FLYING, as ever, in the face of the generally held opinion in the rest of the world, the French believe that there are in fact three sexes: men, women and clergymen.

And it has to admitted that the very word curé, or curate, does somehow seem to deserve some feeling of compassion. But is that reason enough for the village council to buy their local priest a car?

Father Boris Mokélé is in charge of the souls in the parish of Sainte-Monique-de-l’Odon, just over the water from you in the Norman county of Calvados, Helier Clement’s spiritual homeland. And when his motor came off irreparably second best in a collision with a lamp-post the other day, it was all very well saying ‘God will provide’, but how on earth was the penniless man in black to get around his eight villages in the meantime?

So he wrote to all eight mayors asking for their help, and Monsieur le Maire at Fontaine-Etoupefour decided to chip in 1,000 euros from the municipal coffers and hoped that the seven others would show similar generosity to enable the poor curate to continue his mission in darkest Normandy.

Which, you might well feel, is all just another everyday story of country folk — but his decision sparked fierce debate in the national media because Church and State have been living rigorously separate lives since 1905 when a landmark law pronounced their decree absolute.

Even King Sarko I, our omnipresident, was for-ced to backpedal furiously recently after he’d had the temerity to suggest during some recurr-ing youthful unrest that it might be an idea to reintroduce moral and religious education into state schools.

Good Lord! I suspect that les laïcs would have hit the streets in their thousands before he could say sacré bleu — the bleu bit being a euphemism for Dieu.

If they’re particularly flush, the eight mayors might like to give the priest a short spring break too, if not at Easter exactly, and in a spec-ial holiday feature our regional newspaper was wondering what could be a better destination for the French than . . . yes, l’Ile de Jersey.

It seems that St Helier is a miniature London that even the English flock to for all its duty-free goods. Well, there’s no VAT, you see.

The Island’s prices are anything up to 70 per cent cheaper than on the mainland or the Continent, and the pound is looking decidedly anae-mic against the euro.

The Island is also diversifying its economy away from finance and into top-of-the-range tour-ism, so it has reclaimed land near the venerable Elizabeth Castle in order to develop the Waterfront, which has a modern yachting marina and prestigious hotels such as the Radisson SAS.

SAS? Aren’t they your crack troops? No, must mean something else like, um, Seriously Aw-ful Sight, perhaps?

Mind you, in that respect, it is very much in keeping with the rest of the area, which is also an SAS, particularly for visitors arriving by sea from St Malo. But never mind that, the article said, because Jersey is a paradise for walkers and cyclists, with loads of green lanes which are easy riding and well away from traffic.

Actually, Mme Mass-tairmann and I spent our first summer holiday together cycling 2,000 kilometres on the back roads from Brittany to Marseille via the Pyrenees, but we soon handed in our bike-clips as we tackled the Rock. Either you’re hurtling down into Bonne Nuit in white-knuckled freefall, and then hyperventilating your way back up out again, dancing manically over the handlebars, or you are playing ‘sardines’ with the gorse and granite as streams of impatient motorists squeeze past you.

Mind you, despite the unrelenting efforts of the States all down the years to keep coming up with the wrong answers to questions no one was asking, the Island does still have a lot going for it, as Mme M and her group of fellow profes-seurs de disciplines non-linguistiques discovered on a day trip one glorious spring day a week or two ago. Oui, le port, c’est une catastrophe, mais le reste de l’île est très belle!

One of the new trends in secondary education in France is to encourage non-language teachers to teach at least some of their lessons in English. But on mixing with the natives, they soon discovered that there’s a bit more to this anglais lark than mere words.

When the JEP Editor greeted them all with a ‘Lovely day!’, they supposed that he was actually inviting discussion about the weather, and they considered the pro-position carefully, as the French will, before replying that, yes perhaps it was, but the wind’s a bit on the chilly side, do you not think?

And when they were given earplugs to counter the roar of the JEP press, one poor soul suspected that it was chewing gum . . . and pretty tasteless stuff at that.

Nor is this just a Belgian joke, even though that’s what the French have instead of Irish ones, and normally reliable sources at Five Oaks tell me that the incident has already pass-ed into JEP legend.

Other misunderstandings occurred at lunch-time in a St Helier pub, where the party sat and waited to be served, and later on in a tea-room, where they strode confidently up to the counter only to be told to go and sit down.

La Patronne returned to Dinan with some hot cross buns, which are an exotic and much appreciated unobtainable for us expats, but when I asked her what she thought the cross represented, she rubbed her chin a bit and said: ‘Je ne sais pas. St George?’

They thought you Islanders were all ever so friendly, though, and were amazed to be called dear, darling and love, left, right and centre — only been in the place five minutes and they adore us already.

Wrong again, unfortunately, and you would be equally ill-advised to import this typically Bri-tish bit of chumminess into France, however friendly the natives may seem.

We’ve been using the same bread shop down in the village just about daily for more than 20 years now, but we still wouldn’t dream of calling the baker and his wife anything other than Monsieur and Madame, which is what they always call us.

I’m also a sworn translator, and the other day in court the good lady presiding judge interrupted proceedings to ask tetchily if the accused was a friend of mine. Why? Because he kept on first-naming me and calling me ‘mate’, for goodness sake.

Mind you, the atmosphere surrounding Din-an’s Palais de Justice has been less than joyful anyway since they were told that they were being rationalised and moved 30 kilometres up the road to St Malo. So much for all the fine, presidential campaign talk of une justice de proximité.

Nor was the general feeling of having been sold down the Rance eased by the patronising advice on packing sent by the fonctionnaires at the Ministry of Justice in Paris.

Stuff like: If a cardboard box is not big en-ough to contain the object that you wish to put into it, you should use a bigger one.

Oh well, gosh, good job you told me, mon vi’! I’d have been stymied otherwise. The self-appointed Par-istocracy do this a lot when they are dealing with us rustics. In a recent Ministry of Education circular to all teachers on how to deal with accidents and emergencies in the classroom, Rule 1 said: ‘Do not pan-ic. This may only cause further alarm.’

I never did get round to reading Rule 2. Well, life’s too short, isn’t it?
Kenavo!