Rome Letter/Paddy Agnew:In this household, this is the season of the summer language school. Even as I write, the youngest member of the family is currently "studying" French in the south of France. For us, and many others, this is an annual event and one that prompts pater et mater to gleefully get out the map of Europe, call up the AA route planner and take to the long and winding autostrada.
It is a curious business but, even after 20 years of living in Italy, it still gives me a perverse sense of pleasure to think that if I want to go to France (or indeed almost anywhere else in Europe), all I have to do is fill up the tank and motor off. Thus it was that, a couple of weekends ago, we set off in the early morning, complete with child Róisín and a classmate, Sylvia, and headed for Hyères, 830 kilometres away.
We made good progress on the long run up the west coast of Italy, along the Via Aurelia and onto the Ligurian Riviera.
By late afternoon, we were about 50 kilometres short of our destination when we made what should have been our final "coffee, water and bathroom" stop at an "aire" on the autoroute. Here, dastardly fate intervened.
Despite years of travelling in France, the head of household, ie your correspondent, managed to put petrol into our diesel car. Even Homer nods. Five or six kilometres later, we came to a very sick stop in mid-autoroute.
The nature of the problem was immediately pretty obvious. Hurried consultation of on-board literature revealed that, somehow, the ACI (Automobile Club d'Italia) handbook was missing. Pater Familias, at this stage, was not exactly flavour of the month.
Help, however, in the shape of the gendarmerie was soon on hand. Within half an hour, a tow truck had arrived and we were being hoisted skywards. The Baroness, still sitting regally in front of the car, looked down at the truck driver and commented that this was hardly an ideal way to arrive en Provence.
"Ah no, madame, ca, c'est la classe".
When we pulled into the garage for repairs, the Baroness enquired if this sort of "mistake" happened often. A mischievously delighted Monsieur "Arcauto" took us round the corner to show us giant industrial tanks worth of petrol-diesel mixes that had been siphoned out of the cars of, by and large, visitors.
At this point, one's suspicious mind began to speculate whether the filling station up the road was not, in fact, run by Monsieur Arcauto's cousin and that the pumps were not deliberately switched to fool the foreigner. Before that suspicion could take too much hold, however, it began to rain, thus generally adding to the overall festive mood.
Two hours later and €260 lighter, we were back on the road, this time desperately looking for a petrol station.The good monsieur had given us enough diesel to get out of his sight, but not much further.
In the end, though, a filling station was found, the right nozzle identified, the tank filled and precise instructions as to our destination purloined. We were back en route. At this point, as we travelled down a seemingly quiet route nazionale, we momentarily stepped into a Spielberg movie.
The road was built-up on an embankment, partly because of the deep irrigation ditches running through the vast fields on either side. As we came round a gentle bend, an oncoming car first lurched towards us and then went the other way, catching the loose gravel at the side of the road before shooting off the embankment for a high speed crash that saw it literally somersault past our noses.
We stopped immediately, as did every other car that came along the road. Within seconds, a group of people were around the car trying to pull the car's occupants out of the upside down and much flattened vehicle. The car had, in fact, only one occupant, a young woman, who remarkably managed to climb out without a scratch, mobile phone still in hand.
As she gathered her shocked self together, we left her in the care of various helpers and got back on our way. Say what you like, I apologised to the girls, but at least it has not been a boring drive up from Italy. By 10 o'clock that night, we were finally in Hyères, with both girls delivered to their respective families.
The postscript to that journey was that three or four nights later, we rang Róisín: "Oh Fad, you'll never guess where I am. We're outside a nightclub in Saint Tropez, just about to go in." "Oh really, I never would have guessed that," replied Pater.
One can only hope that the brat spoke French in the night club. That is the point of the summer language school, is it not?