HELEN FRYER is from Covingham but is spending a year in the French city of Lille, working at the Pasteur Institute. Helen, 21, is a student at Keele University, where she is studying French and Biology.

Around this time last Friday I was on the Eurostar back to Britain for Christmas.

For once I was early for the train and was able to watch the waiting passengers.

A four-year-old French girl watched fascinated as some equally tiny English kiddies did acrobatics on the station benches, and she started to copy them on a seat nearby.

Both sets of parents told their children to get down from there at once, without exchanging a word.

All the children immediately turned sulky and the French girl declared she wouldn't wear her bobble hat, in protest.

Some things are international. As international as the Sesame Street theme tune that a Spanish toddler insisted on playing on her Fisher-Price contraption all the way home.

The Channel Tunnel workers were on strike at both the French and British ends, resulting in a 50-minute delay that cost many of us our connecting trains. I've asked people, I've looked on the websites of 'The Times', 'Le Monde' and the local paper, 'La Voix du Nord', but nowhere can I find out why. Perhaps the French are so used to strikes that they've stopped asking the reasons.

At intervals over the last few weeks our road has been lined with parked police vans with gendarmes sitting inside looking fed up.

They've been striking over a lack of resources and manpower, and the prime minister, Lionel Jospin, has responded by ordering 50,000 new bullet-proof vests, giving them a pay-rise and promising to hire more bobbies.

Seeing the results of the gendarmes' strike, the respective unions of the postal workers, health workers, and bank clerks have also been threatening action.

Rather less newsworthy was the recent secretaries' strike at one of the three local universities, Lille III. They locked themselves into the computer room where my friend was due to have a lecture, and refused to come out. Why? No-one could say.