A JERSEY friend was telling me the other day that he loved just about everything about coming to France except the driving. He even shuddered when he said it.

And it has to be admitted that if there are twice as many accidents here as in the UK, that’s perhaps because the first rule of the unofficial Code de la Route is Me First.
So are the second and third ones, come to that.

Which may explain why white-knuckled Jersey drivers do so often get themselves into a tizz, like the Bean I followed on that busy roundabout in front of Dinan’s main post office the other day, crawling along astride the two lanes at a speed that was, OK, well over 5 kph but still considerably less than 6 and closely trailed by an ever-lengthening tailback of Gallic get-on-with-it.

First, he inched towards the St Malo exit on the right, and the boot-bumper behind him hooted furiously and started to surge past on the left, only for our Bean to swerve back to the middle and, after a few more zigs and then a few more zags, lurch hard left himself into the St Brieuc lane, forcing the boot-bumper to swerve right and hoot long and hard again.

Which, fortunately for the Bean, is as near as the French get to road rage – well, the Bretons, anyway. I can’t speak for the natives down south because that’s a whole different country, quite foreign.

In fact, French doesn’t even have a snappy, off-the-peg name for road rage, and my arsenal of dictionaries remains virtually silent on the subject – apart from Robert-Collins Bilingual, which only offers the rather anaemic term ‘agressivité au volant’ (steering wheel).

And, oui, there is only one G in ‘agressif’ – I checked (the things I do for you). Just as there’s only one D in ‘adresse’ but two Ns in, say, ‘professionnel’. Funny how the French speak their language better than they spell it. Not that the English are best placed to cast the first stone, of course.

Mind you, there was no need for that boot-bumper to hoot like that, particularly as he was an out-of-towner himself. Yes, the last two numbers on his plate were 35, which means that he’s probably from Rennes, the regional capital, or St Malo, which brashly preens itself as the jewel in the Côte d’Emeraude’s crown.

So he probably felt entitled to behave in such an unseemly manner in a one-horse, dogwater place like Dinan, where all the local plates end in 22.

Well, they did until last month, anyway, when it was the owner rather than the car who was registered. Every county had its own number by alphabetical order, so 22 is in fact Côtes d’Armor, roughly northern Brittany, and 35 is Ille-et-Vilaine, and if you moved to a new county you had to get a new number and plates even if you kept the same car.

But with 150 million files for only 40 million vehicles, the national registration centre was about to implode, and the remaining pool of unused numbers would have run dry in about ten years anyway.

So if you buy a new car now, the number will stay with the vehicle from dealer to dump, and will have two letters, three figures and two letters, like AB 123 CD, flanked on the left by a blue panel containing the letter F for you know where and the 12 EU stars, and on the right by a regional logo chosen by the owner, and it no longer has to be the local one.

Someone who is from Brittany and proud of it, but exiled elsewhere in France, will now be able to show the Gwen ha Du, the white and black Breton flag that looks a bit like the Stars and Stripes and that you might have noticed fluttering on French masts around your coasts.

This new system is in fact the fourth since the invention of the horseless carriage. It was in 1893 (and only in Paris) that possesseurs d’automobiles – there were only 150 of them in the whole of France – first had to register their cars. La carte grise, the grey or registration card, was introduced in 1899 and the first number plates in 1901.

They had up to three digits preceded by a letter corresponding to the owner’s town of residence. In 1928 the plate had letters for each county and four digits. That was replaced in 1950 by the system which has just been dodo-stickered.

Mind you, that’s been the least of their worries for some car owners in Perros-Guirec, which is a little seaside resort just along the coast from St Malo, because some one-track vandal has been attacking the brake circuits on cars parked in the town centre. But who? And why?

The mystery was made even murkier by the fact that in the 75 incidents reported to the police in the last 18 months, only Renaults were targeted, and then only certain models of the Laguna, the Vel Satis and the Espace, and then only the 5 mm cables protecting the ABS sensor thingummy.

For several weeks, les agents de la force publique kept a wary eye on all parked Renaults but didn’t get so much as a sniff of the culprit, even though the vandalism continued. Then a second theory emerged: what if the miscreant wasn’t human at all, but some animal?

Researchers at the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique confirmed that rodents in Germany had attacked certain electrics on some BMWs, so the gendarmes rigged up an infra-red camera on a Laguna and soon filmed the miscreant en flagrant délit.

Yup! It was a ferret – and the only problem now is that the beast is still on the run.

St Malo has other worries in the natural world. The pine caterpillar has been progressing steadily north as global warming continues apace and has now arrived in the Cité Corsaire, and the situation has been aggravated by the importation of pine trees from the heavily infected south.

The creepy-crawlies spend the winter suspended from the branches in cocoons before wriggling down the trunks in the spring to bury themselves in the earth and begin their transformation into papillons de nuit – literally night butterflies, which is what the French call moths.

But they’re covered in highly irritating hairs that can even cause necrosis, the death of bodily tissue, in the flesh of the tongues and snouts of any domestic animals that get too curious.

A few birds like cuckoos, tits and hoopoes are the caterpillars’ only natural predators, and experiments with insecticides have failed to stop them extending their territories.
So what price you next, eh?

Spring is also the season for all the tourist guides to blossom in our bookshops, and the Guide du Routard, The Hitchhiker’s Guide and France’s zillion-selling answer to The Lonely Planet and other Rough Guides, has just published a new edition of its petits restos des grands chefs – the little restaurants of the great chefs.

Nor are they trying to compete with the more august red Michelin. No, they are more interested in the sort of friendly, good-value place where le patron is busy in the kitchen while la patronne shows you to your table with a welcoming smile.

Two St Malo restos make their first appearance in the guide this year: Le Tanpopo and La Gourmandise, along with Le Clos des Sens in Coutances just round the corner in Normandy.

Not much driving to do there, eh, so if you did give them a try the next time you’re over – bon appétit!
Kenavo!