At 7.20 am yesterday, I was enquiring about sandwiches on a Brittany Ferries boat. Myself and the nervously smiling waitress had travelled together some way down a fairly long list of options when I finally asked, “Look, what sandwiches do you have?”

“Cornonation Chicken?” she answered, with that interrogatory tone all young people adopt.

It requires an enormous leap of imagination to configure the psychography of a stocking logistics expert who decides that those folks aged over 60 en route to France on a wet, off-peak Tuesday morning before breakfast are likely to clamour for Coronation Chicken. I know we’re still up to our eyes in the Jubilee maelstrom of denial and all that, but patriotic curry at that hour is somewhat lacking in appeal for even the most committed  royalist.

But then we were back in la belle France. Oh to be in France, and once among among drivers who zag when other europeans zig: everyone else goes ‘mirror, signal, maneouvre’, and the French go ‘maneouvre, signal, mirror, maneouvre back in again’.

As I almost always find when driving south from the northern tip of France, what starts as slate-grey drizzle at roughly 12 degrees gradually improves to become first lighter grey cloud at 15 degrees, and then 20 degrees with white cumulo-nimbus clouds drifting across washed-out blue early summer skies.It usually turns out to be predictive of far better weather than one can get in England.

This wasn’t our normal trip south, and it wasn’t being undertaken at our usual month of departure. There’s a good reason for this: my wife has been struck by a mystery virus causing lesional damage to her brain. Five weeks of hospitalisation having produced nothing in the way of either diagnosis or prognosis, we have come south to the healing sun and abundant greenery of south west France anyway.  I’ll be blogging on some of the specifics of this nightmare experience in due course – and also on multivariate failures in the NHS, from which all hands must be removed if the Left is to be believed. The experience was one I’ve suffered endlessly over the last thirty years: committed medical staff hounded by management idiots, poor quality junior nursing, and patients kept in the dark by arrogant consultants with only process to guide them. Creativity was there none.

For now, I will say only this. The Left places far too much faith in systems and taxpayer monies, while the Right puts all its faith in the people who staff American insurance companies. Neither of these nihilistically warring armies really knows how to find its arse in the dark on this issue.

In the meanime, life at The Slog returns to something approaching normal from tomorrow.