Beverley Fearis gets on better in the classroom than on the Atlantic waves when she takes a combined surfing and French language course in Biarritz

"Attention aux rochers," came the frantic shouts, as I hurtled through the water, on my knees. I knew enough French to realise that I should be watching out for something, but I had no idea what. I also realised that it's not good to surf on your knees, but I just couldn't haul myself up. I had come here to improve my French and to learn how to surf and, so far, I wasn't doing too well on either front.

I was in Biarritz, Europe's surfing capital, nearly half-way through a two-week holiday with Cactus Language. Each morning my boyfriend, Warren, and I had French lessons at a school on the edge of the town, and each afternoon we would make our way down to the beach at the Côte des Basques to learn how to surf. I'm not sure which part of the day I struggled with most.

Whether you're five or 35, a first day at school is daunting, particularly when you discover that you're nearly twice the age and far less glamorous than most of your fellow classmates. As we gathered for the newcomers' briefing, I surveyed the room and saw a bevy of young, bright-eyed beauties of all nationalities - bronzed, blonde Swedes, rosy-cheeked Irish, Swiss, Danes, Japanese, Australians, Russians, you name it. The boys were in designer combat shorts and T-shirts, the girls in denim hot pants and skimpy vest tops. Warren thought he had died and gone to heaven!

Based on an online test before we arrived, he was put in the beginners' class and I was with the intermediates. While he was top of the class (or so he said), I struggled to keep up. Carole, my teacher (also a good few years younger than me) wouldn't allow one word of English to be spoken, and spoke French very quickly. Too quickly for me.

We worked our way through the textbook, doing aural comprehensions, watching videos, playing games, learning tenses I had never even heard of. At first, I didn't understand a word of it and humiliated myself on several occasions by giving a clumsy answer to a question I hadn't actually been asked. Homework was tough, and took me more than an hour each night. While Warren was learning whether chemise was masculine or feminine, I was practising how to tell my classmates the story of Jack the Ripper, frantically leafing through my dictionary to find the French words for "strangled and mutilated".

While I hadn't studied French for 15 years, most of my fellow classmates were straight out of school or college and still h