AT FIRST I thought it must be a mistake, surely. Either that, or the same time-worn joke. But our Monsieur Météo on national radio made a remarkable, unprecedented forecast this morning. Yes, he predicted rain everywhere except in Brittany, would you believe?

And it turned out to be true, bless him, which was one in the eye for the rest of the nation, eh.

Yes, they’re a touch too fond of jibing that when it comes to the wet stuff, this green and pleasant region is the nation’s pot de chambre along with Normandy, which irritates us natives no end and drives our tourist industry crazy.

Because most of France’s weather sweeps in from the Atlantic, for goodness sake, so we just get it all first, whatever ‘it’ might happen to be.

And yet they say it actually rains less here than it does in sunny Biarritz, which, just between you and me, may be statistically true as far as the ‘how much’ goes, but neatly sidesteps the question of ‘how long’, because what buckets down for an hour in Surf City in a week of otherwise blue skies can mean several days of leaden drizzle in Brest.

Mind you, there’s no getting away from the fact that this July has been our chilliest for 25 years, as it has for most of France, too. The average temperature in Brittany was just 14°C, which is 3°C less than the hardly Mediterranean 17 that we’re used to.

So it was perhaps the triumph of hope over experience that prompted the town librarian who lives up the road to organise a neighbourhood street party, particularly as he was also working without a safety net, having no plan B, no ‘church hall if wet’.

But the risk was worth it. Our quartier of half a dozen streets or so is essentially a friendly little cul-de-sac perched on a ridge over the Rance Valley, just outside Dinan’s mediaeval town walls, and although we all wave cheerily to each other as we drive through, we rarely stop and chat, or only when we’re all snowed in like last December, anyway.

Six o’clock it was due to start, and that raised another ticklish problem, one that dogs my life here and drives Mme Masstairmann and our daughters crazy. What am I saying? It drives me crazy, too, because although I’ve been in France for 30 years now, I still haven’t got my head round the French notion of time.

Now we Brits are programmed from the cradle to believe that punctuality is the most elementary, the most essential of courtesies. But if, f’rinstance, you’re invited to supper in France and you turn up on the dot, your host will very likely greet you wearing only a bath towel, a faceful of shaving cream and a puzzled frown. It’s the same at work, where I’m always alone in the room when a meeting is due to start, the other participants only drifting in over the next half hour or so.

And when the lovely ladies from La Moye WI were over for their annual bunfight and invited me to give an informal chat about my life here, I did briefly wonder about applying the 15 minutes late law (when in Rome, eh?) before deciding it was best not to. Well, they might have cut up rough the way their English counterparts did with that poor Tony Blair a few years ago, eh.

Anyway, with Mme Masstairmann almost physically restraining me, we finally strolled into the party a massive half an hour later than the time on the invitation, only to find that we were the first ones there and immediately recruited by the pleasantly surprised librarian to help set out the rest of the trestle tables, uncork a few bottles and start filling the bowls with nibbles.

Everyone else wandered in from about seven, including this chap who’d had this most unusual experience in Jersey a few years ago, funnily enough. Yes, wanting to savour Britain’s more exotic culinary delights, he thought he’d have a go at a cheddar jacket potato at Bonne Nuit café.

The only problem was that he didn’t have any cash and the café didn’t take Visa cards in those days. Nor would Pete and Neat Pallot, the affable owners at the time, have survived in business long if they’d made a habit of handing out free foodstuffs to absent-minded foreigners.

So he set off back up the hill to St John but the tap-out machine in the village or wherever wouldn’t touch his card, either.

Now, follow me closely here, because the man behind him in the queue, realising that this day-tripping Johnny Frenchman was in a bit of a spot, quite simply slipped him enough of the crisp and crinkly to tide him over till he got back to France that evening. Yes! You have a nice day, mon vi’!

A Jerseyman? Free and easy with the moolah, the shekels, the readies? It just didn’t add up, because, well, we Beans, though in many ways an admirable race of course, are not best known for showering indiscriminate largesse on all and sundry, now are we? Rather the opposite, in fact.

So I did quiz the neighbour very closely about the exact nationality of the Good Samaritan. But he wasn’t entirely sure what his saviour was apart from ‘Britiche’ and feeling that I was rather missing the point, finally asked, Jersiais,
Guernesiais, Anglais? What difference does it make, it’s all the same, isn’t it? Oh dear. Oh dear, dear, dear. Will you tell him or shall I?

Yes, tricky stuff, words, as I was once again reminded when we Mastermen popped across to the Rock ourselves a few days later and I found, yet again, that your English had moved even further away from mine, a version of our mother tongue that any modern Professor Higgins would unhesitatingly identify as rusty Southern Britain circa 1980, which was indeed when I fled to France.

For example, it seems you no longer have any problems or difficulties, which should be a Good Thing on the face of it, only it appears that your troubles and concerns haven’t really disappeared at all. No, they’ve become ‘issues’ instead. And within 30 seconds of picking up your favourite evening paper, I learned that you don’t tap phones any more, either. You now hack into them, apparently.

The extent of my expat linguistic time warp was further highlighted when I stumbled across an Oxford Dictionary of New Words in a charity shop while buying in my bagfuls of winter reading. Chock-a-block full of unfamiliar expressions it was, stuff like aga saga, blue box, twigloo, touchy-feely and the pink pound, not to mention karoshi, moshing and barfly jumping.

Oh well, better late than never, perhaps. But, having finally caught up with New Lads (who, it says here, are not to be confused with New Men) and established that green shoots don’t grow in clear blue water, as a quasi-foreigner I am now faced with a second, equally tricky ‘issue’.

Yes, the dictionary was published in 1997, and languages never stand still, of course, however much the Académie Française might try, Canute-like, to fossilise French. So if I should wish to become, er, a happening person, which of its terms can I still use today without making a frightful, hot malted milk drink of everything?

And why is my equally dated spell-check red-lining Horlicks and suggesting oarlocks, rollicks, hotlinks, hotlips, hayricks or cowlicks, instead?
No, you’re right, dude. Maybe I should just chill (out?) and stick to classical English. Get less egg on my face, eh!
Kenavo!