So, we’re back, and now people say things like “We thought you were to be gone for at least 6 months. Why are you back so early?”, and suddenly the giant epic journey begins to shrink before my eyes, as if I had eaten one of Alice’s little cakes.

But the younger half of the family insists on talking, most mornings as we walk to school in Islington,  about every element of the trip, as if to console itself that we did indeed go to the Tropics.

“Which was your favourite flight?” Lucien will ask. Or “What was your favourite/worst hotel” and so on, through fishes, sharks, meals, guides and the rest of the whole mad assemblage of people and animals that we encountered in our journey around the Francophone world.

As for me, my feet have got blisters fromthe novel experience of wearing boots (poor me) and my eyes are blurring at sudden overuse of Blackberry and PC (shame).  At odd moments of the week, I find myself in the library, looking for books on New Caledonia, or leafing through The Times in order to stumble upon stories from St Pierre et Miquelon. The other day on the tube I actually pretended to be French. Total madness.  But even though I have heard no news, information or communication from the Dom-Toms,  I know it’s going on out there, that strange, secret  parallel French world.

And the other day, after 31 flights, 40,000 miles, 20 different bedrooms and a hell of a lot of baguettes,  I actually caught myself saying to Mr Millard “let’s go back. Soon.”

With only three more days to go, no-one can talk of anything else. When are we going to be home, and what we are going to do when we get there? I have already done an online shop at Sainsbury’s, timed perfectly to arrive within about two hours of us touching down at Heathrow. Cheerios, Marmite, Anchor ’spready’ butter, Cheddar cheese, Darjeeling tea have all been ordered. And – with not a little nostalgia – a box of croissants. Interesting what you miss the most. 

In ascending order of family seniority here is what is currently of key importance to the Millard Clothiers, after 90 days away from chez nous.

1. Lucien (4) “Eating food from Sainsburys”

2. Honey (6) “Seeing Disney (family dog) and not having mosquitos”

3. Gabriel (9) “Going online”

4. Phoebe (12) “Having friends over for a sleepover”

5. Mrs Millard (ageless) “Having long hot bath”

6. Mr Millard (infinite) “Being in quiet room on  my own without the kids”

This of course is very revealing. We have all been together, in varying degrees of luxury, for too long now. We need to find our own space, whether it be at school, nursery, work or indeed in the bath. The children want to return to the normal round of identifiable food from Sainsburys, no mosquitos, and no fried wasp’s larvae (a local delicacy here in La Reunion), easy access to the internet, and school lessons.

The adults want to have a bit less time with the children and, er, easy access to the internet. Only Mrs Millard, probably, will miss the constant interaction with Les Francais. But hey! yesterday a nice French ‘mec’ (bloke) in a bar likened her to Jane Birkin. And for that, she would willingly spend ANOTHER three months in the French overseas territories. Next stop, Mauritius for a night of seven star luxury and then home sweet home. A bientot.

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.

[caption id="attachment_150" align="alignnone" width="225" caption="Melanesian sculptures next to a petanque pitch and a formal French monument"][/caption]

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.

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

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.

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.

It was with some horror that I read today about President Nicolas Sarkozy collapsing in Paris after jogging alongside his amour, Carla Bruni. I’m fast becoming a Sarko groupie, frankly.  Travelling around his vast overseas domains has made me something of a haplessly smitten fan. Not only do I fancy him, but I feel rather sorry for him – I mean, who would want to have a country as terrifying and sad as French Guyana on your in-tray of a morning? And as expensive?

You see, half of the people in these Departements and Territories Outre-Mer want to be rid of le Petit Nicolas anyway.  That is, until they realise how cold it would be in the outside world without his comforting blanket of funding which is a constant presence, paying for salaries, pensions, child care, roads, health, education,defense and, er, helping keep the price of wine down.

Apart from wine in Tahiti, that is, which is ruinously expensive.  I can see why they call French Polynesia a ‘luxury destination’. Its because only millionaires can afford to come here. The place is like a James Bond set with infinity pools, personal jacuzzis, crystal clear seas and million-dollar prices to boot. A litre of milk in a supermarket? £ 8! A bottle of champagne in the same? £400! As Mr Millard observed with his usual amusingly caustic nature, walking around the shops of Papeete is not dissimilar to how visiting London in 20 years’ time might be,  when a snack lunch for six will cost £60 and a cup of char will set you back  a fiver.  The children of course while loving the 007/Cubby Broccoli sets are pretty slow at grasping how poor we are rapidly becoming in this world of the £100 breakfast.

“Eat your food!!!” I yell at them as they poke a pretty greasy (but £10) leg of chicken and some chips around a plate in some hideous downtown Papeete snackbar. “This meal will cost us Eighty Pounds!” You can tell they are all thinking, “yeah well you brought us here, live with it. Or if you don’t like it, take us back to London.”

