This is the BBC.

This is from our own correspondence which was first broadcast on Radio 4 on Saturday, the 18th of March 2017.

And with a helping of chips and mayonnaise, here's Kate Aide.

Hello, today, Far-Write politics in France and in Holland,

where our correspondent recalls his childhood

while burrowing under the surface of Dutch identity.

We're in Western China, frontline on terror according to the government.

In Lebanon we look at the greatest per capita concentration of refugees in the world,

and how to survive in France if you're called Kevin.

The French presidential election looms next month and the failure of Dutch

Nationalists to break through this week has given comfort to the opponents of

Marine Le Penz Front Nationale. She's still expected to win in the first round, but the polls suggest she lose the second.

Her campaigns targeting what she calls forgotten France, the small towns and dying villages

in post-industrial regions, centering on the socialist and communist fiefdoms

in the north and east, places like Dernau where Lucy Ash has been.

Emile Zola's novel about a miner's strike, Jaminel, reeks of poverty.

From the rancid fried onions mixed with cold dust to the watery dandelion soup and the smell of human cattle in the

the herd family's overcrowded bedroom. When I first read it at school I was struck

by the description of the half-starved children with pinched anemic faces

and discoloured hair. For his field research Zola went down a working coal pit in Dunin near the Belgian border. He didn't just go underground, he went

undercover, pretending to be the secretary of the region's socialist MP. Close up he saw the back-breaking work in the mine, a place he describes as a vicious

beast of prey choking on human flesh. Today Dunna is no longer ringed by coke furnaces and the mines are long gone.

...