Has the world gone stark raving totally bloody bonkers? As I write, a rather nice lady in her fifties from Liverpool is languishing in a Khartoum jail. Her crime? Allowing her pupils to call the class teddy bear Mohammed.

Did A. A. Milne face such censorship when he came up with the, let’s face it, slightly dodgy name of Winnie the Pooh? Did the naming of Paddington cause even a ripple of scandal?

Gillian Gibbons yesterday escaped a flogging but was sentenced to 15 days in jail followed by immediate deportation. What punishment will they inflict on the poor bear I wonder?

Rupert has a bear that he was given at birth. For forty-five years this bear remained nameless. He is a rather special bear, able to cheer the children up in a crisis (he went with Leo to hospital the other day) and do acrobatics. Finally this morning my husband announced he is going to be named.

“I will call him Mohammed,” he said.

I’m not sure the name suits him that well but I’m prepared to go along with it. Mainly so that every time I look at him, I will remember that having the right to call a teddy bear whatever you like should be a right enjoyed by teddy bear owners the world over.

Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2007

I had my day all planned out. I was going to write my introduction to the French edition of Two Lipsticks and a Lover, finish my article on the Savoie and then take the children to their tennis lesson this afternoon. This was until Leo (aka Spiderman) decided to dive chin-first into the bidet.

As soon as I heard the crack then the ominous silence followed by the wail I knew it was bad. When I saw the cut I knew there was only one thing for it: casualty. Olivia came with me (keen to meet a real Dr McDreamy). Off we sped with Olivia holding a towel to Leo’s bleeding chin.

We were at the Clinique Pasteur by 8.30am. At 8.35 we were in the treatment room. Leo put on the operating bed and a lovely nurse put some pain-killer on his chin. She told us to wait for the doctor. Olivia was ushered out and went off horse-riding with her sister rather grumpily.

She didn’t miss anything. On a scale of things I never want to see again it is right up there at the number one spot. The cut was deep, it needed five stitches. I was told to hold Leo’s hands by the doctor. Not so much Dr McDreamy but Dr McGrumpy. I thought she meant hold his hands to comfort him. Oh no, she meant hold them because he is going to try to escape when the needle pierces his skin.

“Who is holding his hands?” she yelled as the scissors went flying. I felt like such a fool, and also like throwing up. There was my son covered in green surgical sheets with a gaping wound. It was too horrible.

“Has he eaten today?” asked Dr McGrumpy. I replied in the negative. But I know what that means. That means they can put him under general anesthetic. Things were not looking good.

The last two stitches were the worst. I thought I was going to start hyper-ventilating, never mind Leo, but he was braver than me. After about ten minutes it was all over. He must have been high from the gas. As we left the hospital he asked if we could go and play outside.

When we got home I took his hand walked him towards the house. “Phew I didn’t die,” he said. I’ll second that. And phew we don’t live in England, we’d still be in casualty.

A man in London last week was arrested for trying to have sex with a fence. This wasn’t just any fence, it was in Leicester Square Gardens. I know the fence, and very attractive it is too.

Apparently Daniel French, aged 24, told police “I’m going to have sex with that fence.” “Oh no you’re not,” said the police and dragged him off.

The week before a “cycle-sexualist” (what quango came up with that ridiculous phrase) was caught half-naked in a compromising position with a bicycle in Scotland.

What I want to know is this: whatever happened to a good old-fashioned hooker? My mother has just moved to Italy and she lives in the middle of nowhere. “If you get lost,” she tells visitors, “ask the villagers for la puttana, I live just above the whore.”

My mother tells me the hooker arrives in her “office” just before 7am, parks up and stays all day. “She doesn’t even take time off for lunch, which I think is when she’s busiest.”

I imagine in my mother’s village fences and bicycles and other inanimate objects can sleep safely at night….

Oh help, how depressing. When I was young my stepfather would always say to me; “You’ll wish you listened to me, I am older and wiser than you and I know better.” Of course I didn’t listen to him, I found listening to anyone extremely tedious and, anyway, how come he knew so much?

Who was it who said I started out thinking my parents knew nothing, by the time I was twenty I was amazed at how much they had learnt?

Anyway, the night before last there was a storm and Bea couldn’t sleep. “Go to sleep Bea, we’re going to the ballet tomorrow night, you’ll be tired.” Still she fiddled about until the early hours. Yesterday afternoon I told her to have a sleep. “You’ll sleep through the ballet tonight,” I warned her. “Have a sleep.” No way. In the car on the way to Montpellier I tried again. “I’m not tired,” said a by-now-extremely-tired Bea. “I don’t want to sleep.”

We went to see Coppelia, performed by the National Ballet of Kazan. The what? I hear you ask. Well, apparently it’s part of the National Opera of Tartarstan, in the Volga region. Wherever they came from, they were excellent. They danced as only Russian ballet dancers can dance, with 100% precision and constant smiles. The chorus was perfectly synchronised, the prima ballerina impeccable. The male lead had buttocks that made you want to weep with a mixture of lust and envy.

