Paris:- Tuesday, 3. September 1996:- In last week's Diary column, I started off with, "Believe me, I don't want to be where I am today" and the date was Monday, 2. September. I got it wrong, again. The Rentrée - school beginning - is today, and I wish I were on another planet.

There are people who arrange their lives and their vacations to have a full week to prepare for this, but the great majority look like they are vastly shell-shocked. I am a veteran and I am still in recovery from last year.

We have tunnel-vision as we race to the destination, fight for a parking space, elbow to get the new teacher's attention - to say that Johnny is not as brain-damaged and un-toilet-trained as he looks - hold the wailers in our arms while muttering, 'Let go kid, let go!' - and then stagger out the door, if it is possible to do so with all the other parents and kids coming in.

Really brilliant parents then race to school number two - to look for another parking spot - which is blocks away, or on a sidewalk - and race on foot - 'Come on, Jimmy, can't you go any faster?' - to a frenzied chaos in a courtyard - sort of like a holding pen for Saturday night drunks - with parents trying to read hand-written class lists and the kids are bopping around, each with a brand, spanking new, very large case strapped to their back like a parachute.

This goes on longer than the legal limit but finally it gets itself sorted out, sort of. There are mixups - we are at the wrong school or the wrong end of the right school, or the anticipated teacher decided to stay in Argentina - a really good idea! Finally our loved ones are lined up like ducks behind their mother and off they go, like troops, with their nearly empty sacks on their backs. Very touching.

In our case today, there is a little coffee-and-cakes 'welcome' setup, where we try to find the beginnings of car pools and hear horror stories about the traffic jams encountered on the way to the school.

Then the bomb drops. Working parents find out that there are no 'etudes' today; the packages have to be picked up at 16:30 - and not at 18:00 as hoped. 'Etudes' is the thing where the kids are kept in the school after the official closing - for a little breather and a hour's homework. Without it, you need a picker-upper, or you have to tell the boss adios at maybe - 15:30, depending on where you work.

Today, I am the boss and I tell me to do the pickup at 16:10 - because it is not too far - but short day all the same and I have to dock my virtual salary. Tonight the phone lines get really clogged as 'arrangements' are attempted at solutions; but nobody where we live goes anywhere near where the school is - or they don't go at the same time.

There is public transport - modern France is where this is happening, after all - but I am writing here about two specific kids under eight, so my point of view is that buses are out if they are public.

The rest of the day I spend going to two different city halls to buy school lunches and an after-school minder service and the system is different in the two locales, so I get to meet new functionaries as well as teachers. In case you are thinking this is a piece of cake, forget it. Every time you visit functionaries, if you only want to do it once, you have to carry all your relevant personal document plus a couple of - hopefully paid - utility bills to prove you do indeed exist. If one bit of paper is missing, then it means a re-visit. Knowing exactly which papers are necessary is France's version of Trivial Pursuit.

At home, I look at the school insurance stuff, thinking that if I move to Argentina tomorrow, sending them money will just be a waste. My father was going to Argentina before he got sidetracked and he was pretty smart - except for the sidetracking - so I always assume Argentina is a grand place for people who wish they lived in 1947.

A certain amount of school supplies have already been pre-purchased behind my back - I know better than to do this, because the two haven't got their official lists yet. These lists will be quite specific - one cahier rouge, for blah; one cahier vert - with lines, squares, cubes - exactly so - for blat, and on it goes. The newspaper Le Parisien today says that the shops ordered this stuff in March; I wonder why we couldn't have got it then. Somebody didn't want to cut the trees down too soon I suppose.

After school, the first pickup - I ask the usual questions and get the usual replies - in other words, absolutely nothing. Replies are reserved for mom, who edits them and then relays the results. Sometimes it is amazing stuff.

The second pickup is easier: is in the village, and the after-school minders are the same as last year. Number two is whacked though - after nearly a month of teaching himself how to swim in the afternoons by throwing himself in a deep pool in Spain - he has missed his afternoon nap at school, because it is all so exciting.

After the chaos of the early evening, we watch an uninteresting movie in TV - that I have picked in order to bore them to sleep - but it does not work. On Day Two they will start with a sleep deficit, as I will.

La Rentrée According to Le Parisien

What I have written above is one particular view which probably does not convey the amplitude of the event in France which is known by all as the Rentrée - the Return. I worked for several years on a weekly magazine for kids here, and every year we always did several issues devoted to the Rentrée and I never understood what the fuss was about.

One of this week's cartoons - Vive la Rentrée - is a cover illustration that was done for the magazine, Formule 1.

The Paris newspaper for you and me, Le Parisien, from Monday to Saturday of this week devotes 27 pages to the Rentrée. All local papers all around France have had similar coverage. In what must be a publicity coup, Le Parisien has run a photo all week of a really fat Eddie Murphy - which is a plug for his new film, called 'Professeur Foldingue,' which sort of means crazy-nuts, even though it is in none of my dictionaries, as it is a contraction of folle and dingue.

Paris and the surrounding Ile-de-France are counting on 2.04 million students to show up, a rise of 5,100 over last year. Teachers of all sorts amount to 145,000 in the Paris area.

There are 12.4 million students for all of France; and they go to 72,300 establishments, including 1,850 Lycées Professionnels. They receive instruction from slightly more than 1.3 million teachers. France spends about 22,600 francs per year on each kindergarten or elementary school pupil and this rises to 52,500 francs for each student at a Lycée Professionnel.

The teaching of foreign languages was started experimentally for grade one pupils last year, and it is being generalized this year. The quarter million teachers involved in this project have about 40,000 audio cassettes to aid them, and some teachers say that they are learning the language at the same time as their pupils. If the language concerned is English, I can say that the results are not amazing - and a lot of teachers are against it for the good reason that they have had no training themselves.

Le Parisien devoted several pages to François Bayrou, the Minister of Education, who was invited to talk to Le Parisien's readers. For a government Minister, Mr Bayrou is young and dynamic-looking. From reading some of the excerpts, I get the impression that he does not realise that France is surrounded by the rest of the world. Here are a couple - of many - quotes:

"The two major missions of schools are the mastering of reading, calculation and civics."

"Everyone should regard themselves as an actor of the institutions and not as a consumer."

"Once outside the frontiers of French national education, it is presented as a universal model."

"I (Mr Bayrou) wish that we give a major place to reading and grammar."

"We are in a country that has the most holidays and the most hours of courses in the world."

"We are going to have a general debate this year with families about the school calendar."

The last quote is a reference to the habit in France of returning to class from holidays on Tuesdays, and leaving for holidays on Thursdays - while parents generally work on Mondays and Fridays. Another headache for parents are long and illogical holidays in fall, at Christmas, in February and at Easter - which may not be exactly 'at' Easter. Regardless of when they are, few parents get so much time off.

A 'debate' about the school calendar is announced every year and the logical French love to talk - forever - and it does not seem to matter that this particular debate never reaches a logical, and user-friendly, conclusion.

Outside of spelling contests - all those French 'exceptions!' - I think the major purpose of French education is to have something serious to complain about all the time.

This has been our - perhaps annual, perhaps not - Rentrée report. To all students in the world, good luck!