Point 3. My look. Death warmed up, according to my mum. The effect I’m going for isn’t complicated, I want to look like Lydia Deetz from Beetlejuice. If you can’t picture her straight away, my reader on the planet Mars, then don’t panic: I’m going to bore you to death with Lydia Deetz at least one line out of three in this notebook, given that I’m a total fan of hers. In brief, she’s the coolest teenager in the world with her Gothic black lace, her spiky hair, her big panda eyes … and she talks to ghosts! I should add, handsome stranger, that she’s played by Winona Ryder, who isn’t yet eighteen but is the most beautiful actress in the world. I wanted to take all the posters from my room so I could hang them back up here, in our holiday bungalow, but Maman vetoed me sticking drawing pins in the partition walls.

Yes, OK, fine, dear reader. I know I’m rambling on a bit. So let me get back to the first day of the holidays … The big adventure of the Idrissi family of Tourny in Papa’s red Renault Fuego. Tourny, just so you know, is in the Vexin region, a beetroot-growing plain stuck between Normandy and Paris with a ridiculous river, the Epte, which, according to local sages, has caused more wars and led to more deaths than the Rhine. We live just north of it, in the middle of some tiny little hills that locals have christened the ‘Vexin Bossu’ – humpbacked Vexin. You couldn’t make it up!

Anyway, for a long time I thought about how I was going to write about our grand departure for Corsica: piling up the luggage in the boot in the middle of the night, the endless journey from Normandy, sitting in the back with Nico, who can spend ten hours looking out at the cars, the trees and the road signs without ever seeming to get bored. The tunnel under Mont-Blanc and the ritual meal of quiche and salad in Chamonix, the journey down into Italy because, as Papa says, Genoa isn’t that much further than Nice, Toulon or Marseille, but the Italians never go on strike. Yes, I could have described all of that in detail but I’m not going to. It’s a narrative choice, dear intergalactic reader of mine. That’s just how it is!

Instead I’m going to concentrate on the ferry.

A person who has never taken a ferry to an island can’t really know what the first day of the holidays is.

I swear it, on Lydia Deetz!

It’s a trial by four elements.

Water, first of all.

The giant yellow-and-white ferry with the giant Moor’s Head – the symbol of Corsica – is magnificent at first sight. But when it opens its great mouth it isn’t so much fun.