Every New Year’s Eve I make the same resolutions; do 100 sit-ups a day (at least), drink less, don’t shout at my children, read more and improve my French. This year I am wondering if I should bother with any resolutions at all as I never end up keeping them. It is not as if I make them lightly. I truly do believe that I will set aside 15 minutes a day to study the vagaries of French grammar. But I never seem to find a spare 15 minutes. As for the drinking, my husband and I have given up alcohol for January several times. It isn’t as bad as it sounds, actually once I get past that initial craving for a glass of wine I quite enjoy the saintly feeling I get from being totally sober. But tomorrow is January 1st and the thought of not having a drink to get me through the last day of the Italian influx seems worse than conjugating French transitive verbs. My aunt has now managed to fall out with my uncle so the atmosphere is strained to say the least. But my father continues to amaze me. He has actually played with the children and taught Olivia to write “Benedetto is very beautiful” on his laptop. A phrase I’m sure will come in useful.

I think rather than vow to do everything at once in 2007 I will have one resolution a month; January drink less, February read lots of books, March do sit-ups every spare moment. There’s only so much multi-tasking a girl can stand.

So far the paternal visit is going well. The only person he’s managed to fall out with is his sister, my aunt, by teasing her relentlessly about her capacity to exaggerate the merits or otherwise of a particular kind of rice/pasta/vegetable. She took her revenge by heading off for the day with my uncle and not coming home again until after midnight, waking me up in the process, so actually the only person who suffered was me. My father seemed unphased by her stomping off and much to my amazement agreed to go on a short outing with my mother and all three children. This is the fist time the children have been out with my parents and I was quite moved by the whole idea of it. They came back happy and smiling, my father described it all as a wonderful piece of theatre. But he refused to let them call him grandpa, preferring “uncle”. My father and aunt are obsessed with their age and although they are both closer to 100 than 50, act and look closer to the latter. Actually at times they act closer to five than 50.

Once the children had gone to bed my parents and I (that sounds so weird, this must be only one of a handful of occasions I have seen them together after they separated, rather like getting used to saying my husband when you’ve only been married a few days) sat around chatting about old friends and telling anecdotes about Truman Capote and Marylin Monroe – really lovely. I wonder how my life would have turned out if they’d stayed together. I suppose he’d have made me call him uncle too – as it is I call him by his first name, Benedetto. By the time we met up again when I was a teenager so daddy seemed inappropriate. My middle daughter, Beatrice pictured below, has gone one step further and calls him by his full name. “Benedetto Benedetti is up,” she announces every morning when she sees him shuffle past our bedroom. “Boungiorno Benedetto Benedetti,” she shouts. Most of the time he doesn’t hear her. He can deny being a grandparent but deafness is one sign of age it’s difficult to hide.

When I was a teenager I was re-introduced to my father. He is Italian and much to his horror I didn’t speak the language of Dante. Not surprising really as he and my mother split up when I was three and since then I had lived in Stockhom and Berkshire. “All you need to speak Italian is Dante,” he announced and from then on would recite the fifth canto of the Inferno to me every few minutes.

The fifth canto is the story of Paolo and Francesca. It is one of the most moving in the Inferno and also the most romantic. One of the lines drummed into me was “la bocca mi bacio tutto tremante” – he kissed my lips all trembling. All very well but I was in love with John Travolta at the time and found Dante a bit of a chore.

As I write, my Dante-quoting father (he actually does know everything Dante ever wrote off by heart as well as every other Italian poet and much more, but then again the man has never had a job so he’s had plenty of time to learn) is on his way here to spend a week with me and my family. This may seem perfectly normal, it being Christmas and all that, but my father and I have been estranged more than we have been together. He was out of my life for ten years when I was a child, then he came back in, then he stormed out of my wedding nine years ago and it was only when I wrote Ciao Bella that I went to find him again. He met Leonardo then but has yet to get to know the girls. He seems very excited about the prospect. “Tell them I will teach them the whole of the fifth canto a memoria,” he told me on the phone yesterday. Some things never change…..

Yesterday was the first day of the school holidays and the children were all up at 6.15am. By mid-morning I was running out of ways to entertain them and so did what millions of parents will be doing this Christmas and put them in front of the TV. But as I have sworn they won’t spend hours watching rubbish I chose a film for them; Zeffirelli’s Romeo & Juliet. The children are three, six and seven so you might think this was a bit advanced for them. Not a bit of it. Leonardo (aged three) loved the sword fights, Bea (six) loved the “kissing on the lips” and Olivia (seven) loved it all. The only thing they couldn’t understand was why the star-crossed lovers were unable to tell anyone they were in love and getting married. The whole concept of war and feuds was incomprehensible to them. At the risk of sounding like a candidate for CND (not my usual image) I thought it was rather a seasonal discovery and perhaps a message to us all. So – Happy Christmas and may your feuds be few and far between.

As fog causes chaos at Britain’s airports I sit here wondering if I will ever fly again. It’s become such a nightmare that whenever I go back to England I take the train. If I can’t take the train I don’t go. You are treated like a criminal from the moment you get to the airport and the departure lounge is not any more comfortable than many penal institutions, or filled with any more civilised people.

