NOW what’s all this that I hear about Monsieur Sarkozy and France’s Première Dame, Carlita to her hubby, each having affairs?

Well, that’s what it said Under the Clock in my Weekly Post, anyway, because the French media certainly hadn’t mentioned it, or only a few days later, and then only to wonder at the British media talking about it at all.

Firstly, because any journalist daft enough to upset our omnipresident tends to end up down the job centre before the NUJ can say ‘liberté de la presse’, as the editor of Paris Match can testify.

And secondly, because a Frenchman’s definition of marital fidelity is one wife and hardly any mistresses. Yes, three wives may be polygamy and two bigamy, but one is monotony, they say. So a bit of hanky-panky on the side is not big news, and what’s good for the goose…

Even the more silver-haired among the governing classes are often surprisingly, er, active, it seems. A reporter once asked the ageing Jack Lang, then Minister of Culture, if he ever took advantage of all the sophisticated groupies that the arts attract, and he smugly replied: ‘Of course I do. No point being Culture Minister if you don’t, now is there?’ Silly question really.

The current Min of C, Frédéric Mitterrand, brother of ex-president François, who himself maintained a mistress and their daughter Mazarine for over 20 years without exciting the slightest media comment, is a homosexual and his autobiographical admission of sexual tourism in Thailand or somewhere a few years ago caused only a mild chuckle.

Yes, this is a country where you can call a senior politician ‘un chaud lapin’ (literally a hot rabbit) and he’ll take it as a compliment, grinning modestly at the tribute to the quality and quantity of lead in his pencil.

Certainly nobody would be talking resignation, and no French paper would ever bother with the ‘allegedly’ with which the JWP felt it wiser to cover its back.

Meridian was also taken to task by some JEP readers for discussing our presidential couple in the light of other, more boring non-newsworthy marriages which is the category Mme Masstairmann and I must confess to being members of, I’m afraid, having just celebrated our 29th anniversary.

Well, it’s only the 23rd really, because for the first six years we lived ‘en concubinage’, which is the official term and not always as sexy as it sounds, either. We got married at Dinan town hall, because a register office wedding has been compulsory in France since the separation of church and state a hundred years ago. Whether you then go on to a church is your business and, legally speaking, neither here nor there.

We didn’t, but many couples want more romance than the local mayor in his tricolour sash can drum up as he reads them their republican rights and duties as future spouses under the terms of Articles 212, 213, 214, 215 and 371-1 of the Civil Code, which, as an interpreter on the Court of Appeal list, I am sometimes requisitioned to translate when one or neither of them speaks French.

Actually, la patronne and I got married when we did only for tax reasons. Yes, we were buying a house and the notaire explained that as ‘concubins’, if one of us died the surviving partner would probably have to sell the place to pay the death duties on the half of the property that they had so unhappily inherited.

And as our down-payment was the compensation I had received after being multiple-fractured to within a whisker of oblivion by a drunk driver on the Route de Dinard …

It has also been the 30th anniversary of my arrival in France as a political refugee fleeing Mme Tatchair, La Dame de Fer, and fully intending to move back across the Channel just as soon as she had blown over or up, which I was convinced couldn’t take more than a few months, surely.

I am now a dual national, and having lived here longer than anywhere else, I’m not so much more French than British as neither one thing nor the other, being completely out of touch with the day-to-day realities of your life back home while finding it impossible to fully integrate the Gallic mind-set.

Yes, the Britkid being the father of the expat-man, you end up feeling like a bit of a stateless citizen, in fact.

Mind you, I can’t be the only one. A total of 300,000 French people live in London, making it the sixth-largest French city in the world in terms of population, and the biggest outside France, and if they want to get on in the UK, it’s vital that they understand The Importance Of Not Being Earnest.

But to survive in France you have to delete that ‘Not’. Be modest and self-deprecating and they’ll take you at your own estimation. Use humour the way the Brits do, which is more or less constantly, and you won’t be taken seriously.

And it seems that for some people, I can no longer consider myself a mother-tongue, native speaker of English, either. Yes, the boss of Europe’s top translation agency reckons that they are so successful because, unlike most other agencies, when they want something translated from French into English, say, they get a Brit living in London to do it, not some 30-year expat in, well, Dinan who wouldn’t know what a chav was if one of them walked up and nutted him.

Now I do happen to know what a chav is, as it turns out. (OK, fair cop! I didn’t and I’ve just looked it up. Don’t keep on.) But I have to confess to not having the foggiest about when it first entered the language, how and why, who uses it and when, or even whether you or they still do.

And I was once horrified to hear an old friend in Jersey, a chap called Derek, addressed as Del Boy, for goodness sake. But then, I’d never heard of Only Fools and Horses, either.

Lord only knows what else I’ve missed since or just how far out of touch I have inevitably become.

TALKING of anniversaries, way back in March 1790 the Paristocracy decided that northern Brittany would henceforth be known as the county of the Côtes-du-Nord, a chilling name suggesting some drizzly, windswept coast somewhere up around Dunkirk, which itself revives painful memories here, that being where you lot ran off like rabbits, leaving our brave lads stranded on the dunes. Well, that’s the French version, anyway.

But in the two centuries, only seven counties have ever been allowed to change their names, among them Charente-Inférieure and Seine-Inférieure, which both swapped their inferiority for -Maritime, in 1941 and 1945 respectively, and Loire-Inférieure, for -Atlantique in 1957.

But Charles Josselin, at the time the mayor at Pleslin-Trigavou on the Dinan-Dinard road and a minister in the Mitterrand government, kept chipping away and in March 1990, François Le Grand finally gave the imperial thumbs-up to the Côtes-du-Nord becoming the Côtes-d’Armor.

Some whingers did object that the new name was a bit of a bimbo – very pretty but rather silly and somewhat confused, Côtes meaning coasts in French, and Armor the sea in Breton.

Never mind. Its inhabitants, the Costarmoricains, local tourism and even the wider local economy have been on the up ever since it corrected the 200-year-old ‘déficit d’image’.

Yes, we all owe a big merci! to Monsieur Josselin, who is as nice a chap as ever bit a baguette, and I do believe that among his many other accomplishments is marital fidelity. Well, I’ve never read, seen or heard anything to the contrary in the media, anyway. No, not even Under the Clock.

Kenavo!