I ask the Bay City Roller Les McKeown what he used to think when looking at an audience of fans. "I thought, what a fantastic lot of pussy," he says. And he means their mums, too

It's been nine months since I left London for the gastronomic heaven of the Dordogne. Craig, my husband, still amuses the locals, waving his hands when he's lost for vocabulary (about 80 per cent of the time), but both daughters speak fluent French. Holly's first full phrase came bubbling out after she sent a bowl of cereal smashing on to the tiles. She gasped, looked at me and, with all the horror that a baby of 18 months can muster, said: "Oh la la la!"

Yet for all the magret de canard avec Margaux I devour, I still wonder whether I'm missing out on something amazing "back home". Then an event happens to remind us why we left. Peter, a hippyish academic friend, was en route to visit us in France when he was assaulted on a bus in Euston in broad daylight. It started when an inspector asked to see his ticket. Pete couldn't find it, so he suggested checking with the driver, who duly remembered him buying a ticket the stop before. End of story? No. Pete was asked to leave the bus. He refused.

Reinforcements were radioed for and the cavalry arrived to tackle this dangerous 50-year-old teacher. "Ken's cadets" dragged Pete off the bus, forced him face down on to the pavement and kicked his glasses away. His wrists were twisted and bent until they bled and he was locked up, first in the back of a van, then a holding cell and finally a police cell, for a total of six hours. He was then charged under the Public Order Act because his yelling and struggling (aka cries of fear and panic) had caused the arresting maniacs "alarm and distress". He will have to pay an £80 fine under David Blunkett's new thuggery laws. Zero tolerance?

The French education system is astounding. Vergt, our town, has spotless schools with brand-new equipment. Our one concern is that rural secondary education seems a bit lethargic, unless our daughters aspire to be opticians' assistants or farmers' wives. With this in mind, I took them for some "culcha" to the National Portrait Gallery. Alex was handed a backpack of puzzles, floppy hats, a quill, a glove and other random items. She then ran through the Tudor rooms trying to match the items to the paintings. I took her over to a portrait of Elizabeth I. The globe in Alex's bag was supposed to match the one Elizabeth was towering over. We chatted about what a monarch straddling the globe meant. An hour later, walking back through the room, I asked Alex, looking tiny among the bored ten-year-olds and tourists: "Which is the picture of Elizabeth I and what is special about it?" She ran straight to the painting and squeaked: "This is it, of course. It's special because it's saying she owned the whole world." The parents near us gasped, a blissful sound. I'm a competitive London mum at heart.

Radio 4's Loose Ends invited me to be a guest interviewer. My subject - Les McKeown, the most famous Bay City Roller. Not all jobs in the media are exciting, but this one gave me butterflies. Loose Ends always sounds so slick in that "we're deliberately not being slick" kind of way. When I'm shown the studio, it's so bleak I almost blurt: "But I thought you recorded this in a smoky jazz club in front of a live audience!" I stumble through my first cue, then I ask Les a fairly benign question like: "There is a dark underbelly to the boy-band world, isn't there?" He launched into a five- minute rage against the "felchers" in the music industry who rape young men and steal their money. Judy Carmichael, the amazing stride pianist, nearly fell off her chair, she was laughing so hard. He then laid into most of the record industry, his old manager, other band members and any other names he could think up. In desperation, I tried to draw out a gentle Loose Ends-type of answer from him. I remarked how great it must have been to look out on an audience of fans at just 20 years old. What did he think? "I thought, what a fantastic lot of pussy!" He added that he didn't just mean the teenagers; he had shagged their mums, too. This is an unedited version of the interview that went out. I can tell you now that Loose Ends is far raunchier backstage than you might imagine.

At a gay party in Hackney, I am entranced by stunningly attractive, witty, erudite men. Am I a fag hag? The term has always bothered me. I ask around for clarification: are homosexuals still "fags" and am I Macbethian enough to qualify as a "hag"? Over pumping house music and glasses of champagne with added vodka, a competition is held to come up with a better term. "Queer dears" is rejected - too Danny La Rue. "Bender frienders?" You read it here first.

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