A Night in France

Yes, and that is what it is built for. You buy it, the download arrives straight away, and the email tells you the five things to do in the next ten minutes. The first one is putting the music on, which takes one tap.

Yes. Nine of the twenty pages are made to be coloured, written on or cut up, and those want a printer. The other eleven read perfectly well off a phone: the plan, the twelve recipes, the shopping list, the facts, the charades cards, the phrase cards and the debate questions.

So the evening still happens. You put the music on, cook something, read the facts out, play charades off the screen, and argue about cheese over pudding. Print the colouring pages another time, or don't.

Standard A4, plain paper, home printer. Colour is nicer, and black and white works for all of it. The only page that suffers is the Monet colour-by-number, where the six-colour key at the bottom comes out as six grey dots, so write the colours on before you hand it over.

After you have paid, you can choose how much to print: nothing, three pages, or all twenty. If you have more than one child we will duplicate the colouring pages, the passports and the postcards so the whole thing prints once, in order, rather than you noticing halfway through and starting again.

Immediately. The download link appears the moment the payment goes through, and the email follows within a minute or two. There is no account to make and no password to choose.

The link works for 30 days and up to five downloads, which is enough to save it to your phone, save it again to the laptop, and come back and print more of it later.

Roughly five to ten. The colouring, the passport and the postcard suit the younger end. The facts, the debates, the spaghetti tower and the cheese scorecard hold older children easily. A nine-year-old will take the tower challenge considerably more seriously than you expect. Nothing needs a child to be a confident reader, because an adult is reading most of it out.

Nothing, if you do not want to. Crêpes are flour, eggs, milk and a pinch of salt. Croque-monsieur is bread, cheese and ham. There are twelve recipes, and most of them start with things already in the house.

There is a proper shopping list in the pack if you would like to do it properly, and it is deliberately short. The list of extras (a beret, a mini Eiffel Tower, bunting) is marked optional because it is optional.

No. The music link goes to a page we host, which offers the same playlist on Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube. Free accounts are fine. If you would rather not use any of them, page four of the pack tells you what to search for.

It is yours. Print it again next year, do a different set of activities, run it for a birthday, or hand the passport to a different child. Nothing in it expires and nothing in it is dated.

Do please keep it to your own household rather than forwarding the file around the class WhatsApp group. It is £5 and it is how we get to make the next one.

You could. Plenty of people would enjoy it.

But it is 4pm. Somebody has already worked out what to cook when there is nothing in, put the debate questions in an order that produces an argument worth having, thrown away the activities that were dull, and made the whole thing look like something you would happily leave out on the table.

That is what the £5 buys: an evening someone else has already assembled, at the hour when you have no time to assemble anything.

Reply to the email and tell us. We will refund you, and we will want to know what went wrong, because there are more of these coming and we would rather fix them.