By the time you read this, the millionth pressed duck will probably have been eaten in La Tour d'Argent in Paris. As you no doubt know, the six-week-old duck is strangled, so as to preserve its blood, and then lightly roasted.
After breast, leg and liver are removed, the carcass is put in a press and squeezed and the resulting blood, fat and abdominal goo are collected and combined with the liver, cognac and butter for the sauce.
True, a trifle health-conscious and vegetarian to my way of thinking, but there you are. More to the point, the millionth customer will probably be Jacques Chirac, who will be called whenever the 999,999th duck is ordered.
Wrong way round. The millionth duck should have been spared, and that bumbling, conceited criminal Chirac should have been strangled, half roasted, his liver removed, his carcass pressed, and the entire Président Pressé fed to the bird.
There is something so bizarrely and Frenchly unreal about the Tour d'Argent duck, arriving coincidentally with the end of a week-long festival in Paris celebrating the incomparable culinary culture of France. Perhaps they were doing the same in May 1940. For like then, the French government appears to have no idea where it's going or what it's doing, nor of the appallingly hard times that lie ahead.
It's good Air France is getting rid of Concorde. It would have been flying empty from the US from now on. And if you've invested in French clarets, sell them now, or reconcile yourself to drinking them, or laying them down for at least a decade. The biggest investors in Bordeaux used to be the Americans. As I say, used to be. Wait a year, and you can buy a chateau or a vineyard around Haut Medoc for the price of a halting site in Limerick.
Far worse is to come. Watch Airbus Industrie - which of course is not French at all, but a European consortium with a French name and a French billing address - trying to sell its aircraft in the US: it'll be like selling condoms in a convent. Watch the French technological sector shuffling to the soup kitchen. Watch the exodus of French talent to London, New York, Dublin even.
You can blame the catastrophe looming over my beloved France on one man: and more than France. The EU is lying on the canvas, wondering what hit it, and NATO might as well be our own National Association of Tenants Organisations for all its military value. And the Rapid Reaction Force should now be renamed Don't Do Anything Rash Until We've Made Up Our Minds No-Reaction Force.
This farce has directly proceeded from Chirac's decision to veto any UN amendment justifying US force against Iraq regardless of the circumstances. A simple truth: unconditional negatives can only destroy the authority of the forum in which they're deployed. And to cap it all, as the millionth duck neared its end, the Franco-German alliance - the Franks - convened a conference of four European countries - themselves, plus Belgium and Luxembourg - to be the "nucleus of collective capability" of European defence.
One wonders they didn't invite Monaco, San Marino and Lichtenstein to add some real military muscle to this new, earth-shaking Frankish-led alliance.
(A tip to the Belgians: don't go looking for spare parts for my F-16s from the US for a very long time indeed).
Our own policy on deployment of the Defence Forces is in a shambles too, following the Chinese veto on a troop deployment in Macedonia. We have priggishly tied deployment of our forces to UN authorisation, like the class good-goody calling for a vote of thanks to teacher, only to get a sound hiding for his trouble. Depend on the UN, and what do you get? A European-led mission by one European country, us, to another European country has been vetoed by an Asian country whose prime minister probably thinks our capital is in The Hague.
The lesson is clear. The UN is no longer the sole authoriser of force. The world has had its Abyssinian moment yet again: henceforth states will pursue their own self-interests, with the occasional visit to the big building in New York to see if they've changed the coffee there. The UN, meanwhile, will simply become a large aid agency, with the difference that its officials will still all fly first class, and retire at 50.
In other words, Humpty Dumpty has fallen off his wall and, thanks to Brian Cowen, we didn't go the way of the egg - which we would certainly have done if we'd listened to the pious nitwits in Fine Gael and closed Shannon to the US. Then we would have had what you might call the French moment, with transatlantic telephone calls to the IDA ceasing, and the vital air transport question not being the Shannon stop-over, but whether it made any economic sense at all to have planes full of emigrants flying to the US, and empty coming back.
Fine Gael, once the party of international realism, is now competing for the small Irish neurotic left-wing vote with three other parties. It has thereby made itself unelectable as a government party, which is bad enough, but far worse is the consequence: Fianna Fáil, with all its cronyism, and its committee-room deals, and its planning permissions over a Powers, a wink and nod, could be in government for decades.
Do you know what all this is this? It's post 9-11. It's the world we live in.
Get used to it.