NOW I don’t like to talk about these things when you might be having dinner, or have just finished and are now sitting contentedly in your armchair with your favourite evening newspaper, but Mme Masstairmann’s Uncle Pierre recently had to have an operation for, well, ‘hémorroïdes’.

Actually, that’s a word that’s given me as much trouble as him, because I’ve never been able to spell it with any confidence in English, never mind French. Still, he did manage a chuckle when I told him all his troubles were behind him.

Anyway, once the surgeons had him stretched out on what they call ‘le billard’ (the billiard table), they thought they might as well remove a very minor spot of skin cancer high on his forehead while they were about it.

Yes, it was all very routine, certainly nothing to detain France’s best-loved doctors, Messieurs House and Ross, and he was soon back in his chemist’s shop when the local gossip, staring at the dressing, nosily asked what the op had been for. Piles, said Pierre without blinking.

It’s a new technique they’ve got. And the poor dear fled, leaving her paraffin on the counter.

JUST over the water from you in St-Sauveur-La-Pommeraye (St Saviour the Apple Orchard – they’re good at names, aren’t they?) 75-year-old Gilbert Moncuit is one of Basse-Normandie’s 115 candidates for an organ transplant, but his visit to Caen General was less successful.

For the last seven months he has been on dialysis. Then, a couple of Mondays ago at 8 o’clock in the evening, the hospital rang to say that they had a kidney for him and he was admitted to the ‘service de transplantation rénale’ at 8 the next morning.

The preliminary electrocardiogram and the blood and urine tests were fine and he was just waiting to be trolleyed along to ‘le bloc opératoire’ when, at 10, the embarrassed surgeon told him it was all off.
They didn’t have a free theatre.

The hospital had had a sudden and unusual rush of more urgent cases, with more than 90 patients operated on in three days. Gilbert’s condition wasn’t immediately life-threatening and ‘his’ kidney had already been dispatched to another hopeful in another hospital.

And you think the French system’s streets ahead of yours? Well, Lord help you if it is.

DR Gauducheau is a family doctor in the heart of Brittany and he has been rushed off his feet, too, because another GP not far away has just retired so he’s got all his patients now as well.

Not that he had any choice really, even though he’s 66 himself and should have unscrewed his own brass plate more than a year ago, because if he did hang up his stethoscope, there would be no one left at all.

Yes, rural France is fast becoming ‘un désert médical’. Young doctors no longer want the sort of career he has loved. Real medicine, he calls it, where you treat a bit of everything: births at home, minor surgery, monitoring old people, public health, and all for 75,000 euros a year.

But the dog’s-life downside for this no-secretary, one-man-band is 12-hour days seeing 20 to 25 patients, five and a half days a week, a week of nights every three weeks, and an increasingly consumerist public that uses and abuses their doctors like they do the local supermarket.

No wonder 11,000 young doctors fresh out of medical school now prefer to work as locums rather than setting up their own surgeries.

THE mayor of Lopérec, an isolated village of 1,000 souls in the Finistère, Mme Masstairmann’s homeland, is ‘ovvair ze moon’, however, because they have just managed to recruit a doctor at long, long last. Lord knows it wasn’t easy and they had to look high and low, far and wide.

Yes, when they’d finally given up any hope of ever finding anyone in France, they enticed several Romanian doctors to come and have a look round, in vain, despite the fact that the village council had voted to set up and equip a surgery for them, pay the rent, and even lend the new incumbent a car until he got himself up and running, just as they had done a few years ago to ensure the survival of the restaurant and the hairdressers.

Now your Breton’s nothing if not stubborn, and they finally found their practitioner. In Bulgaria, of all places.

Nor was that the least of the villagers’ surprises, for although Dr Richard Yoyo had trained and was practising there on the western shores of the Black Sea, he is in fact Congolese.

Nine months on, he is now treating five or six patients a day, which isn’t enough to live on yet but they’ve decided to extend his living allowances for a while longer. And he has just been joined by his wife and daughter, who wants to continue her studies in France, which he admits, was the main factor in moving to Brittany.

The locals, whose average age is 60, have now warmed to him after some initial reticence, it has to be said, and it’s not unusual for them to offer him a little drop of something when he calls. They’re even teaching him the odd bit of Breton, like the traditional glass-chinking toast of Yehed Mad! (Good Health!), not to mention Kenavo! or Au Revoir! as they see him to the door.

JUST a tiny drop for the doctor, mind, and certainly not enough to refloat the wine industry in France, which is looking more than a soupçon peaky itself. Yes, alcohol consumption has fallen 50 per cent in the last 40 years, and it’s almost entirely due to people drinking less red, white or rosé.

In 1957 each adult inhabitant knocked back 5.5 drinks a day, but that’s down to 2.5 now : 1.5 glasses of wine, half a glass of spirits and another half of beer or cider or whatever, with men now averaging just over four drinks a day to women’s two.

And yet temps passé, wine was as much a part of any meal as a baguette. But as the population has moved away from the land and the factories to the shops and the offices, coffee, tea and even water are now very often the preferred tipples at table.

And today’s youngsters, weaned on zippier stuff, have come to see wine as granddad’s snifter.

When the corks do pop, it’s increasingly a rather decent bourgeois bottle bought for a special occasion rather than a working-class litre of the rough red that strips the enamel off your teeth. Yes, wine, once the much loved symbol of all that was best about France, and the very icon of its gastronomic identity, is now seen as a health risk, and even downright dangerous.

Then there have been the persistent TV ad campaigns about the lesser perils of even social drinking (‘Have you seen yourself when you’ve had a few?’) and the current one targeting regular low-level drinkers who believe they are fine because they’re never actually drunk, all of which has had the wine lobby crying ‘Haro!’.
The nation’s once-thriving lacework industry in northern France is also more than poorly, but got a much-needed shot in the arm by supplying all the tricky bits for Kate Middleton’s wedding dress, Sophie Hallette lovingly crafting them on a 12-ton machine installed in 1887, would you believe.

So let’s all charge our glasses and toast not just their remarkable lady artisans, but also the happy couple, of course. Yes, Yehed Mad!
Kenavo!