M

The past historic would mark you out as a very very formal speaker (although I agree that you do hear it on occasions especially the PH of être. Personally I would avoid it. M

I am booked on the East Midlands - Nantes flight on Oct 22nd, returning on Oct 27th, so they are flying up until then - I hope! It looks like the service finishes on Oct 29th. M

The 'standard' method is for each parent to speak to the child only in his/her mother tongue. So you would use only English, your husband only French. You might think this would cause some confusion, and it may do in the early stages, but the child's little brain soon sorts it all out. M

We use the stuff which you put on the back of the cat's neck - Drontal. It is expensive but it is very very effective. We dose them every 2-3 months, whenever we see the little white wrigglers! M

Oy! You two! Take it outside! M

Yes - Samsung netbooks are brilliant. I have an NC10 which I have used for almost a year, and my wife has just bought a Samsung N250 Plus.

Well, the rules about 'il est' versus 'c'est' are a bit more complicated than that (look them up on French.about.com if interested) - but essenially Clare is correct. M

Thanks everyone. The first leg of her journey (Toulouse - Paris) seems to have taken off ok. Fingers crossed! M

Well, I guess that's a 'no', then. She will be relieved! M

Mrs M, who is in France at the moment, has 2 flights with Air France booked for tomorrow, and she has heard a rumour that there will be strike action. Air France say they know nothing about it, and I can't find anything on Google.fr. Has anyone heard anything? M

As the great American movie mogul Sam Goldwyn said - 'A verbal contract ain't worth the paper it's written on'. I suspect the same is true of a handshake. It's hard to make a 'gentlemen's agreement' - there are so few 'gentlemen' around these days (and to fend off any flack, I say nothing about thier female equivalents!). M

Hachette Education do a useful 'Dictionnaire des Synonymes (632 pages in paperback ISBN 2.01.280536-1 published 2003)  edited by Marc Baratin (no, really!) and Mariane Baratin-Lorenzi. I can't recall how much I paid for my copy, but I am notoriously tight-fisted , so it can't have been much! M

She doesn't have to wait, if she applies for the OU PGCE. They register students 6 times per year - every 2 months from September onwards. M

Hack it back - we take at least 1/3 off ours, and it just comes back even stronger. M

When someone acts 'de mauvaise foi', they are acting in bad faith, ie with an intention to deceive. 'Foi / foie / fois' can cause problems - when I lived in France, I kept hearing of people having a 'crise de foi', which I took to mean they had started to have serious doubts  about God. In fact they were just feeling 'liverish', bilious![+o(] M

To work 'in a silo', to have a 'silo' or 'bunker' mentality, means to work in isolation, not as part of a team. The message talks about reducing the tendency to work cut off from colleagues, and to increase the team-spirit of the enterprise. M

De Montfort is now the largest University in the UK, I heard recently! No, that's the Open University - over 220,000 students. I work for them. M

Don't worry about the 'poison in the soil' scare stories. Buy some glyphosate gel and just paint it on to the leaves of the weeds - they will die, but nothing else will, and nothing harmful will get into the soil. M

Ah, but it's not YOUR chair, Clair. He only lets you use it when he doesn't want it. I bet you think it's your house, too? Wrong![:)]

I think it depends on what you want them for. I have a pair 0f 7-20 x25 by Praktika which are ideal for carrying around, bird-watching etc. I also have a pair of 15x70 which are so large & heavy that it is almost impossible to hold them steady -  I have them on a tripod (for looking at the sky, moon, stars etc.). M

Definitely illegal for someone to sell a house knowing that it had a serious structural problem which was not evident just by looking, and which they did not alert you to. The phrase you need to search for is, I think, vice caché. But proving it could be a lengthy (and expensive) process. M

Could be lungworms - we had a cat which developed a cough, and when we took him to the vet the cat very considerately coughed up a load of them on the table [+o(]- easy diagnosis, and easy treatment. M

Aha! I add a shot of pastis to fish stew - yummy! Serve with crusty bread. M

Wow! Where did you find that? M

Mostly brilliant - even the 2 & 3 star 'municipal' campsites. Almost every town has one, and they are not expensive at all. M