This man has a serious tropical illness brought on by leaves on the brain

Do you know what? I think La Reunion is probably the most gorgeous of all the French overseas Departements et Terretoires. Huge crashing waves, perfect weather, lagoons, coral, big splashy banana trees and dinky Creole houses in all sorts of beautiful colours. Hotels are heavenly, food is delish and there’s even a running track by the Indian Ocean just outside.

Which is just as well, frankly. Thanks to a thrifty living policy we have been focusing rather too much on baguettes and chips (cheap, you see) and now represent a flock of fat French chickens rather than a lean, trim travelling machine.

We plump lot have also become completely paranoid about ants, mosquitoes and hornets, having been bitten by all of the above in regular quantities. I actually PULLED the sting of one out of my leg the other day. Quelle courage! While Mr Millard has had his feet invaded by biting ants, but then it serves him right for wearing Crocs. Honey is currently asleep in her bed wearing long trousers, socks AND mosquito repellent.

Meanwhile we have had a variety of ludicrous health scares, the pinnacle of which was probably Honey being scanned at Noumea airport, New Caledonia, and declared a carrier of Swine Flu. Cue arrival of face masks and an appointment at a Quarantine Tent at the General Hospital. She left the airport covering her entire head in horror of recognition, somewhat like a young Elizabeth Taylor in a burkha. After a four-hour wait in boiling heat she was eventually found Not Guilty by an urbane French doctor, who talked about the National Health Service in tones of hushed awe, and let her off with a mere throat infection. And a £65.00 bill which he said I didn’t really need to pay.

Since then, aided by internet diagnosis of course,  we have had a rash of diseases in the Millard-Clothier camp. These include a  suspected outbreak of Dengue Fever (Mr Millard), lockjaw leading to Tetanus (moi), possible dysentry (Anonymous) and of course Sleeping Sickness. We are all exhausted! Don’t give me “what a wonderful holiday you must have had”; by 9.30pm every night the entire team of ardent travellers have had it.  

We need to come home for Rest and Relaxation. Honestly!

Well, the provocation behind the French Empire is les rosbifs, of course. Or at least, our langauge. Because English is so dominant it has made the French absolutely positive that it must hang onto its overseas domains, no matter how many billions of euros they cost every year or how useless they are, in economic terms.

This was all made perfectly understandable to me today at Sydney University when I met my heroes, Robert Aldrich and John Connell, two academics who have written the world’s definitive text on the Dom-Toms in English. This book, known between Mr Millard and I as The Book, (as in “OH my GOD, have you got The Book?! I need to check out on the population growth of Guyane!”) has been our Bible. And it was thrilling to meet the authors today, albeit in the presence of irritating, head-butting children (c.f. previous blogs on bad behaviour amid the Junior Millards, who today had to be taken off by an Australian film star and entertained with charades).

Anyway, for Connell and Aldrich, two genial types from Leeds and the East Coast of America respectively, it was clear. The French language, culture and customs, be it arty films, decent bread, proper wine or petanque, is perpetrated across the globe by France in her overseas domains for a few reasons, one of which is because the rest of the globe has gone resolutely Anglo-wards.

And so we have this parallel universe where one converses in French, where a cup of coffee costs 5 Euros and where cycling is bigger than cricket.

Yet diving into Sydney for a rushed night, though, seeing the skyscrapers and packed harbour full of rapacious English speaking capitalists (there’s no recession here, folks), these French enclaves with their Boulangeries, Mr. Bricolages and insistance on wacky currency (French Pacific Franc, anyone?), seem by contrast quaintly out of step, an anomaly, rather like a rare animal padding about in a zoo.

Or maybe I just feel like this because I’m about to leave the land of the dollar, normal pricing and the Ashes. Tomorrow, we return once again to Planet France. Next stop, the Indian Ocean and the French Department of La Reunion.

French post boxes in the Pacific. Mad, but that's how they like it.

Melanesian sculptures next to a petanque pitch and a formal French monument

So, how to entertain four children while going around the Francophone world looking at the sights? 

Well, not by introducing them to the delights of French life. “Not another croissant!” they yell over breakfast, while wailing for Cheerios.  And looking at the sights is another crap idea for inspiring people under the age of 13. All they want to look at is a miniscule screen, prefarably of the Nintendo or iPhone variety.   “Look out of the window at New Caledonia, wow, do you realise that you are looking at a flightless bird/ bit of rainforest/giant nickel mine”  has soon collapsed into “Please look out, just a little bit, at these amazing mountains,” and is now ”Oh, just be quiet,here’s my i-Pod,  and let Daddy and I look out of the window, etc etc”.