“I love it,” said Bea, during the interval, glowing and grinning from ear to ear. “I’m going to dream about it.” And indeed she did. She dreamt about it all the way through the third act which has a pas de deux I would travel to Tartarstan to see.

Tempted as I am to say “I told you so” I remember how bloody annoying that was when my stepfather did it, so I won’t. I might just buy her a DVD of the ballet for Christmas and watch the third act with her.

All four girls (Bea, Manon, Olivia and Estelle) were great. An English couple behind us said their hearts sank when they saw that they were behind four children. “But they were less trouble than our neighbours,” they told us on leaving. “The girls were all transfixed.” Apart from Bea of course, who was asleep.

Even if she missed the final act I am thrilled. I have always loved ballet and I was really hoping my girls would too. It is one of those things that when done well leaves you with a warm glow for days afterwards and an inexplicable desire to jump around wearing a tutu. Which I think is a good thing. When I once did this with my friend Louise in her aunt’s garden we were told “it’s so much better to live out your fantasies.” I couldn’t agree more.

Having my two happy little girls sitting with me watching ballet dancers all the way from Russia is something I have fantasised about for years. Even if the little one did miss one of the best bits.

Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2007

I am lucky that I am not one of millions of ordinary French people trying to get to and from work today. For me the commute is easy. Out of bed and down the stairs to my office. But all over the country people are stranded, delayed, inconvenienced and for what? So that SNCF workers can retire aged 50.

Sarko was voted in by the French. His mandate was reform, and heaven knows the country needs it. Who do these civil servants think they are helping by bringing France to a standstill? Themselves of course. This is not what the majority wants, otherwise we’d have Sego not Sarko. These are selfish people fighting for their own turf to the detriment of the majority.

The message is clear. France cannot afford to go on like it has been. France is going broke. People need to work longer hours for more years if she is to stand a chance of being economically viable. Although we don’t pay a huge amount of tax our social charges are totally horrendous. We have had to take out loans to pay them off.

“But if you’re ill you can claim money,” our accountant told us. I would rather take that risk and not have the charges. But this is where the French mentality differs from mine.

The school is on strike today. The teachers are taking part in what they call a “national movement”. National movement for what? National movement to work as little as possible. Luckily my in-laws are not on strike and the children have gone there for the day. I’m lucky they are English, striking just isn’t in their vocabulary. A bit like claiming.

Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2007

Stefania Prestigiacomo, minister for Equal opportunities in the Italian government, has come up with ten commandments for female happiness:

* Consider motherhood a value – it is the greatest experience for women
* Follow your childhood dream
* Keep falling in love
* Buy something useless every once in a while
* Take pride in your own beauty
* Do not be upset by your man if he doesn’t notice when you’ve been to the hairdresser – it is his loss
* Do not be envious of important people; they, too, often spend evenings just watching television
* Travel to broaden your mind
* Defend other women
* Smile

I don’t agree with all of them. Number seven for example. Since when did I ever envy anyone who has to go out every night? My idea of a good evening is the apero a grande vitesse, followed by dinner with my husband and children and bed with a good book by 9.30pm. Or watching Grey’s Anatomy.

Number nine is slightly dodgy too - defending other women is just not in our genetic make-up. As a friend of mine said yesterday when we were discussing what makes us happy “nothing makes me more miserable than seeing other women happy.” In France, at least, sisterhood is dead and buried.

And what about men? Their list is a lot shorter, as I saw at lunch yesterday with Leo and his friend Louis, both aged four.

“Mine’s bigger than yours,” said Leo, holding up a piece of emmental to compare with his friend’s bit of emmental.

“No,” protested Louis. “Mine’s much bigger.”

It starts early…….

Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2007

We have just come back from Venice where we were invited to the launch of a joint venture between the estate agents Savills and a local company called Views on Venice. We stayed in a penthouse apartment overlooking the Grand Canal. The weather was amazing, sunny and warm, and we walked for hours on end, discovering parts of Venice that I have never seen before.

Another thing I discovered is what I most miss about living in England. I thought it was M & S or Waitrose or Bendick’s Bittermints. It’s not. It’s the girls. We went out for dinner Monday night after the launch party. There was the Savills PR girl Fiona, Rupert, three other female journalists from The Standard, the Mail on Sunday and Country Life (did you know by the way that it comes out weekly? Amazing, I can’t think what they find to write about. Apparently they have a dog of the week column now, is that animals or women I wonder?) and me.

Anyway, we sat down to dinner, ordered vast amounts of wine and had such fun. Having lived in France for seven years I have forgotten that all women are not forever counting calories and refusing to drink more than one half glass of wine. These women wouldn’t drink any less than half a bottle each. And OK you might wake up with a hangover, but all the laughing you’ve done must counterbalance the health threat of the alcohol.

