France is my favourite foe in our national game.
It all starts with their anthem - La Marseillaise. If ever there was a stirring call to arms (quite literally if you translate it) before a game of footy, it's this. Like the French it's showy, emotive and brassy - a Gallic haka, if you will.
The fact they're slightly nuts adds to their allure. But that's uncharitable. They're endlessly complex. There are the feral players, like the once world-class thug Gerard Cholley, and, of course, the grizzly Sebastien Chabal.
But then there are the urbane acts, the guys remembered more for their class - Philippe Sella and Abdelatif Benazzi spring to mind.
Whatever magic they wield, they maintain an ability to slice through All Blacks backlines with apparent ease.
Of all the All Blacks' fixtures in my house, this is the must watch.
It's also why I woke yesterday morning in deep shame after falling asleep about 15 minutes into Saturday night's test.
One of those "you know you're old when ..." moments.
As a kid I remember watching in disbelief as my father slept in his armchair on Christmas Day. How could anyone drop the lids on such a day? There were presents to break, not to mention a 24-hour amnesty on sugar, fat and fizzy.
How anyone would forgo those hours of decadence for some down time, once baffled me.
I say once, because three years ago I also succumbed on the 25th of December. I'd like to blame the beef, Bacardi, brandy snaps and the fact my kids rose at 5am to tip pillow slips upside-down.
But the truth is I slept for three hours after lunch because I'm old and tired.
Sorry, Dad, for judging you all those years ago. I now feel your fatigue.
Old Man Time waits for no one.
Things tend to happen to one's body, and generally at about midday in my experience. It made me think of the myth of the Noonday Devil, thought to be a demon active at the noon hour that inclines its victims to restlessness, torpor and inattention to one's duties.
It's no myth. Come noon, I'd give anything for a nanna-nap.
This whole ageing thing is a little disheartening.
At the moment I'm reading David Trubridge's book So Far, where he says structures are defined by their junctions. I was thinking that's also true of the ageing human body. Joints are problematic. My knees click as I bend (which isn't that often), it takes me an age to swing my hips from the bed in the mornings, my vertebrae creak, and my shoulder cup aches.
Then there's the hair colour. In the course of five years it's turned from dark brown to ash.
Many things I can blame on a sedentary vocation and a bottomless stomach. Recently, on medication, I glanced at the pill bottle and to my horror read the medication should be taken on an empty stomach. I was unfamiliar with that concept.
So what happened between the youthful days - and now? I never intended to live forever. But the physical descent is far too rapid.
On the upside, I read a nice theory the other day. I forget where, but the upshot was as we age, us old folk become physically frail because we're meant to be concentrating on more cerebral things. Our physicality becomes increasingly immaterial; the art of procreation and spear-chucking is now left to the young ones.
It's our job to impart wisdom to said procreators and spear-chuckers.
That fleetingly liberating theory all but dissolved when I glanced in the mirror and spied newfound hair sprouting from my ears last week. Looking at the tell-tale tussocks I realised it was quite appropriate. Here, looking back at me, was a tottery old parsley bush going to seed.
Mark Story is deputy editor at Hawke's Bay Today.