Well here I am in the south of France, staying with my goddaughter and her family, and since I'm trying to put something here everyday, I today cross-examined the goddaughter about her school. Did she like it? Yes. I spent about fifteen minutes hurling questions at her about why she liked it, and for a while it was not at all clear. She said she liked mucking around with her friends during the lunch hour interval, but apart from that it didn't sound especially good fun. She has to memorise lots of stuff. And do you like that? No. She had to learn about Napoleon, and Joan of Arc. And is that amusing? Not very. It just sounded pretty much like a school to me, and as such very boring.

I carried on with my cross-examination and finally stumbled upon the answer. Which is: that the lunch hour lasts two and a half hours.

School is often touted, especially by the opponents of home schooling, as something that offers "socialisation", in a good way, i.e. in the form of lots of fun friends of the sort you couldn't make if you are stuck at home. Well, with this school, for my goddaughter, this really seems to be true.

The secret is the extreme length of the lunch "hour", presumably a reflection of the siesta that they have down here in these parts, these parts being Catalonia, rather than just France, Catalonia being something that spans the Spanish-French border.

Think about it. If you had a school lunch hour lasting only an hour, then you wouldn't have much time to do any truly amusing socialising. And if you just worked through the morning and then stopped and everyone went home, then those precious friends would probably disperse. All you'd ever do is "socialise" by attending classes, which is hardly very enjoyable. But by going to a school where the day is divided into two chunks with a long gap in between, my goddaughter really does get to do some truly enjoyable socialising, in a way that she and her friends decide about, rather than her teachers.

She doesn't dislike her teachers. They are strict, it seems, but fair. They don't have class favourites. But it's those long, long lunch "hours" that really make the difference.

The true test for whether school is fun is: Do you miss it during the holidays, and look forward to it starting again? Says the goddaughter: yes.