There were only two of us in the cinema this afternoon, me and one old lady who looked about 80. (She was gently snoring as the movie started but I thought she'd have a heart attack if I tapped her on the shoulder. What a social dilemma ... I didn't want her to miss it.)

I'm certainly old enough to remember learning to type with coloured stickers on the keys but I never painted my nails as a mnemonic. Anyway, back then nail varnish was red, pink or coral. Maybe a Mary Quant sludgy purple, but I don't recall blue, yellow and green.

I loved every feelgood minute of Populaire, but I've been itching to see it ever since I saw the posters on the Tube. Did they really have speed-typing marathons in the 1950s?

Try to imagine Mad Men: La Vie en Rose ...  lots of cigarette smoke, but set in smalltown Lisieux instead of New York,

And in a palette of colours that reminded me of Les Parapluies de Cherbourg and Les Demoiselles de Rochefort.

Don't you love that pink typewriter? (They seem to have forgotten the grubby, crumpled carbon paper which I always managed to get wrong way round.)

If I'm honest, Rose's handsome boss would never have been my type. I'd far prefer her seedy-looking Papa, who's looking rather older here than in The Returned. (Was it the shock of his red-haired zombie daughter coming back from the dead?)

The old lady must have woken up because as we left she told me she was shocked by so much old-fashioned sexism.
But actually, I've always worked in offices where most of the men could type faster than I can.

Like Rose, before she went into training, I can still only type with two fingers ...

A few more shades of nail varnish and I might have cracked it.

I knew that Populaire reminded me of something and now I've remembered ... it's the Orla Kiely typing pool from London Fashion Week. Not that any of these tentatively tapping models would win any speed contests.