Yellow-lit road

The ineffable cool of the French is often wildly overstated, but it would be hard to deny the style of actors Alain Delon or Sophie Marceau, for example. Or take the plaintive songs of Édith Piaf or Serge Gainsbourg, and the attitudes, shrugs and pungent whiffs of garlic and Gitanes cigarettes that help reinforce the Gallic psyche.

Then, of course, there’s Paris, City of Lights, capital of romance and, well, dog poo. Not very car friendly these days, it’s true, but once bathed in the amorous yellow glow of car headlamps.

My dad, a Francophile to his roots, would take his entire family on a three-week holiday to the fifth republic in the 1960s and we knew our booking on the Thoresen ferry was near at hand when he arrived back from Figgures in Lymington High Street clasping a tiny bottle of yellow fluid, which would be carefully painted on the headlamp glass of the Rover in preparation.