YOU will be wondering what I did on my holidays in Paris.

Part of the 
time I was learning to count. I asked the market stall-holder how much 
for the red peppers. He said quatre vingt dix neuf. That's four, 20, 10, nine.

I was trying to work out how a few peppers at 1.99 a kilo could cost four euros something. The vegetable seller, an Indian chap who spoke better English than I do, explained the cost was 99 cents.

That's when I remembered the French don't have a word for 90. They call it four-20-10. It's like the counting bit in hide and seek. This may be why the ice cream cone with the Cadbury flake, the four-20-10-nine, never caught on in France.

You can get by without a word for 90 when you're buying peppers for the salad but how does Christine Lagarde, French lady who is head of the International Monetary Fund, cope when she's explaining why 
the Greeks need another 90bn euro loan?

In the spirit of the Auld Alliance, I am happy to help the French. If cinquante is 50, then neufante can be 90.

I worry about other aspects of the French economy. The land of the menage-a-trois. What kind of 
menage only has three members? Even at a tenner a head that's just £30 when it's your maw's turn to get a set of sheets and pillowcases at Terleys.

This is not to be confused with the fromage-a-trois, which is an intimate relationship between three consenting adults and may involve Camembert.

The French certainly take their fromage seriously. In the market 
there is a cheese factory outlet 
shop.

It is he final resting place for big lumps of ripe and runny dairy produce that, if they don't meet 
the last one-euro asking price, 
can make their own way into the 
bin.

There is more to French culture than cheese, as I often contemplate on my morning constitutional through the Pere Lachaise cemetery. It is home to Moliere, Bizet, Chopin, Edith Piaf, pictured, and Sarah Bernhardt to name but a few.

The real star, in my opinion, is Jean Pezon, a lion-tamer who according to local legend, was eaten by his own lion.

Pezon really should be in the Pantheon, the vast domed building in the Latin quarter, where French national heroes are buried.

Voltaire and Rousseau qualified for entry and they ran a second-hand bookshop in Glasgow.

tom shields
Fromage a trois

on ...