If you like being thashed by the sea, you can get a two hour boat ride from La Rochelle to Fort Boyard and back. There’s no stopping so it’s not that fun either because there’s nothing between there and there, so all you get is a slow boat ride that gets you there and then a slow boat ride back. We got a very bumpy ride both ways with the ride back being really hard. So hard that it felt like a fairground ride which aren’t things I tend to like, but I’ll be honest this wssn’t too bad once I worked out that this was OK. I mean ‘ve never spent a great deal of time on boats so I didn’t know whether this thrashing about was OK for the boat but once we hadn’t died then the rest was fine, despite the screams from the other passengers and the multiple sick bags being handed out and returning… used.

What I didn’t lnow was that apart from Fort Boyard being a cheap UK TV show it was a really logn running French one. In fact the French show pre and post dates the UK one which I didn’t understand. As a fort, it was as useful as the UK TV version.