GOOD grief, January again, which, you may remember if you read last month’s Letter, was what some grouch grumbled on New Year’s Eve while the champagne corks were still fizzing around our heads at my in-laws: Mme Masstairmann’s tribe down in the Finistère on the blustery western tip of Brittany.

And yet 2010 soon turned stunningly sky-blue, snowy white. The school bus service slithered into the ditch and then the county’s schools themselves were closed down by order of the Préfet, who very roughly corresponds to your Bailiff.

As if we, the hoi polloi, weren’t capable of deciding for ourselves whether or not it was safe to be out and about and despite the fact that they all stayed open in the next county just down the road. But that’s French bureaucratic centralism for you.

Not that I minded all that much in this particular instance, because I’m a teacher and it’s always the kiss-of-death to even your best-prepared lesson when the cry goes up, Il neige! – it’s snowing. Yes, you sigh and rest your forehead on the blackboard for a moment before turning round and trying to salvage what you can.

So ‘professeurs’ like Mme M and I enjoyed some unexpected sunlit jogs in the not-too-deep and crisp and even, along the Rance tow-path. Then she got out her cross-country skis while daughter Fleur and I took our boogie boards to the short sharp hill that swoops down from the medieval castle and into the village in Léhon, just south of Dinan.

In fact, it was all so magical that we Facebooked and Skyped our other daughter, Morgane, who’d also been boogie-boarding herself as it turned out, but under the palm trees on some Caribbean beach in Costa Rica where she’s now working as a multilingual translator.

Well, she did get a head-start by being brought up bilingually. I’ve only ever spoken to her in English and ditto la Patronne, but in French. In fact, speaking two languages was so natural for her that she was about five before she came rushing across from the swings in Dinan’s town-centre park one day to whisper a big discovery: ‘Dad! See that lady over there? Guess what, she can only speak French!’

Someone did once ask me out of the blue what language Mme M and I spoke to each other when we were, um, making love. And, yes, you’re right, it was rather a personal question and we did both blush prettily before I side-stepped it by saying that we only ever speak French to each other when we’re alone. In fact, it’s my English that feels like a foreign language to me if circumstances, the presence of non-Francophone friends for example, mean that we have to converse in Angleesh.

When we first met in Paris way back in 1981, one of the things that she liked about me was that I seemed to be rather the silent type. Little did she know that my rusty grade 6 and only-at-the-second-go French O-level wasn’t up to anything more. Mon Dieu! Did she get a surprise to hear me yacking my soft-brained head off the first time we met all my old mates down the Smugglers.

Anyway, Fleur soon had to catch the ice-skirted TGV express back to Paris and the Institut des Sciences Politiques, aka ‘Sciences Po’, but not before we’d sampled the traditional New Year galette des rois, or king’s cake, which is a round, flat pastry filled with almond paste.

A small figurine in anything from plastic to porcelain, many of them much-sought-after collectables on all sorts of themes, is baked inside the pastry and the person who cracks a molar on it in their slice gets the cardboard crown to wear, becoming king or queen for the day.

Unlike your crackers, though, there’s only one figurine and only one crown to go round, so to avoid any accusations of favouritism and to prevent any illicit peeking as the cake’s being cut – well, you can never be too careful about that kind of thing in France where they do like to be both squeaky clean and pull a fast one whenever they can – the nearest innocent or small child is shoved down under the table in amongst the aunties’ knees to shout out who’s to get the next piece.

Actually, after the French Revolution in 1789, anti-royalist hard-liners wanted to put an end to what they saw as a superstitious and now obsolete homage to the recently guillotined monarchy.

So they tried to launch the galette des sans-culottes instead, a sans-culotte, literally a person ‘without knee-breeches’, being a lower-class Parisian republican, one of the great unwashed. But the idea was hardly an appetising one, eh, and it never took off.

Anyway, the tradition is far older than that, being a popular privilege dating back to the days of Roman Saturnalia and the festivities surrounding the passing of the winter solstice, the cake and the figurine symbolising the sun, fertility and the rebirth of nature in the coming spring.
It was only in about the 4th century that the western church decided to hi-jack the practice itself to celebrate the arrival of the Melchior, Gaspard and Balthazar, aka The Three Wise Men, in Bethlehem on 6 January, Epiphany.
So that’s why the grouch at the other end of the table would say, and often does, that you should only eat the things on Twelfth Night. But there’s not a friend, neighbour, club, association, workplace or whatever that doesn’t have their own little galette party sometime in the month.

And since 1975, the President has also had his own widely-publicised galette reception at the Elysée Palace every year, but his cake doesn’t contain a figurine because, this being a republic, the head of state couldn’t be crowned king, anyway.

Well, that’s what the constitutionalists say and official life in France is so nit-pickingly chapter-and-verse that you can’t help suspecting that they’re only half joking. But the cynics claim that it’s really because all our top men from Mitterrand down to Sarkozy would have been seriously miffed if anyone else in their entourage was crowned, even if only in jest.

Actually, I said the figurines were normally made of plastic or porcelain, but some small bakers even put a gold one in at least one of their galettes as a sort of lottery in a desperate bid to attract custom and, for many, to stave off bankruptcy.

Yes, among the great icons of all that’s best about France and the French, our flour-faced ‘boulangers’ are crying Haro! against the supermarkets, industrial bakers, non-baking bread shops, drive-ins and even those bake-your-own-at-home machines.

Culinary habits have changed, too. The French eat 140g of bread a day now compared to 200 in 1970, 325 in 1950 and 900 in 1900.
In fact, it was once so central to the national diet that they used to say their loaf had seven lives: buttered, toasted, crumbs for frying, to mop up soup, garlic crusts for the Sunday stew, bread pudding, and finally in stuffing.

Good Lord! First it was the onion strings on handle-bars that disappeared, then the berets and the blue-striped T-shirts, and now it’s their baguettes that should be sold with dodo stickers.
Oh, well. That’s progress for you, I suppose, but you won’t mind if I only clap with one hand, eh.
Kenavo!