The Guardianistas are on holiday. Only their corpus – their spiritual souls are still swarming across Twitter expressing outrage. A moment’s pause in motion brings the fingertips skating across their touch screen. “Oh do look Jeremy, Martha has posted pictures of their villa – just look at those sunflowers!”

Every restaurant within 100 miles of here is packed to the rafters with tousle-haired coltish adolescents who have arrived on those quaint French bicycles you can hire at the airport being marshalled through the menu in painful French by ex au pairs now married to BBC journalists.

They decline the Fois Gras, sending a quick tweet back to their timeline – #endthiseviltrade – and promptly order ‘Perigordine salade’ for the children, and a glass of merlot for themselves. Attagirl – feed the children the organ that digests the corn to make the Fois Gras. #illogicalityisus. I swear I heard one telling the kids the gesier were mushrooms. ‘Youdathought they’d put the menus in English’.

We went to a village sale yesterday. The French don’t throw away their old bed sheets and buy new ones from Cath Kidson on their credit cards. They bring them out once a year and flog them to the English. The English take them home, send them to the little woman in the village who dyes their pristine whiteness into a fetching shade of taupe, and then they get flogged to Martha, who takes the ‘brilliant French linen’ to a little woman in her village who makes them up into curtains – that get flogged to Sarah for her ‘dear little’ cottage in Norfolk. Everybody is happy. Including Marie-Claire, whose Father died in those very sheets ‘pure linen curtains’.

We sat and listened to the conversations all around us. Animated conversations. The Guardianistas have much to animate them at the moment. Feminine matters. Surprising what you can learn. Did you know that the Court of Appeal is to hear a test case from a child suing the rest of us for compensation because its mother was drinking whilst pregnant? I didn’t either. It’s true though, I just looked it up. My unwitting informant was on her third glass of merlot – they give you such tiny glasses in France…I do hope the BBC journalist hadn’t been carried away by lust while she was doing her yoga exercises beside the infinity pool.

Soon enough the conversation turned to those our hearts are currently bleeding for. Not the schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram, and still kidnapped to this day – the #bringourgirlshome initiative failed and best not to mention it. Nor the terrible plight of the starving in southern Sudan, walking miles through the arid desert to – well, to whatever – that’s last year’s campaign. No, we went straight into those poor peasants in Gaza, fighting to establish an independent homeland with medieval weapons, at the mercy of the ‘disproportionate’ high-tech weaponry of the Israelis. Baroness Warsi was quite right, it was disproportionate. The Americans had given the Israelis laser guided bombs – all the poor Gazan’s had was a few home made rockets.

Disgraceful – but talking of disgraceful, did you see that picture on Twitter of that Australian man who had taken his children to fight in Syria? #wishyouwerehere. ‘There was the most disgusting picture of the little boy holding up a severed head!’ (I was hoping she might pause at that moment to Tweet a picture of young Anthony holding up an innocent duck’s severed gizzard and enquiring what it was. #wishyouwerehere. She didn’t, sadly).

Still, she knew that Cameron hadn’t done enough ‘carpet bombing’ those Yazidis with water supplies. Did you know all those water supplies burst when they hit the ground? Those poor women, buried up to their necks in sand, just because the evil ISIS wanted to establish an independent homeland. They are medieval savages, determined to obliterate the Yazidis just because they are of a different religion. ‘They must be stopped’. ‘We should be teaching them a lesson’.

Presumably with the ‘disproportionate’ use of American high-tech weaponry?

Mr G dragged me away before I could start a riot. He’s such a spoilsport when I’m evesdropping. I can’t help it, they’ve all got voices that could quell the Mafeking uprising.

Only another three weeks to go, and they will load up their children and the winter supplies of Merlot into their 4 x 4s and depart these shores. The bed sheets will go back in the greniers, and the restaurants will have andouillettes back on the menu…