SO where did you all get to this summer, then? Now I know we’re knee-deep in recession, the pound’s decidedly anaemic against the euro and the weather hasn’t helped either, but you Brits are the French tourist industry’s nicest little earners – and frankly, you let us down big time this year, all you stop-at-homes.

And the penny-pinching faithful who did make it across the Channel often seemed to have spared themselves the expense of even a guide book or pocket dictionary, like the young English lady travelling alone who found herself trapped overnight in a town hall in eastern France.

Desperate to spend a eurocent just before seven on the Friday evening, she slipped into the Hôtel de Ville thinking it was a regular two-star tourist stopover. But while she was chilling in the loo, the concierge finished locking up for the weekend and doubtless hobbled off across the square to the Café des Sports for a swift demi-pression on the way home.

It was the usual suspect – the one man and his leaky dog – who spotted her asleep on the doormat in reception early the next morning.

Mind you, the town hall here in Dinan does realise that the level of French spoken by most of their remaining English visitors is, well, only comme ci comme ça at best. But the bilingual sign on their round-the-sites mini-train informs them that it departs ‘all the 45 minutes’, rather than every 45 minutes.

Maybe they got some internet website to translate it for them, unaware that one computer-assisted translation from English to French and back again famously transformed ‘out of sight, out of mind’ into ‘a blind madman’.

Not that French tourists abroad are in any position to cast the first stone themselves, either. A recent poll of 40,000 international hoteliers for an online travel agency concluded that they are the world’s worst for foreign languages, which is hardly surprising when you consider that another survey found that their school students ranked only 67th for their ability to speak English.

Worse still, they are also seen as chauvinistic, the tightest when it comes to tipping, and second-to-last for courtesy. But at least they are discreet (or should that be discrete? I can never remember which is which), and they are clean, too, despite a stubborn stereotype to the contrary. The Japanese, the Brits and the Canadians topped the poll, by the way, in that order.

So maybe it was just as well that more and more of the French decided to holiday at home themselves this year. And that may explain why the traditional end-of-July, start-of-August lemming-like changeover, when the pale-faced half of the nation heads south or west as the freshly sun-bronzed half turns back up the road, caused 866 kilometres of traffic jams at one point – ‘un record historique’, which is what the media inevitably call any new all-time best or worst, forgetting or perhaps not even caring that any record is by definition historic.

Some 20,000 visitors gridlocked Mont St Michel every day, too, but only a third of them could be bothered to jostle their way up to the crowded abbey. The rest played at sardines among the mountains of kitsch in the souvenir shops down below, hesitating between the breathtakingly awful sea-shell dolphins and the dayglo T-shirts -
anything to prove that ‘j’y étais’ – I was there.

In fact, the tide of tackiness has now risen so high that they even have Mont St Michel French letters, would you believe, and one way to translate that is, um, ‘capotes anglaises’, a capote being a cape or a hood.

But by common accord, even among the shopkeepers themselves, many of whom miss temps passé, when they did manage to sell the odd bit of quality tapestry or pottery, the ugliest item of the lot is the snowball – the thing you turn upside-down to see Mont St Michel in the snow.

And yet it’s also the runaway best seller year in, year out. So who buys the boules à neige, then? Well, often it’s grandparents for their ‘petits-enfants’ or grandchildren, or a few ageing collectors, or they are bought as joke gifts for friends and colleagues.

In fact, I even shelled out for one myself once, but I’d like the record to show that it was in tropical French Guyana, a tasteful study of the waterfront in Cayenne, and a wry thank-you present for the perpetually perspiring, climatically homesick expats who had put us up.

Another surprising and equally unlikely best-seller here this summer has been a book about the Occupation – yours that is. Well the Sarnians’, anyway. Yes, the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society has so far sold 150,000 copies in France and 800,000 in America.

Its American author, Mary Ann Shaffer, wasn’t a professional writer at all, but she fell in love with the Channel Islands when she visited them in 1976, then spent many years writing the book in her spare time, even battling against terminal illness to finish it, but died before it came out.

Meanwhile, back in the mob at ‘Mont St Mich’, many visitors had obviously heard of the famous galloping-horse tides, but equally obviously had no real idea what a tide actually is or does. Where’s all the water gone then? one popped into the tourist office to ask.

Further down the coast at St Malo, another grockle contemplating the West Park-style swimming pool on the beach at low tide was heard to say that it must be an awful lot of work filling it up every day. Maybe he was the same chap who wanted to know what time the train went to the Chausey Islands.

But one young surfer in the Cité Corsaire really should have known better when he decided to ignore a lifeguard’s order to get back in his zone, because nearly all France’s coastal lifesavers are policemen and women on summer secondment from the half-empty cities and enjoy and employ the full power of the law.

So he was hauled out of the water and handcuffed, then frog-marched up the beach by six burly coppers and detained in his wet suit for four hours before being released, vigorously contesting an 11-euro fine for failing to obey a lifesaver. He had also had to abandon his board at the water’s edge but fortunately a sympathetic restaurateur had looked after it for him.

And once, down in Corsica, Mme Masstairmann and I saw an experienced English swimmer frolicking in the rough seas unwittingly let himself in for similar treatment, not realising that when they run up the red flag it means that bathing is not only dangerous, but also forbidden.

Yes, even at the beach, the French can be very chapter and verse. Pastis-driven pétanque in the warm evening dust behind the camp-site car park may be France’s national sport in summer, but the mayor in Perros-Guirec in northern Brittany has barred boules from the resort’s sands. Well, the metal boules, anyway. Imagine the damage if a child gets hit in the head by one, he protested.

But he is just about prepared to tolerate your lightweight, multi-coloured plastic jobs, though, if you really insist. And it would be as well to remember that, too, if you didn’t fancy a stiff walk up the beach with the boys in blue cossies, eh?
Kenavo!