Paris:- Saturday, 8. February 1997:- The event of the week - fraught with fear and loathing and incomprehension by all involved - was the beginning of the winter holidays.

Some teaching professionals in France believe that school children should go to school for no longer than six weeks at a stretch without having a break. They say the kids get dopey if they have to slave away longer than this.

They should know: these are the people who give grade one kids a hour of homework every night. Actually, in France, it is thought dangerous to have kids go to school for three consecutive days, so they get Wednesdays off and sometimes have to go on Saturday mornings. Parents really love this and I wonder why everybody doesn't just emigrate to a country where illiteracy is in fashion.

One of my kids got out of school on Tuesday for the 'winter holidays.' The other got out on Friday. Apparently, according to Le Parisien, the schedule for the holiday-begin days was set for France some time on Tuesday. There are three departure days for Paris and its region, which are the same as for the Bordeaux region. For the entire country, there are nine departure days.

Since winter holidays take place in the mountains, the traffic people also had a hand in deciding the dates. They wanted everybody to drive to mountains at different times on different days - to avoid the mess of a couple of years ago when everybody went on the same day and got stuck in some narrow valley, trapped by a blizzard.

And of course it has to be that all the people who rent places do so from Saturday to Saturday, and not from mid-week to mid-week.

Instead of there being two clear weeks, from which you can chose either one; there are two half-weeks with a complete week in the middle and absolutely everybody is going then. Except myself, of course

Before and after this 'complete' week, you have to scramble around trying to find minder places for the kids - because no parents get two weeks off - if they get any at all.

After all this frenzy, today's noon news said the routes to the mountains were virtually deserted this morning - as everybody is waiting until the usual morning rush is over before they depart.

Where the French Really Go in Winter

To read the papers you think that going to the mountains for winter sports is not an optional activity in France, but a major obligation.

Friday's Le Parisien popped this soap-bubble with a little pie-chart that shows that only 26.3 percent use this holiday for winter sports. Almost as many go to the 'country,' which usually means the kids go to grandparents or relatives while the parents stay home and work.

I don't know why, but almost 20 percent go to the seaside. Only 13 percent of these may be going to foreign seasides where it might be warm; 86.7 percent of all holidayers stay in France.

As far as the visitor-industry is concerned - even if many in the French mountains depend heavily of these particular holidays - fully half of the vacationers stay with parents or friends and only about 28 percent actually rent lodgings.

Le Parisien reckons that a six-day sojourn in the mountains costs a family of two adults and two teen-agers from 9,000 to 11,000 francs in half-pension. With equipment rental and various other charges and a couple of hot drinks, the tab comes to 20,000 francs a week - and this does not include round-trip transport or autoroute tolls.

This is about what a month's stay on the Costa Brava in August would cost, including round-trip transport and autoroute tolls. And down there, there's no waiting for ski lifts, although if you fall off your water-skis, you do get wet.

Following Le Parisien's two-page report about the insanity of it all, they've followed it with another two pages describing how to go skiing without getting killed or seriously maimed.

For the next week or so, evening TV-news will show the happy vacationers 'hot-dogging' around the slopes. By the end of the week they will show these same people being rescued by helicopters, and transported back to Paris on special hospital trains, and crawling out of the Gare de Austerlitz or Lyon, on crutches.

High Times Just Ahead for France?

Not much happened last weekend, so Monday's Le Parisien was wondering if things were 'going better' economically in France. Apparently consumption increased by 2.4 percent last year, with automobiles shooting up by 9.5 percent - due, it is true, to massive government incentives - now over.

After reading the two pages carefully and finding it hard to find truly positive figures, I think the answer to the paper's question is 'no.'

The figure not present is the annual inflation rate. Month by month this has been reported as less than 0.5 percent, and often was not much more than 0.1. When the cost of a lot of basic goods and services are increasing ever steadily, to arrive at such a low percentage for inflation means that the economy is going backwards - therewould be no inflation at all if the price of gas hadn't jumped nearly a franc a litre in a year, if the price of train and métro tickets hadn't gone up, if the price of cigarettes hadn't risen steeply.