WHAT a summer, eh? I’m beginning to feel that the only way to get a lasting spell of good weather here at home in Brittany would be to frame a photo of some brief sunny period and hang it on the wall.

This year, like last, winter blurred through spring and into July, only for the depthless grey skies to reappear in August. It’s like living in Tupperware, as Bill Bryson once remarked of the Yorkshire Dales.

Now as you watch your weather forecast, it might be some consolation to see that it’s actually quite balmy there on The Rock compared to, say, Aberdeen or even dear old Skeggie. But we’re very near the top of France’s weather map, and our Monsieur Météo has been reminding us daily that they’ll need sunblock by the bucketful down in Cannes and Corsica and, good grief, it’ll be oilskins as usual up along the Channel.

Nor did this stop the Parisian secretary of state for tourism smugly boasting on telly that the season has been very satisfactory with figures three per cent up on 2007, consolidating France’s position as the world’s top tourist destination with an estimated 63 million visitors this year.

Well, I hope he’ll forgive us Bretons and Normans for only clapping with one hand, because it’s all been very quiet out here on the western front. All our indicators are as much as 20 per cent down on last year, and that was officially described then as ‘mediocre’.

In sheer desperation, Mme Masstairmann and I finally drove down to the beach near Dinard last week anyway, but we just sat in the car, slack-jawed, watching the sole occupants of the sands, a hardy English family shrieking with cold as they splashed out into the cheerless grey chop.

Mind you, I don’t know what we’re complaining about really, because 12 million French people never go away on holiday at all, most of them because they simply can’t afford it. And the few tourists who did brave the ominous skies have been very canny with their money, taking shorter stays later and cutting right back on the optional extras like cafés and restaurants because income has failed to keep pace with rising prices, despite what the government claims.

Nationally, the cost of a hotel room has gone up 7.4 per cent since January, which is three times the rate of inflation, the inevitable fuel-induced hikes being aggravated by successive increases in the national minimum wage which is the pittance earned by the vast majority of those working in the industry.

And the ambient gloom wasn’t lightened as four out of ten guests complained of an indifferent welcome and 35 per cent complained of noise.

A further 28 per cent criticised the food and 23 per cent the cleanliness – or lack of it.

Standards in restaurants, cafés and other eateries in tourist areas weren’t much better, either. A total of 9,400 were inspected at the end of July and more than a quarter weren’t up to scratch for one reason or another, which is about par for the course when compared to other years. Of those, 37 were closed down immediately and 30 tons of dodgy food was seized in 563 more.

Maybe they should call them gastro-caffs or whatever, because, to a French person, ‘gastro’ can only mean one thing – gastro-entérite, when your insides do their Vesuvius number.

Mind you, it wasn’t all bleak for the disgruntled locals and tourist professionals, because the few soggy grockles braving the buffeting breezes between showers were often, as ever, an unwitting source of light relief.

‘Can you tell me where to find a beach with water on it?’ asked one. Well, if you will picnic under the ramparts at Mont St Michel at low tide …

Or ‘Where does the sea go when the tide’s out?’ Or ‘There’s no one on the beach – is it closed?’ And ‘We’d like to visit the Wall of Brittany’, which doesn’t in fact exist, unlike the Great Wall of you know where and unlike the little town of Mûr-de-Bretagne (pop 2,300) on the banks of the Lac du Guerlédan in the Forest of Quénécan in central Brittany.

At least there’s been no need to water the garden, and the fairways at Dinard golf course, often baked to doormat brown by this time of year, are positively emerald.

But last weekend in Roscoff, these tourists saw a couple of young chaps warily ripping up stuff in the municipal flower beds. What on earth could they be after? Some of your Parade Gardens daturas, perhaps?

Anyway, they chased the vandals away and called the gendarmes, who discovered that there were in fact marijuana plants hidden in the masses of other flowers, shrubs and bushes lovingly tended by the parks department.

Talking of substance abuse, the checkout man at a supermarket just along the coast in the little port of Paimpol is facing a 3,750 euro fine for selling spirits to a 16-year-old girl. She was later found unconscious by her father in her tent at the local campsite, having drunk herself into a coma éthylique. Minors are currently allowed to buy wine or beer from the age of 16, but that will all end in 2009 when the age for purchasing any alcohol is raised to 18.

I WONDER what sort of season they’ve been having on the Ile de Quéménès, which is the merest of specks a few blustery miles out into the Atlantic off the western tip of Brittany. You may remember me mentioning in July that temps passé it was home to a hundred or so rugged Bretons.

But life got too hard even for them, and it had long since been abandoned to the gulls when, two years ago now, the Conservatoire du Littoral, the coastline conservation trust, gave a young couple a rent-free nine-year lease to manage the islet in an eco-friendly and autonomous manner.

They did up a farmhouse, installed wind- and solar-powered electricity and hot and cold running water, and took their first paying guests this summer. But in the spring they discovered something that they were asked to keep very quiet about for the time being. Not a word to a soul, mind.

You remember that massive storm that battered us all back in March? Well, it seems it washed away some topsoil in the south-west corner of the island, unearthing the skeletons of four young adults – three lads and a girl, lying side by side as two couples.

All very odd. And, odder still, they were completely naked.

Detectives couldn’t find the slightest shred of any clothing, or any rings or other jewellery, and the bones showed no sign of  any violence or injury or any illness. What was this, some ancient burial site or something?

But tests carried out at the Institut de la Gendarmerie Nationale near Paris suggested that the remains dated from no further back than 1970, give or take five years. So who were these poor kids?

How did they die, and how did they get there? Had they tried to escape from the juvenile delinquent work-camps on the neighbouring islets of Balanec and Trielen?

Marcel Masson, the ex-mayor of another isle nearby, was a teenager himself in the 1950s and remembered that there were about ten boys – only boys, mark you – from 15 to 18 in each camp, and they got the short sharp shock treatment with Spartan living conditions and hard labour.

They were sometimes put to work on Quéménès, doing domestic chores and collecting vraic for fuel or manure.
But for some reason the camps were closed down only two or three years after they were opened.

Good Lord, what’s that? A poor little ray of pale sunlight has just hit the keyboard, so Mme Masstairmann will no doubt be clumping along in a minute to drag me out to savour it. Must go!

Kenavo!