NOT quite believing what he’d just heard, a journalist once asked General de Gaulle if he really meant to suggest that the French police were stupid, to which the good general genially replied that of course they were, monsieur, they wouldn’t be in the police if they weren’t.

Now I’m not sure that I would entirely agree with that, but there are times when you can’t help wondering. Take, for instance, what happened to this poor chap just down the road from St Malo the other day. Pierre is 75 and had spent all the morning huffing and puffing backwards and forwards, getting the church and the village hall ready for the 150 guests at his and Madame’s golden wedding anniversary celebrations.

Then, just before the service which was to open the festivities, he nipped home in his car to get changed into his Sunday best, a drive of around 200 metres. But, pushed for time and with so much on his mind, he forgot to put his seatbelt on. He’d hardly rushed in the door when a squad car complete with flashing blue light pulled up in front of the house.

Pierre pleaded fair cop on the no-belt charge, explained the mitigating circumstances, apologised for his oversight and said that he was in a bit of a hurry actually. But les agents de la force publique weren’t interested. As they sat down to write out his ticket, the bells at the church started ringing, and his wife and all his guests were waiting and wondering where on earth he’d got to.

Now if he’d lived in Dax, a spa town near the Pyrenees, Pierre may still have been late for church but he might not have had to pay a 90 euro fine or have three points docked off his licence because they would have given him the option of doing community service instead.

They can never find enough helpers to run their Grande Feria, or annual fete, funfair and bull-running in mid-August, so the mayor always asks la police municipale to be especially vigilant in the months before the big day and do everything they can to recruit ‘volunteers’.

On 10 June, Jean-Philippe was also booked for not wearing his seatbelt, and, rather than pay the fine, he agreed to man a ‘rest point’ on 12 August from midnight until six in the morning, serving coffee and soup and breath-tests to the revellers to see if they were fit to drive.

But on 25 July he had a heart attack. And when he left hospital on 6 August, his doctors prescribed complete rest for a month. So he took his certificat médical along to the police station to see if he couldn’t postpone his ‘voluntary’ work.

No chance, mon vieux! The show must go on, and the local prosecutor had made it quite clear that he wouldn’t tolerate any such requests. So Jean-P turned up at midnight as ordered, looking more than a little off colour amid all the fun of the fair. But his condition had deteriorated so worryingly that by 5 am that a few kind souls arranged for him to be driven home.

It would have been far simpler to pay the fine in the first place, of course, but maybe he just didn’t have the money. Times are hard, and getting harder, and half the nation earns 1,200 euros a month or less, which is only 200 euros above the guaranteed minimum salary.

Pay-packet wages are illegal in France because cash leaves no tracks so it’s too easy to cheat. Thirteen per cent of the population, most of them single-parent families or young people under the age of 25, get less than 880 euros a month and are thus officially living in poverty. And a staggering 85 per cent of parents are now worried that their own children might sink into similar financial quicksand.

In fact, the very word pauvreté, when used in a specifically French context, had all but disappeared from the nation’s vocabulary, and a variety of politically correct euphemisms were employed to avoid calling les pauvres, well, poor. Things like économiquement faible. But more and more people are being threatened by extreme hardship, and poverty is once again being called just that.

Nor are the reasons for this ambient anguish difficult to find. Unemployment is rising, purchasing power is falling, and although inflation is officially running at ‘only’ three per cent or so, the cost of petrol and domestic fuel has soared and the price of food has risen 6.7 per cent in the last 12 months.

But the French have in fact managed to reduce their food budget. Yes, they now spend 18 per cent less to feed themselves, having cut back on the little extras like wine and desserts and trips to the café for an espresso, and 47 per cent have cut out bigger extras like restaurants.

The government campaign to get us all eating five pieces of fruit or veg a day has also been hit, because it’s easier to say than to pay for. Temps passé, the French bought their fresh produce by the kilo or three, or even by the crateful, but they’re increasingly shopping à l’anglaise now, buying smaller quantities and even counting the number of, say, apples or peaches they need or can afford.

Cost has become second only to hygiene and safety and way ahead of any other consideration, and some supermarkets are also having to employ security staff to control the poor souls who hang around outside the back door at the end of the day, waiting to scavenge in the wheelie bins.

But a quelque chose malheur est bon, as they say. It’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow somebody some good, and those merchants of misplaced hope, the people who run le loto, the national lottery, are trying to cash in on the gloom by revamping the traditional twice-weekly draws.

They’ve introduced a third draw, on Mondays, and it will now cost 2 euros to play instead of 1.20. Punters will only tick five numbers on the main grill rather than six, plus a sixth on the grille chance of ten numbers. Two million euros will be up for grabs each time, a million being rolled over to the next draw if no one hits the right boxes.

Four million punters already play every week, and another 11 million try their luck at least once a year, but what the promoters are, understandably, being more discreet about is that your chances of winning the new lottery have receded from 14,000,000 to 1 to 19 million, ie from no chance to none at all. So I won’t be playing myself.

Indeed I never have. Mind you, I have been having problems with my bank in Jersey myself, but nothing to do with solvency, fortunately. I had a joint account there with my father, but he died in the spring, so I wanted to delete his name from the account and get all correspondence sent to me here in Dinan. Still with me so far? Good, because the bank isn’t, or not yet anyway.

They wrote back to B Masterson (check the name at the top of this article if you’re not sure what the problem is), saying how sorry they were to hear about my wife’s death (that’s odd, she seemed fit enough 20 minutes ago), and enclosing a new chequebook (in my father’s name).

So, losing faith in the call centre in the Isle of Man, I finally popped across to The Rock and we made progress. They still write to B Masterson, bless ‘em, but at least the cheques are in my name now. Oh, and I also needed to make a payment to a company in Paris. ‘Er, would that be in France, sir?’ the teller wanted to know. I dread to think what General de Gaulle would have said to that.
Kenavo!