Not that CC#1 is troubling me very much at the moment, since he is away on his gap year in Australia. He is currently in Melbourne working in what the Australians call a bottle shop and we in the UK call an off-licence. I am not sure what he is learning there, if anything, although he may well be exposed to an equal opportunity household. The wife of the bottle-shop owner is a noted business development adviser to many of Australia's top law and accountancy firms and has just published her first book, Growing Your Professional Practice. I am sure that everyone in her house can operate the domestic appliances.

Australian women are to be found working in senior positions all over the place. My Airline Girlfriend, for instance, is Australian and runs all the training for a large airline based in the Middle East that draws its cabin crew from more than 100 nationalities. It's a big job, especially when you consider that the airline concerned employs 10,000 cabin crew.

Australian women are working in such large numbers in the UK nowadays that there is even an annual award for the most prominent. But I was startled to discover that they are not the only foreigners who can win prizes. Last month I was invited to the "Francais of the year" presentation, for goodness sake. These awards "celebrate the most talented French people who live and work in the UK". I didn't go. (I am not averse to all things French, and indeed wear a French version of the Wellington boot, but I had a prior engagement.) I did scour the shortlist and am not sure that many of them could really be described as French, given how long they have lived and worked in the UK. Michel Roux Jnr? Nicole Farhi?