SO how was it for you, then? Christmas, that is. Very nice but very quiet? And have you got the last of that mince pie out of the carpet yet?

Actually, for one 40-something lady down in southern Brittany it might have been a sight quieter than she had bargained for, but the judge unaccountably decided not to throw the code pénal at her.

Lord only knows what she thought she was playing at, but she had absorbed more than the recommended dose of seasonal spirits when she forced another car to pull over, strode up to the driver’s window and barked: ‘Police! Papers, please!’

Unfortunately, the car’s three occupants just happened to be plain-clothes
men from the BAC, the no-nonsense Brigade Anti-Criminalité.

However, she was only done for the DIC, not the usurpation de l’identité d’un agent de la force publique – impersonating a police officer – perhaps because she had made such a laughably bad job of it.

Well, no real French policeman would ever have said please, for a start. Mind you, I might not be best placed to cast the first stone here myself. My normally near-human Year 7s duly scuffled to their feet as I entered the class the other day, but when I told them to sit down again, nobody moved. I repeated the order a couple of times with ever more ample gestures, à la John Cleese, just in case they had already forgotten what ‘sit down’ meant. Blimey, if I had waved my arms any harder, I would have taken off.

Still no reaction. Or was that a stifled titter somewhere in the back row? What on earth was going on here? A revolt? Revolution?

So I abandoned English. Allez! Asseyez-vous! Nope, still no good. You could have heard une mouche voler – a fly fly, as the French say, though you’re right, it does lose something in translation, and you don’t get all that many flies in Dinan in mid-December, anyway.

So I turned to little Marie-Laure, the déléguée de classe, and demanded an explanation, and Marie-Laure, being Marie-Laure, the sort of fledgling Edith Piaf who doesn’t keep her tongue in her pocket, as they also say, I got one.

Well, Monsieur, you remember yesterday you were telling us how important please and thank you were to the English, much more than they are to us French, in fact, and how we wouldn’t get anything or anywhere without them on the other side of the Channel? Well, when you said sit down, we were only waiting for you to say please.

Voilà! Thus was I hoist on my own petard, as I seem to remember someone in Shakespeare saying way back in my own inky-fingered first-year days up at Hautlieu.

OH no! There’s the doorbell, back in a tick … Sorry about that, but it was a fireman selling their traditional calendar for however much you feel like giving. Fire brigades here in France are also the ones who answer 999 ambulance calls, and most of them are unpaid volunteers like your lifeboat men, or even teenage fire cadets limited to certain activities, but they are all organised by just a few full-time professionals.

Been busy, I asked him? More than the rest of the year, he said, a lot of it the downside of the season of good cheer: car crashes in the dark and the wet and the snow and the ice when people are out visiting, and chimney fires as they over-stoke the blaze or throw too much wrapping paper on the flames after opening their presents.

Then there are the depressives, some needing A&E fast, if it’s not already too late for that. Yes, Dinan’s vertiginous viaduct over the old port attracts despairing souls from all over the region, a bit like Beachy Head, so if you’ve ever seen a bouquet of flowers on the pavement there …

ACTUALLY, that’s our fourth Christmas box calendar now, the fireman having been preceded up the drive in December by the lady who delivers the morning paper, the postman and the Scouts, although I’m not sure what kind of Baden-Powellers they were exactly. We’ve got all sorts, you see, and the corresponding Guides too, of course.

There are associations specifically for Catholics and for Protestants, and Jewish and Muslim ones, not to mention secular groups for non-believers and others for communists, socialists and right-wingers and doubtless National Front members and goodness knows who else besides.

I expect we’ve even got some of your regular common-or-garden skinny-kneed toggle-toting khaki-shorters, too. Yes, France is still the place where it’s ever so simple to have a complicated life and ever so complicated if you want a simple one.

WHERE was I? Please? Oh yes, at school just before Christmas, thank you, and blearily boarding a coach at 4.30 the next morning for a 14-hour drive to Strasbourg with the 44 pupils in our Section Européenne, the twin aims of which are to improve their sense of European citizenship and identity and to fast-track their English.

Now I know the EU attracts a lot of flak, much of it quite rightly so, and a lot of it one-eyed nonsense too, but let’s not lose sight of the fact that the grandparents of us baby-boomers fought two world wars, our parents one, and we and own our children none, nor are we or they likely to as long as the EU continues to stagger along.

Good Lord, one of our tour guides in Alsace-Lorraine was telling me that her great-grandmother’s nationality had changed no fewer than five times from French to German and back again as the frontier and the tides of conflict ebbed and flowed over the course of her lifetime.

So I’m all for a united Europe, me. Well, I even voted with my feet and came to live here, didn’t I?

And a very pleasant week it proved to be, too, not least because for the first time ever on a school trip, at no stage did I feel as if I was riding shotgun, standing by to ward off hostile native yoofs the way I usually have to on our annual visits to the UK or the CI.

And five days with any group of over-tired and over-excited kids normally leaves me quietly determined to become an active member of the nearest Herod Society as soon as I get home. But this bunch were great.

Mind you, Strasbourg’s Marché de Noël, Europe’s biggest and oldest, dating back to 1570, is absolutely wonderful, and everywhere we went in the whole region, it felt just like everything a traditional Christmas should be. Give it a blast on Google and you’ll see.
Kids and staff alike were all absolutely enchanted and we had to admit on our return to Brittany that our own dear Dinan suddenly seemed rather bleak in comparison.

But the very idea of Christmas itself must have seemed an even bleaker prospect to the possibly homeless, certainly hard-up lady in front of me in Le Clerc’s supermarket the next day, because when the girl at the check-out wished her a Joyeux Noël! she merely snapped back: ‘Don’t be sarcastic!’ Oh, well! Here’s hoping things pick up a bit for her in the New Year, eh.

AND here’s wishing you a Bonne Année in 2010, too, or Bloavez Mad! as the Breton Mme Masstairmann’s family down in the Finistère chirruped in unison at midnight on New Year’s Eve. But we never did find out who the grouch was who grumbled: ‘Good grief, January again.’
Kenavo!