The children just do NOT care about anything which does not directly impinge on their world and the French overseas territories are, sadly, not their world. They might well be mine, however, since after today’s shenanigans I’m seriously considering emigrating to countries under the jurisdiction of Paris. Or in fact, how about just Paris? Bad behaviour in the past on this trip has been quelled by Mr Millard throwing litres of water over various offenders. Today it was managed by yours truly threatening to hurl a much treasured furry turtle out of our apartment window. Eleven floors up. “Yes, but would you, Mummy?” was the fascinated question after the contretemps was over. You betcha.

I suppose we are to blame. Even when the going’s good, we have taken such a limited amount of amusement fodder on board for the children that each book/toy/pad has acquired totemic status. For example. Lucien has about  three hundred books to choose from at home, plus Islington’s West Library on the corner of our road. Here, he has five, namely the Little Red Train series by Benedict Blaythwyt.  These books! The detail! The iconic representation of the eponymous train, Duffy Driver’s extraordinary hair and  Jack the guard’s patch on his left knee. Oh, Benedict,  I know your entire canon in intricate detail. Every single page. Well,  I’ve been immersed in it every night for the last 13 weeks.

Meanwhile Honey gets Pippi Longstocking, bumper edition, a chapter a night, all good stuff,  and the older two are wading, with me, through David Copperfield, six pages per night. That’s all they can stomach, poor things, but it’s fine. God, but Dickens is good for long-haul. I can see why people wept when they greeted him in America. In the days before email and mobiles, he saved them from going bonkers, you see.  Thirteen weeks in the company of David, Steerforth et al,  and time just flies past. 

It’s easy when you are in the presence of an epic, clearly. At least, if it isn’t our own particular epic.

Yes, well the adults are having a good time

“When are we going home?” asks Lucien every day. Only three weeks left to go, mon cheri. Next stop, La Reunion.

The General in St Laurent de Maroni, on the Guyane/Surinam border

The General in Tahiti, French Polynesia

Gabriel and the General in St Pierre et Miquelon

Its official. The French are jolly happy to have their empire across the world. Alright, it may cost them several billion euros every year, and brings in practically zero in return (bar some fantastic honeymoon locations, and a  rather nice heap of nickel from New Caledonia), but think of the glory of it all.

As the head of tourism in Noumea told me today “Well, you used to say that the sun never set on the British Empire…but the truth today is that the sun never sets on the French.” And indeed, when we later strolled on the beach and saw the hordes of elderly, male Frenchies playing petanque in the rays of the sun across the balmy lagoon, and when you thnk that  pretty much the same scene would have played out a few hours before in La Reunion, and a few hours before that in Paris, and then across the Atlantic in St Pierre et Miquelon, and then down in Guyane…well, you have to agree.

The French have their Empire, and rather than winding it down, like everyone else is, they are actually expanding it; only last week, tiny Mayotte, a dot in the Indian Ocean, changed its status from part timer to full-time Department, so it too can have the yellow post boxes, full French school curriculum and entire social services package, thanks very much. Meanwhile all the French way of life is taken along for the ride. 

How about the Frenchman who has founded the world’s only vineyard on coral soil? (Rangiroa atoll, French Polynesia). Never mind that it does not make any money, Vin de Tahiti churns out thousands of bottles of red, white and rose wine every year, so ex-pats can be sure to have something to quaff alongside their foi gras. Which is of course also made in the proper Gallic way in the Outre-Mers, be it New Caledonian foi gras or St Pierrais foi-gras.  Those ducks are force-fed in exactly the same way  as they are home in the Dordogne, and a man even turns up every year from the Dordogne to check that the quality of the gavage produces the right quality of foi gras. 

Then there’s the whole issue of General de Gaulle, who loved the Outres-Mers so much he visited them all after WWII, presumably to tell them how much he appreciated their help. Yes, there are war memorials in all these far-flung French outposts, for all those people who died for the glory of La France, in both World Wars. Alongside the war memorials, and roads named after grim French battles (Rue de Somme, anyone?),  there are as many memorials to de Gaulle himself. Boulevards, squares, roundabouts, statues; every capital city here has a de Gaulle moment.

Naturally I have captured them all, be they pristine, shabby, fringed with palm leaves or, as in one case (Guyane), above a sex shop.

