Britain and France are, by all accounts, at loggerheads over the future of the European Union.
The message comes from the British media that the French are being nasty to the Brits over their EU refund because Chirac is trying to draw attention away from his referendum defeat.
The French media are divided. The more chauvinistic right-of-centre press in France writes of the Anglo-Saxon cultural threat. The intellectual left-of-centre press is wary of the threat posed by the Anglo-Saxon economic model in which the market dominates.
The message from the British media, with their less politically correct and near-racist focus, is the more simple one that "the Frogs are at it again", being "bolshie" and "selfish" and ungrateful about Britain winning the war.
The British can always be relied on to "mention the war." But as an Irishman in post-war France taking a close look at the attitudes of both of these large countries towards the small country of which I am proud to be a citizen, it is a confusing fact that the French take an imperialistically British attitude to Ireland while the British do not.
A combined rugby team comprising British subjects and citizens of our Republic are at present touring New Zealand. The British media have, after some decades of persuasion, come around to describing the team as the "British and Irish Lions". The French media have been totally and old-fashionably British in their outlook and insist on referring to "Les Lions Britanniques". Mind you, they occasionally refer to Nelson Mandela as an "Anglo-Saxon", so the inexactitude of the French language must be taken into account.
It is difficult to forgive the French for being Europe's most Anglicised country towards Ireland, especially when there are important practical issues at stake.
Try booking a train on the internet site of SNCF, the highly efficient French state railways system. If you nominate Ireland as your country of residence you are, first of all, prompted to pay in cash in pounds sterling at an address in London. Fortunately, as a second choice you will be allowed to pay over the internet by credit card in euro.
It's a different matter if you want to book a hotel through SNCF over the web. Everything goes well until they ask you the address to which your credit card bills are sent. You insert your house number, your street name and the name of your city and then you are are asked to choose from a list of countries.
This list includes Antarctica, the Faeroe Islands, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Fiji, Kiribati and Papua-New Guinea. As far as I could make out from my not unlimited knowledge of geography, the only countries missing from the list were the mythical "Bongo-Bongoland" that Tory MP Alan Clarke made infamous - and, of course, Ireland.
I rang SNCF, who informed me that Ireland was part of Grande Bretagne. I informed them that this arguably had been the case until 1922 and perhaps the train bringing this news to SNCF had been delayed by 83 years. At this stage and for some unexplained reason, I was cut off.
Wine and food, not necessarily in that order, were resorted to for comfort. I consulted the works of Ginette Mathiot, France's most popular cookery writer, to find that Irish soda bread, called "pain d'Irlande", was listed under "Royaume Uni" (the United Kingdom).
The train from 1922 has, however, begun to arrive at a station or two, not always with welcome results. It seems to have arrived in Brittany where signs bearing the message "Brits Out" have appeared - directed, presumably, at the Brits from Britain rather than at those French who are more British than the British themselves.
The same train is shortly expected to arrive at the Gare Saint Lazare in Paris, where, close by, the Rues de Moscou, Budapest, Leningrad and others converge on the Place de Dublin.
French-style ignorance of Ireland is by no means a universal phenomenon. In Moscow, where I spent many years as the Irish Times correspondent, a street-sweeper once conveyed his knowledge that Irlandiya was "an English-speaking former British colony, a member of the EU, not a member of Nato, whose capital was Dublin, the birthplace of Birnard Shou and Shmuel Beket and Dzhems Dzhois." I will leave it to your imagination to decipher the last.
The same attitude was encountered, not surprisingly, in India where there has been a focus on Ireland from what is known there as the "Independence Generation." In my travels in Serbia I encountered a knowledge of Ireland as a country with an independent literature in English and in Irish.
In Estonia I found a romantic attachment to Ireland, its music and its literature. One of that country's senior diplomats continues to play the spoons in the "Hell Hunt" (Gentle Wolf) pub in Tallinn.
Only in France, in my experience, is Ireland still generally regarded as part of the UK. The French may not realise it, but they inhabit the most Anglicised country in Europe - and that includes England.