Firstly, a Friday 13th-style apology – due to eerie, unnatural technical glitches (ie my e-mail not getting through when I wasn’t in the office) last week’s column didn’t appear. I’m sure you coped, but for anyone still traumatised, I’m very sorry.

So, on with the fun. I had to e-mail in last week’s column because I’d gone for a tour of French motorway service stations. Not really; it was a few days away we were trying make as inexpensively as possible by driving, rather than flying and hiring a car.

Those of you with more experience of driving in France than me will know this was foolhardy because of the cost of petrol and the toll roads.

Still, the advantages of driving are numerous. You can take as many tins of beans as you can carry (1 euro 59 cents A TIN in France!), and you can take the buckets and spades, beach cricket sets and boules you bought last time, rather than buying new ones.

As we were driving from one end of France to the other, we spent a lot of time in motorway service stations, because two small children require a lot of wee breaks, leg-stretching and inspecting of plastic Eiffel Tower souvenirs in shops.

There was something rather pleasant about the French service stations. They each seemed to have their own identity, and had nice little places for eating outdoors and strange sculptures.

The food chain franchises were different from the usual fast-food outlets (watch me try out my French! I managed to order a completely wrong Panini and was told off by Mrs B for asking for a diet Coke in English, but with a French accent).

The pleasantness of most of the service stations (apart from odd little foibles at some – what’s the point of having a parking area that is inaccessible to the petrol station unless you perform a swift, slightly illegal manoeuvre?) made our Le Mans-style endurance rally slightly more bearable, until it got time to abandon the car on the campsite and break out 28 tins of beans.

Coming home is never as exciting as going, though, and the service stations had lost some of their sheen on the way back – sitting in a car eating the remnants of the ham sandwiches we’d made three hundred miles previously while the rain hammered on the roof somewhere south of Paris, isn’t that romantic.

But then we were back in Blighty, and on some stretch of motorway sometime after 10.30pm, we to stopped for some food in a service station.

The two fast-food outlets were closed up. There were some dry, curling chips and an unappetising mound of something brown. The coffee tasted like dishwater and the service was, at best surly.

Welcome home, then. I’m afraid I might have said something a little rude. Please pardon my French.