"It's not often one has the occasion to kiss boys like these."

Hear, hear, Jane Birkin.

She admitted herself that she was noticeably without rhythm but even then I couldn't help wondering whether she was gone in the hips. Still, she has that intriguing quality of being not quite beautiful - unitl she smiles, and then it's as if there's no more joyous creature alive. She came out wearing great wide-leg pants that sat on those (gone-in-the) hips without being hipsters in the true bum-crack sense of the word. And slippers, which perhaps contributed to the hip thing.

I think it probably takes quite a bit of concentration and planning to seem as spontaneous as she does - but there's no doubt that there's something in it. When she returned to the stage for the second half in a pared down French take on the scarlet diva dress - importantly without shoes - it seemed that everything was right with the world.

I chatted to a friend of a friend on the balcony before the show. He said that he'd checked out the Serge Gainsbourg website that day and that the final line in his life story is simply a date and "Serge Gainsbourg finis". Me: I don't know much at all about Gainsbourg's life or work. Friend of a friend: silence.

I didn't understand a word she sang but read later that one of the songs was called Chic Underwear. She said she was flattered but frightened to be invited to perform at the Avignon Festival because it is "a terribly chic event", and her producer told her that she must do something different and not just trade on the Gainsbourg thing in its pure form. She still thinks herself a gauche English person.

She's not, though. At the post show event the French champagne flowed and she, with her glass of red wine, stood apart from the crowd. As did one of the band momentarily when security, failing to recognise him, almost didn't let him in.

We drove home down Broadway and the massive half moon seemed to be dropping rapidly towards the horizon. It prompted a conversation about Chicken Little and the general appropriate-ness of childrens' stories that deal with disaster. In fact the horizon was rising in our view as we headed into a dip in the road.

Apart from the romance and optimism that was Jane B, this was a week in which my mobile phone got cut off because I believed in the reliability of the giant corporation to send me a text message as an indication that they meant business. They didn't send the message but clearly they did mean business. Must try harder to deal with the reality of paying bills on time.