A report in Lib?tion said that, by the age of 11, one in two French children has been exposed to the hardest forms of pornography, through the internet or videos or cable TV. In other words, many children in France (and, no doubt, Britain) are getting their first, muddled impressions of sexuality not from playground gossip, as I did, but from the most extreme, violent forms of porn. (Charles received an unsolicited e-mail the other night from a “teensex chatline”.)Last week, eight boys, aged 14–15, were arrested in Lyon for the gang rape of a 15-year-old girl. There has been a series of similar attacks in France, involving boys as young as 13.

In most cases, the children showed no remorse or even understanding that they had done anything wrong.Two hours a year of sex education for 14-to-15-year-olds is hardly an intrusion into impressionable minds. The risk is that, by that age, their minds may already have been impressed to a pulp.Blessed were the cheesemakersCamembert is part of the heritage of France and, more importantly, Normandy. Its reputation as the big cheese among the 300-plus different French fromages was established during the First World War, when every French soldier received a camembert a day in his rations.In recent years, there has been a decline in the popularity of the cheap and relatively tasteless, mass-produced varieties of camembert made with pasteurised milk. There has been a modest boom in the sales of the real thing: the dozen or so brands of camembert still made in the traditional manner, with hand-held scoops of untreated milk from selected Norman cows (moul? la louche au lait cru).

The depth of taste of such a camembert compares with a pasteurised camembert like a holiday snap compares with a Monet.Dreadful news for lovers of Normandy and real camemberts. Lactalis, the largest dairy company in Europe, manufacturer of Pr?dent, the biggest-selling brand of pasteurised camembert, has made an appalling discovery. Its laboratories in Brittany (a further provocation to Normans) have invented a way of messing around with the bacteriological process in order to produce a Frankenstein of cheeses. They claim to have invented a pasteurised camembert that tastes like a raw-milk one.The new product, called “camembert campagne”, will be hitting French supermarket shelves shortly. The manufacturers insist that the new cheese will survive in the shops, and in the home, for longer than the traditional camembert.

It has to be admitted that those can go critical in a matter of hours unless handled with extreme caution.France claims to be the country of “la bonne bouffe” (“good grub”). In other words, the French believe that they are superior to the slop-eating British and Americans. Blurring the distinction between real and fake camemberts is no way for such a country to behave.Touch?re on the Bernadette Chirac-Hillary Clinton connection. France’s first lady was campaigning in an old people’s home for one of her husband’s supporters, Jacques Toubon An old woman asked if she was Mme Toubon “Certainly not,” Bernadette shot back. “If I was, he would be President of the Republic.” Whether consciously or not, that is a lift from Hillary Clinton. Hillary once introduced Bill to an ex-boyfriend working as a petrol-pump attendant “And just think,” Bill said. “You might have married her…” Hillary interjected: “And he would now be the President of the United States.”.