If you or your children wear spectacles, make sure that your travel insurance covers their loss or damage in full. If you need repairs or replacements while in France, despite the reciprocal medical cover now supposed to be in place, even if your spectacles were supplied or subsidised by the UK DoHS, the French Sécurité Sociale makes it as difficult as possible to claim back the cost.

If you seek a refund on damaged spectacles, the Sécurité Sociale will ask for a prescription, so unless you have a copy of the most recent prescription issued in the UK, this means you will need to see a French optician and pay for a new eye test.

Even if you overcome this hurdle, the refund amounts to 65% of the ‘normal’ cost. Quite reasonable? You might be forgiven for thinking so, but the yardstick of ‘normal’, fixed by the Sécurité Sociale, has not changed since the 1960s.

In the Alice in Wonderland world of French optical services, the ‘normal’ price of frames is deemed still to be only €2.84, thereby providing a 65% refund of €1.85 for citizens 18 or over. Other than in exceptional circumstances, the lenses are considered to cost just €16.18, ensuring a 65% refund of €10.52. So, irrespective of their actual price, the most you can recover of the true cost of a new pair of spectacles is €23. Not all medical services are vastly superior across the Channel.