I bet it wasn’t like this in Gauguin’s day, when all the seas were blue (and untainted by atomic fallout), and all the maidens beauteous. They still are beauteous, but there Tahiti has not one of Gauguin’s pictures of their antecedents.  There are lots of copies in a rather charming studio owned by his grandson Marcel Tai, but no originals. Monsieur Tai is very charming but somewhat disillusioned by the way that Tahiti has latched onto his grandfather without, as he sees it, actually comitting to the art.  There’s  there’s a Rue Paul Gauguin in Papeete, and a Salle Paul Gauguin in the Sofitel Hotel, and an ecole Paul Gauguin.

And for those homesick French residents who keep a portrait of Sarko below their personal Tricoleur, way above the city on a mountainside perch,  there is The Belvedere, a proper French restaurant selling raclette, fondue and snails imported from Burgundy (at £30 a shot) so at least you can eat proper French fare and think about France’s thwarted genius, if not see his actual work.

Anyway, tomorrow morning I, Mr Millard, the team and our 13 bags are taking a 3-hour flight to the Marquesas Islands, there to pay homage to Gauguin’s grave. In terms of distance, it’s rather like flying to Moscow from London, but Gauguin (apparently) didn’t like people much and wanted to get away from things.  He was also impoverished and found Papeete rather pricey, even in 1900. At least he chose a fabulously gorgeous place to go to. Apparently he got to the Marquesas where he was told he had to go to church in order to have a piece of land. He went to church every week, was given the land on which he promptly built La Maison de Jouir. He never went to church again. 

And so when it came to it, I couldn’t face it. Sleeping all night in a former prison cell of France’s infamous ‘bagne’, the prison of the penal colony for which French Guiana was renowned. Our room was a) windowless, b)airless and c) very haunted. There was a huge pit outside in which various caimen and iguana lurked. Alright, there was also a toucan there but even its bright blue feet couldn’t dispel the sure knowledge that all human rights had ended, for sure, right here in the Isles de Salut. Alfred Dreyfus spent five years on the next door island – every time a boat was sighted on the horizon, a prison guard held a gun to his head. What a dreadful place. Imagine checking into a hotel on Robben Island and you sort of get the picture. In fact we actually did a runner. But not before we had LOST Gabriel. I thought he had fallen into the pit along with the toucan, iguana, etc. Actually he just had popped into the museum which had lovely things like iron leg braces on display. Then when we were at last reunited and waiting for our catamaran to rescue us (well, we have standards), a giant palm branch came crashing down and nearly decapitated us all. Perhaps reminding us that there was even a guillotine here, in former times. Even Gabriel sighting a wonderful leatherback turtle popping its head out of the ocean didn’t dispel the gloom and doom. We leapt aboard the boat and charged back to the mainland amid one of the most terrifying and enormous tropical storms I have ever encountered. Fork lightening, sheet rain, peals of thunder and we had to all get on a tiny dinghy. Its a wonder Lucien wasn’t swept overboard. Yes, another adventure he will be “telling Nursery about”, you see. Hot showers all round and a bad mark on France’s copy book of human rights, I’m afraid. Next stop – Polynesia and Gaugin’s grandson.

Oh, God. We wanted the jungle. And we got the jungle. Courtesy of the crazy Paul Griffin, a former Hell’s Angel and now practising chiropractor in Guyane. Who actually lives in the jungle. Yes, in a hammock. Cooks on an open fire. Bathes in the creek. Shoots ocelot. Eats snake. Has done for four years. And when we bumped into him in St Laurent, home of the infamous ‘bagne’ which locked up thousands of French convicts – and indeed guillotined them – he invited us to come and see his pad.

Well, it was amazing. He cooks fantastic roast potatoes (see evidence from picture), and delicious Surinamese casseroled water-buffalo. After lunch, we all went on a jungle walk around some of his own jungle. “Don’t stop, touch any trees, or go near any ants” were his words as we set off. He was also taking his rifle with him, just in case. Left the kids mighty impressed. Sadly, while leaping over a fallen log in the rain forest we came across about 40,000 giant black ants.  They were not happy about the advent of family Millard-Clothier on their terrain, and promptly climbed up my trousers, Honey’s trousers and Gabriel’s trousers, where they then bit us. A lot.  Have you ever felt an ant bite? Its sort of like being pierced by a red-hot needle. In my case, it was on my arse.

Every0ne started YELLING. “I hate this jungle,” said Honey, who ended up with about 15 bites on her.  ”Get me back to Islington NOW!”

Meanwhile Lucien was quietly contemplating the entire panic-stricken occasion, which included interesting sights such as his mother ripping off her trousers, everyone else hopping up and down while his father calmly filmed the lot.  “I am CERTAINLY going to tell Nursery about this,” he commented drily while fording the local creek back to Paul’s jungle hut. Unforgettable.