IF you read last month’s letter – and if not, why not, eh? – you may remember that bit about the Loire Valley pensioner who was unwittingly caught having ‘un pipi’ in his garden when Google Street View went down his way. He became the laughing stock of the village, sued Google, lost, and was [...]

FORGIVE me, reader, for I have sinned … yet again. Yes, as an 32-year expat in France who has done everything he can to integrate, who always does his damnedest never to start any sentence with ‘Back in the UK’, and who believes that if a country’s worth living it’s worth fighting for, I have [...]

LAST week, Mme Masstairmann and I were having our annual flirtation with broken legs and the thermometer at the top of our Alpine ski slope glinted at minus 16°C as we stood in the calm, crystal-sharp early-morning sunshine, blinking at the mighty Mont Blanc in the frosty distance. Where’s Julie Andrews when you need her, [...]

THEY say that to make a fortune in France today, all you need is a lot of money. But if it’s still in francs in a biscuit tin under the floorboards, you had better move fast, because the Banque de France will no longer exchange them for euros after 17 February.

HOW was it for you then? Christmas, I mean. Very nice but very quiet? Well, Noël was much the same Chez Masstairmann here in Dinan, but I must admit I’m still puzzled by the hidden agenda behind two of the books La Patronne gave me, even though she denies that there is one.

I WONDER if they ever found out who won the Euro Millions lottery draw in September. It was someone just over the water from you, anyway, in the Calvados, home of the world-famous apple-based paint-stripper so beloved by Helier Clement. Good Lord – you don’t think it was old Helier himself, do you, and he’s [...]

The clocks have just gone back, alas, and it’s now dark at six. Winter looms, ho hum, but summer made a brief reappearance the other day, in our hearts and minds at least, when the gendarmes announced that they’d finally arrested the man who left a long trail of rather strange, sunny season damage in [...]

IMAGINE, if you will, that you live far from Jersey’s madding crowd in a delightful cottage right on the water’s edge in the village of Arradon, on the beautiful Golfe du Morbihan in southern Brittany, in a house that’s been in your family for more than a hundred years and is so idyllic that it [...]

IF you read last month’s letter from you know where, you may remember me saying that we Beans, though in many ways an admirable race of course, were not best known for showering indiscriminate largesse on all and sundry. Rather the opposite, in fact.

AT FIRST I thought it must be a mistake, surely. Either that, or the same time-worn joke. But our Monsieur Météo on national radio made a remarkable, unprecedented forecast this morning. Yes, he predicted rain everywhere except in Brittany, would you believe?

IT had been an awful long time coming – 30 years, in fact – but there it was in my trembling hands at long last: the letter summoning me, a Brit-Anglo-Bean, to invigilate and therefore read the French GCSE dictation paper in this Dinan school.

NOW I don’t like to talk about these things when you might be having dinner, or have just finished and are now sitting contentedly in your armchair with your favourite evening newspaper, but Mme Masstairmann’s Uncle Pierre recently had to have an operation for, well, ‘hémorroïdes’.