IN these letters down the years, my wife has perhaps become familiar to you as the rather formal, not to say formidable, Mme Masstairmann, the French not slipping easily into first name terms. Nor do La Patronne and I have turtledove names for each other in the intimacy of our own home either, come to that, unlike 60% of her compatriots, according to a recent opinion poll.

Chéri(e) and mon (ma) chéri(e) are cooed by a quarter of the nation, the bracketed bits indicating that the person so lovingly addressed is female, followed by bébé, mon coeur and mon petit coeur, then amour and mon amour and the more curious ma puce or even ma pupuce, literally my (little) flea. Bringing up the rear are the names of animals like duck, chick or rabbit. Good grief, Mme M would soon check the tide level in the whisky bottle if I called her anything like that.

And our omnipresident, the human pinball King Sarko I, wouldn’t use any of those terms to describe the Bretons, either. No, he’s gone on record, off the record, if you’re still with me, as saying that he couldn’t care less about them, or perhaps I should say ‘us’ because I’ve been here for nearly thirty years now and no one’s ever had to tell me that there’s a Condor out in the morning.

So he was less than, ’ow you say, ovvair ze moon when Rennes and Guingamp reached the Cup Final, a match that as president he is bound by tradition to attend, and the first time since Sedan met Troyes in 1956 that both finalists have come from the same region.

In fact, his advisers had the devil’s own job persuading him to nip back up to Paris from his bank holiday official residence down on the Med. He did finally cave in but his spin doctors weren’t fooling anybody when they claimed that this had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that there are important elections in the offing and this was no time to snub a big chunk of France.

Even so, the military band in the centre circle had already oompahed the Marseillaise by the time he slipped quietly into his seat, having refused to go down onto the pitch to be presented to the teams. He said he was fed up with being whistled at by ‘cons’, which is his word and one that I won’t translate, not least because your favourite evening newspaper wouldn’t print it if I did.

He also gave strict instructions that he was not to appear on the big screens inside the stadium either, though national TV was of course to give his beaky features ample coverage. Well, if the programme’s producers wanted to keep their jobs they would, anyway.

Ditto after the final whistle when the speaker on the PA was told not to say that the cup was to be presented by Sa Majesté, who’d no sooner handed over the silverware than he slipped away again like a thief in the night. No, the diminutive president who’s so fond of crowing, J’ai la banane, moi! – I’ve got a (smile as wide as a) banana, me! – was not walking tall that night.

And yet Rennes-Guingamp was the classic St Helier-St Ouennais confrontation but with bells on, mon vi’. Yes, the premier league big city of 200,000 souls against the second division Asterix village of 8,000. Welcome to town! the Rennes banners jibed when Guingamp last came to the regional capital for a derby. Welcome to Brittany! the rustics jeered in the return match.

Neither side would give you a merci for steak and kidders and a cup of Bovril at half-time, though. Both prefer pancakes, but down in Guingamp they’re sweet and light, whereas your Rennais prefers his rough and savoury and wrapped round a hefty sausage, as celebrated in one of the club songs: Galette saucisse, je t’aime!

But just as two dogs fighting will both go for anyone who tries to separate them, so both sets of supporters put on a united Breton front for the rest of the nation as 80,000 of them swarmed into the Stade de France brandishing their distinctive black and white Breton flags, while back home the thousands and thousands of ticketless danced and sang in front of the giant screens set up in the town centres. Ma doué! – My God! in Breton – you should have been there.

Not that they were allowed to sing the Breton national anthem, before the kick-off, though. No, this is republican France and the Paristocracy won’t tolerate any of that regional identity nonsense. Now I know it will never happen but could you imagine Cardiff meeting Swansea at Wembley and the stadium full of Welshmen being told it was God Save the Queen or nothing?

Actually, the Breton and Welsh anthems have the same tunes but different words and on second thoughts, it’s probably just as well they weren’t allowed to sing it because Breton, like your Jèrriais, is very much dodo-stickered, unfortunately. So the regional press had to print the words because hardly anyone knows them, not that seeing them written down helped very much, either. The first line – all together now – is: Ni, Breizh agalon, karomp hon gwir vro! See what I mean?

No, they don’t speak much Breton this side of St Brieuc, where Gallo, the local patois, is an offshoot of French like yours – ours. I’ve been living in Dinan for 25 years now and my own Breton still doesn’t stretch much beyond the Kenavo! – au revoir – at the bottom of these letters.

Fewer than 200,000 of the four million or so Bretons speak their regional language, compared to an already anaemic 250,000 ten years ago. Only 35,000 use it every day and only 12,000 of those are under 40. The picture is further fragmented by the fact that the language is itself divided into three sub-regional dialects.

Seventy per cent of those who do speak it are over 60 and the typical Bretonnant or native speaker is a poorly paid, less educated married woman living in the Finistère, on the western tip of Brittany. In the schools, five or six thousand students are taking it as an option but it’s a stable door job and you’d need to triple that figure just to slow down what seems like terminal decline.

And when I mentioned that I wouldn’t mind learning it myself, my Bretonnant brother-in-law down in Brest warned me to be very careful who I spoke it to because they might think I was insinuating that they were just bumpkins who weren’t bright enough to understand French.

Anyway, where were we? Oh yes, at the Stade de France for the cup final, not that I actually went to the game myself, even though me and my 17-year-old daughter Fleur have been season ticket holders at Rennes since she was old enough to chant ‘Allez, les rouges!’ And even though we did manage to get hold of two of the 20,000 tickets allocated to the club.

Because the two teams had to turn away another 200,000 applicants, including la Patronne. Now Mme Masstairmann’s from the Finistère, too – ask her if she’s French and she’ll say, no, Breton, actually – and she was so disappointed at not being part of the greatest Breton army ever to hit Paris that when she drove us to the station on the morning of the game, I gave her mine. Yes, greater love hath no man . . . And I could have sworn she called me Mon Amour, too.

Fade out to the sunset and the unhappy ending: we lost, and it was all my fault too because we always do when she comes with us. Fleur even banned her one difficult year when relegation threatened. Yes, Guingamp won The Battle of Brittany 2-1 and, Ma Doué! we haven’t heard the last of it yet, either. No, not by a country mile we haven’t.

Kenavo!