English women are great. They are feisty, fun-loving, generous, warm and just fab company. Even Rupert, who was severely out-numbered, had a good time. I cannot imagine a group of French women having such a riot, and they certainly wouldn’t have drunk their way through four bottles of wine. Topics of conversation ranged from journalism (and how crap it can be, but then you do get to go on trips like this), children, men (and how crap they can be, except for Rupert, obviously) and whether to give up your maiden name when you get married. No is the answer.

Had I been out with a bunch of French women, I may have woken up feeling more clear-headed than I did on Tuesday morning, but where’s the fun in that?

Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2007

In 1207, a terrible massacre occurred in Béziers. This sleepy southern town – just half an hour from our house – was home to a number of Cathars, a sect deemed heretical by the Catholic Church. At the behest of the Pope, the French king got up an army, tempted with promise of booty and rewards in heaven. When they got to Béziers, the army managed to break into the city. The terrified citizens took sanctuary in the cathedral, only to hear these dread words from the Crusader leader: “Kill them all, God will know his own.”

The reason I am relating this gruesome tale is that, 800 years on, a similar massacre is set to take place, also on holy ground. The vanquishers had built an enormous cathedral in Béziers, more like a fortress than a cathedral. If you walk round the corner, as I did last weekend, you pass through a glorious cloister, and into what is known as the ‘Bishops Garden’. Beyond there is a formal garden, with views to the Pyrenees. Here stand a line of plane trees, maybe a hundred years old. They provide shade, colour and light. Their autumn leaves make a cheerful sound in the autumn afternoon. But they, like the Cathars, are condemned. On November 26, on order of the mayor, a crane and a gang of workers will chop up the trees, winch them over the cathedral, and there will be nothing left but a row of stumps and a memory of a better past.

The locals who appreciate such matters, including Béziers procurer, Charles Puig and artist Simon Fletcher, are outraged that this is going ahead, especially as the work is set to cost 100,00 euros. But the word from the mayor’s office is that “Le dossier est plie”: the case is closed.

It seems rather a shame. And very short-sighted. As Simon Fletcher says: “I wonder if it has occurred to our French hosts that the main source of revenue in the Herault comes from tourism and foreign residents who come for the climate and landscape. Will they continue to do so when all the plane trees have been cut down and the fine landscape between the coastal towns and the hills is dominated by wind farms and cheap housing?”

One of the most tragic and memorable moments of any Hardy novel is in Jude the Obscure. Jude’s son, Little Father Time as he is known, strangles his siblings and hangs himself, leaving a note saying “done because we are too menny” (sic). His reasoning is that Jude and Sue will be better off without the children and less poor.

Tragic as this is in a novel, you can’t imagine it happening in real life.

Today I read one of the most depressing news stories I have ever seen. An 11-year-old Filipino girl has hanged herself in despair over her family’s poverty.

“I wish for new shoes, a bag and jobs for my mother and father. My dad does not have a job and my mom just gets laundry jobs,” she wrote in a letter she put under her pilllow before she died. “I would like to finish my schooling and I would like very much to buy a new bike.”

Her family lives in poverty in a hillside shanty town, 600 miles south of Manila. Apparently little Mariannet could no longer bear to show up at school with no shoes and was also distraught at missing school when her parents couldn’t afford the fare to get her there. On those days she would just stay at home and do laundry with her mother.

A neighbour said of them: “The Amper family are always being discriminated against. They’re poor, the kids are dirty and the other kids don’t want to play with them. Because they’re very poor, they’ve been rejected by their neighbours.”

Any child dying like this is beyond horrific. But what really got to me was that this was clearly a very sensitive and intelligent young girl who was deprived of something she yearned for; an education. I’m not sure you can call education a human right, but it certainly should be a right for those who want it, and those who could benefit from it.

Perhaps Mariannet would have been the first member of the Amper family to make it out of the slums. She certainly felt the shame of living there strongly enough to want to escape, even to die.

Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2007

When I was a teenager living in Sweden my Italian aunt once asked me why I chose to live “in that periphery of the world”. She had a point. I could have lived in London or Rome and compared with either of those places, the Swedish countryside probably didn’t have much going on.

I am happy to report that this is no longer the case. Just last week an elk was rescued from a swimming pool in a town called Oskartrom, located in southern Sweden. The elk had wandered into the pool which had to be drained in order for special steps to be built so that it could walk out again.

I am not surprised the elk ended up in a private swimming pool. In Sweden we have a law called Allemannsratten, or Every Man’s Right, which means you have the right to walk anywhere you like, even on private land. The elk will have been well aware of this right and had clearly taken full advantage of it. Though I’m not sure it stretches to swimming in other people’s pools.

Anyway, even with the pool drained and the steps built, the elk was in no hurry to get out. Twenty-four hours later it was still standing in the pool. Probably waiting for someone to put the water back in. Eventually rescuers shot it with a tranquilizer gun and lifted it out using a harness.

“We initially held up a screen in front of the animal so that it wouldn’t jump back in the pool, but then she just lay down next to it,” said a local news reporter. After resting for an hour the elk wandered into neighbouring woodland and was reunited with its calf.

And you thought London was hectic?

Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2007