My parents-in-law flew over here two days ago. They describe their journey from Gatwick to Toulouse as “hellish”. They were forced to unpack everything they had with them in the check-in queue (to much sighing and muttering from the people behind them), then practically strip-searched on their way through security. Someone here is not thinking clearly. Can we just cast our minds back to the profile of your average terrorist? Is it a public-school educated mother of three and grandmother of eight who bears more of a resemblance to Mrs Tittlemouse than Osama bin Laden? I don’t think so. Surely instead of holding up the queues at airports and making air travel the most dreaded thing since the plague a little bit of passenger profiling might come in handy? My mother-in-law says she is searched every time she travels between France and England. Why? She is a well-dressed, elegant woman in her seventies. She has never been to a mosque apart from to admire the mosaics and is unlikely to convert to radical Islam at this late stage in her life. I guess it’s always a possibility but I’ll make a deal with the airport staff. You let her pass unhindered and I’ll keep her under close surveillance. If I see any evidence of subversion, you’ll be the first to know.

It’s Frank’s funeral on Friday. I have been trying to explain to the children that he is dead and will be cremated. His wife Virginia will scatter his ashes from their house in a hamlet close to ours. Bea is very practical about it and seems to have taken events in her stride. Olivia (pictured left) on the other hand has obviously been mulling over it. At 4 am this morning she came marching into my bedroom and posed the following question:

“Does Frank know Virginia is going to burn him?”

I tried my best to explain that they probably took the decision together before he died. Then she started to ask me about going to heaven. My children have a firm belief in heaven. Their childminder is very religous and has been telling them all about it since they were born. In fact when they heard that my mother lives in Devon, Bea asked where that was and Olivia responded: “It’s where people go when they die.”

I tried to explain about the soul going to heaven and the body not really mattering. And then luckily she fell asleep. Because to be honest I have less idea of what happens when you die than I have about the plots of French films.

I suppose it is one of the great unsolved mysteries. I like to think that Frank is out there somewhere, reading some weighty biography, drinking a pression and listening to Wagner. It seems such a strange thing that his life is just over, that a light just goes out and it’s never to be seen again. But maybe that’s just a need the living have to deny death and its finality.

“What is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without any pictures?” I felt rather like Alice last night after watching the French thriller Hidden. “What is the point of a film,” I thought, “if you don’t know what the hell is going on?”

Hidden has had rave reviews so my husband bought the DVD for my birthday. I installed myself in front of the TV last night with a pile of ironing (oh, the glamour of my life) to be entertained. After 119 minutes I was totally confused. It wasn’t until I watched the interview with the director that I began to understand. This is not unusual when it comes to French films. I remember watching Belle de Jour once with a Slovakian au pair we had at the time. She asked afterwards if there were instructions on the box as to what it was all about. The French are brilliant at this lightness of touch that is often so light you totally miss it.

At first we sat there furious and exasperated. We watched the end again just to see if we’d missed anything. But slowly we began to understand that the whole point was that it wasn’t clear-cut and easy. And that maybe we’re the ones who have got so used to instant gratification that a film with subtleties is too, er, subtle. We have been watching a lot of Grey’s Anatomy recently (Dr MacDreamy, if you’re listening, choose me, not Meredith or your evil wife), perhaps our brains are so used to constant stimuli that watching a plot unfold slowly over an hour and twenty minutes in all its complexities is now beyond us. I have to say though the male lead was so bloody irritating I really couldn’t care less what happened to him. And although the deeper messages of the film such as the selfishnes of the west and the lack of honesty in our lives were potent, the fact remains that a film, like a book, should have a satisfying ending. Otherwise you’re left hanging on, which is most uncomfortable.

But in conclusion, I’m glad we watched Hidden. It certainly made me think. But I think in terms of ironing fodder, Grey’s Anatomy wins every time.

PS Amazon rating looking perky again, just in case you’re interested.

Not only is my rating way down but some poor woman has bought the US version of Two Lipsticks and a Lover (called All you need to be impossibly French) thinking it was a sequel. She is understandably furious and calls the book a “con”. Not a great review to have up there. The only upside is she liked Two Lispticks enough to want more…..

Not much else to report, a rather hellish weekend, Frank keeps popping into my head and I can’t believe I’ll never see him again. It was my birthday the day after he died but no one really felt like celebrating.

We are edging away from the St Tropez idea I think. Right now this feels like the best place to be, even if it is the safe option. Remembering how much Frank loved it here has in part made me think again. And of course there is always Wolfie. Although he started as a stray he is now very much part of the family. And then there’s Max, the world’s most stupid living creature, a ginger-haired cat, who belongs to my stepson Hugo and has been with us for eight years. I can’t imagine either of them settling into life at Club 55. We’ll see, things may change. Let’s hope my amazon rating does anyway.

My friend Frank died this morning. He had been ill with cancer for several years so we were all expecting it. But it is so much sadder than I imagined it would be. I suppose the reason it’s so sad is that Frank was so special. Everyone thinks their friends are special but Frank really was. He was a walking historical encyclopaedia and also a world authority on opera and ballet. His day job was politics, which he wrote about brilliantly. But more than anything he was funny. When I heard yesterday that he was in a coma my daughter Olivia, aged seven, asked me what was wrong.

“I don’t want Frank to die,” I said.

“None of us want Frank to die,” she said. “He makes us laugh.”

“And he’s Swedish,” added Bea, aged six.

Frank was many things, but he was not Swedish. He was, however, a brilliant mimick and would speak to the girls in pretend Swedish which they loved. I always remember a story he would tell about being on a London bus and pretending to be Russian. The conductor was charmed, called him comrade and let him travel for free.

We first met him about four years ago when he and his wife bought a house down here. He loved the region and village life. He would often sit in the local bar drinking a pression with a local man who claims to have discovered the Internet. My husband and he followed their local rugby team, Bèziers, in several defeats and would go on mad day-trips to places like Vichy, a four-hour drive each way. He called him “dear boy” which I found old-fashioned and charming. He called me “Hurricane Hels”, which I will miss, as well as everything else about him.