with a charming American lady at the same time.

* If you want to find out something from a French ministry, make friends with a French official in London. Exposure to le modèle Anglo-Saxon will have given him a hint of urgency.

* Power walking or gentle jogging in the Tuileries is not recommended for those liable to feel like physical wrecks in the presence of superfit Parisian sapeurs pompiers.

* Arriving on time, for dinner, drinks or similar, is a serious gaffe. Getting there early is positively insulting and destined to bring social exclusion.

* Gard du Nord handles people more efficiently than Waterloo. And no one there will try to serve you wine in a cardboard cup.

* Anna Perry was right. The Champs Elysées may look pretty when lit up for Christmas - see above for photographic support, however amateurish, for that claim - but feels ugly and naff most of the time and, at the bottom end, menacing late at night.

* Brits who want to live in France, but stick to English-speaking ghettos and recoil in horror from any idea of integration, bring disgrace on their country and should go home.

* French reality and game shows are even worse than those on British TV. And French television generally is dire.

* Leaving Paris on a TGV feels much better than coming back.

* Coming back to Paris on Eurostar feels much better than leaving.

Here's an explanation I prepared earlier