It’s pretty unfashionable to be so gung-ho about your roots, but seemingly the French just don’t give a damn about all of that. They fly their Tricoleur all around the globe, and insist on proper French being spoken in the schools, and play their petanque and read their Le Monde,  and I have to confess finding something rather stylish in such brazen confidence.

Yeah, yeah, but I'm grinding my teeth. A bit.

Being here in French Polynesia, aka Paradise, takes some beating. There’s the emerald mountains, the boundless ocean, the oodles of tropical fish swimming around, and the perfect sunsets. Not to mention the men who carry you on and off catamarans and dive twelve feet when your knickers blow out of the boat and into the water. Which all means that being here makes me feel a bit like Brooke Shields in The Blue Lagoon. And yet…travelling around the world with four children while trying to create six documentaries en route is actually a rather trying recipe. Sometimes the cracks in the entire precious edifice threaten to open up and become giant crevasses. Only today I was asked by our Adonis-like guide to wade with him around a small inlet and burst into tears. Alright, the inlet was being pounded by some giant ocean waves, and I was carrying a) a child who cannot swim and b) a camera, but even so. This trip, I now realise, is a ‘grande projet’ in human stamina as well as geography.

Take the notion of treats. Yesterday Gabriel (9), was leaning rather foolishly across a rope having a look at some green turtles which are nurtured and returned to the wild in the deluxe Meridien hotel in Bora Bora. Beneath him, a four foot drop onto a sharp coral bank leading to a pool. Involved in examining the swimming techniques of a giant turtle, Gabriel leant over too far, and he did a perfect tumble turn over the rope burning his neck on the rope and scraping his arms and legs badly on the coral. As the French say, he was thoroughly ‘gratinee’.

The hotel could not have been more apologetic, giving my weeping child special treatment from their in-house paramedic, and then giving him BOTH a cuddly turtle and a special Turtle Adoption Certificate for his own particular reptile. While such a response is obviously delightful, and charming, I knew what the subsequent response from the three siblings would be. ‘Its not fair’, ‘What’s my present?’, and so on and so forth. Driven half demented by repeated demands for turtles, adoption cerfificates, T shirts and the like, and in a fit of rage, I actually threw the entire contents of the suitcase of one child into a nearby hedge. Then, feeling rather like President Clinton in Primary Colours when he throws his mobile out of the car window, and then has to spend the next 30 minutes finding it, I had to shamefacedly climb into the hedge toretrieve all his stuff.

Basically, the demands of this 90-day shoot combined with the ‘trip of a lifetime’ around the world mean that slowly but surely I have metamorphosed into a sunburnt, insect-ravaged woman who spends her life packing and unpacking, swearing and threatening dire retribution and the denial of the next fizzy drink if Good Behaviour is not instantly forthcoming.

And if working with your children is tricky, working with a husband is no bed of roses, either. Mr Millard is being a brick, lugging a damned heavy camera and tripod everywhere and never stinting on his directing duties. But I have found that being directed by your spouse is a nightmare, not least because Mr Millard has put his foot on the control freak pedal and let rip. Being in charge of the camera has means he now feels he has carte blanche to extend his power over all sorts of domestic terrain, viz packing, unpacking, driving, map-reading, menu-perusing, deciding whether room service should be called upon or not, and whether I should log onto the Internet on my PC or his Apple. “You are a complete control freak” I yell at him from time to time. “I only try to help” is his meek response. Yeah, right.

Plus, whenever I want some R and R and relax, albeit pompously, with Book Seven of Dance to the Music of Time, he gets out his camera, which I have come to detest, and issues one of two dreaded phrases. These come in one of two kinds, either “do you have any big thoughts here?” or “We really must have a piece to camera here, do you realise I have NO SEQUENCES. Do you know anything about Polynesian lava.” Well, apart from the fact that it is called Aa, which is jolly useful in Scrabble, no. Sequences, I should point out, are a big deal in this show. As are Big Thoughts, of which I usually have none.

Frankly, the only place I am doing any R&R at all is on airplane flights, which is good because we have 32 of these babies to endure, and you can’t film on them. Only today, thanks to the children doing some form of Arts and Crafts project with sickbags and headrests, I was too busy placating the stewardesses and tidying up, to spend more than 2 minutes in private commune with Mr Powell’s great work. And then, guess what? I leave bloody Book Seven on the plane. You should have heard the effing and jeffing. It quite horrified the French couple who run our ocean-side pension, where we are all six sleeping in a single, airless, mosquito-infested sweatbox. Paradise? Only intermittently, folks.