Jonathan Miller

‘Autonomous machine operating here,’ says the sign. ‘Stay away.’ And instead of the chatter of the vendangeuses, there’s the hum of a robot. Welcome to southern France, 2024, just down the lane from my house, where, walking the dogs among the vines, I stumble upon Ted, a compact, green and white, battery-powered cultivator, guided by GPS satellites. Ted is not dissimilar in principle to a robot lawnmower or vacuum, but is the size of a family car. The French ban on chemicals has created a vast amount of work for growers He is toiling away, straddling the vines and chopping up the mauvaise herbes. He is neither cute nor friendly or even that smart, though he will stop dead in his tracks if he encounters a human obstacle.

Every Thursday morning at Washington Dulles Airport, a French government Airbus disgorges a metal freight container under diplomatic seal. Bypassing US customs inspection, it is transported directly to the French Embassy compound in Georgetown. At midday, elite French diplomats gather to watch as the precious content is unsealed. Spain thrashed France at the 2023 World Cheese Awards Along with the diplomatic papers, direct from the Quai d’Orsay, cheese is delivered weekly for French officials in the United States capital, a country where unpasteurised cheese is cruelly banned. Embassy staff put in their orders a week in advance and get delivered individual baskets of Comte, Reblochon and the soft, smoky goat’s cheese of Sainte-Maure de Touraine.

Having breakfast at a hotel in the chouette Eighth Arrondisement of Paris last weekend, and employing what I imagine to be my faultless French, I asked for a boiled egg, ‘un oeuf à la coque.’ The waitress asked, did I want glaçons (ice) with that? Err, no, I replied, bemused. The waitress then brought me a bottle of Coca-Cola. Perhaps this is not a propitious anecdote with which to begin today’s assignment, ‘How I learned to master French.’ Perhaps it casts doubt on my claim to speak French. Or perhaps it was merely a reminder to be humble.  I had a little chat in French with Karine Jean-Pierre, President Biden’s spokeswoman with the wacky hair. We joked about Macron I am sometimes asked how I have cracked it but the truth is it can’t be done.

Senior management was recently walking down the street and took a funny turn. With her habitual stoicism she ignored the swelling in her foot for two weeks until I finally persuaded her to go to the urgences (emergency room) at the local Polyclinique Pasteur, a mini-hospital in Pézenas, the town four miles from our village.  Nobody here seems to be waiting 84 hours in an emergency room, as one NHS patient recently did in Scotland There wasn’t much they could do about the annoying bone in her foot, that was shown to be broken after a wait-free visit to the on-site radiology suite. But the diagnosis was rapid. The advice on what to do and not to do is proving effective. As encounters with the medical milieu go, I’d give it five stars.

As we celebrate 120 years of aviation with a plug door and several iPhones tumbling from an in-flight spanking-new Boeing 737 Max, and a new Airbus A350 burning to a cinder in Tokyo, it is fair to note that not a single passenger was killed in either incident (although four Japanese coast guards perished on the ground). When I started flying it was glamourous, exciting and genuinely dangerous. An actual pilot. Some kind of God. I stood there hypnotised by the illuminated dials and the throbbing turboprops Not so long ago in the annals of human civilisation, on 13 December, 1903, in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville Wright, a bicycle mechanic from Dayton, Ohio, piloted the Wright Flyer he’d built with his brother Wilbur.

The English director Ridley Scott has certainly produced a massive irritation to French amour-propre. Over the weekend, he said that criticism of his film Napoleon proved that the French ‘don’t even like themselves’. Whether Napoleon is a masterpiece is yet to be determined (it isn’t released until Wednesday) but opinion is already divided. As if the French were ever likely to appreciate the Anglo-Saxon appropriation of a French national hero. Doubtless some of the French outrage is contrived. The relationship of France to the Emperor is complicated and hard to explain as an interlude in the glorious republic Scott, who will be 86 this week, has created an epic row, as well as an epic film.

It is now four years since I bought my first electric car. At the time, I wished I hadn’t. The car, though solid, swift and fun, had the slight problem that it could explode at any time.  In 2019, a tranche of electric cars were sold to ingenues such as myself, only to be recalled so that their batteries could be replaced with ones which might not spontaneously combust. Once replaced, it was fine, but my home needed an upgrade, too – every fuse in the house blew when I first tried to recharge the car and boil a kettle at the same time. Being an EV pioneer (I was the first person in my French village to have one) came with hardship. Road trips were experiences of anxiety, despair and finally anger, as autoroute charging in France was primitive.

On Saturday, I went to the synagogue in Béziers. I was motivated by defiance, sentiment, and an urge to demonstrate solidarity, but hardly from any rekindled religiosity. I’ve never had any to be rekindled. Like my namesake, the late Dr Jonathan Miller, said in Beyond the Fringe, ‘I'm not really a Jew… but I'm Jew-ish; not the whole hog.’ I grew up in North London when there were still some scars from the second world war. Bombsites. Prefab homes in Dollis Hill. I knew about the Holocaust but it seemed remote, impossible. My family had arrived in Britain in the late 19th century, exiles from the pogroms in Latvia. If any members of my family had perished in the camps, it was never mentioned. I really can’t recall much anti-Semitism.