IMAGINE, if you will, that you live far from Jersey’s madding crowd in a delightful cottage right on the water’s edge in the village of Arradon, on the beautiful Golfe du Morbihan in southern Brittany, in a house that’s been in your family for more than a hundred years and is so idyllic that it even appears on the postcards sold in the region.

Now imagine, if you can, that you have just been ordered to demolish the place and return the site to its natural state before you leave, and all at your own expense, too.

Because that’s what has just happened to four householders down there, one of them 82 years old.

Yes, their properties were built on le domaine public maritime and for the last century or so they had received an autorisation d’occupation temporaire. But in 1993 the Prefect, who is about as near as France gets to your Bailiff, refused to renew the permits, invoking the Coastline Conservation Law, which came into force in 1986.

To take some of the pain out of what even the chapter-and-verse functionaries realised must be a shattering bolt out the blue, the authorities were prepared to let them remain in their houses for the rest of their naturals. But they were also reminded that they had no legal right to sell or transfer ownership or occupancy to anyone else.

Not surprisingly, they turned the proposition down, and the Prefect imposed a fine of 100 euros for every day that they failed to comply with his decision. The four owners then decided to appeal and set out on a long legal battle that took them all the way up through the French judicial system and on to the European Court of Human Rights, who finally handed down their verdict in 2010: sorry, but we can’t help you – it’s up to each country to decide how best to protect its coastline.

So early this year the Prefect wrote to the four again, now asking them to specify the date for demolition, which some of the pensioners quite simply can’t afford to do, even if they were prepared to bite the bullet, which they aren’t.

‘I want to finish my life in my own house. I am not going anywhere,’ said Goulven Vernois, whose cottage was built at the end of the 19th century by his great-grandfather, an ex-Cape Horner. ‘This house is the last link that I’ve got with my childhood,’ cried Sophie Epiard. ‘It feels as though they are tearing up my roots.’
In desperation, they asked for another meeting with the Prefect, but he didn’t even answer their letter. So then they wrote to the President of the Republic, ditto, and finally to the ecology minister, who has asked the Prefect to at least give them one more hearing. But, well, don’t hold your breath, eh …

OUR ruling classes might (and do) get away with blue murder when they’re scratching each other’s backs, and the question ‘Is France in danger of becoming a banana republic?’ is now the subject of serious debate here, and not just among the chattering classes, either.

But the State remains as implacable as ever with l’homme de la rue. Steal a mobylette, they say, and you’ll get six months over the wall. Steal the factory that makes them and you’ll get three months suspended. This magnificent country really does deserve better.

Anyway, it certainly puts my own September SAD into perspective. Yes, it was back to work for me and La Patronne after the ten-week summer break, not that I’m expecting much sympathy from those of you who are grafting away out there in the real world beyond the school gates. Mind you, I’d like the record to show that we are not paid for our July and August off, you know. No, we have an annual salary based on ten months’ work, doled out in 12 monthly instalments.

And France may have the longest school holidays in the OECD, with only 144 days in class a year, compared to the organisation’s average of 180, but French pupils also put in the most hours, funnily enough. Yes, six hours a day in primary, seven in secondary and around 900 a year rather than the lead-swinging 600 you Brits do.

We teachers work a basic 18 hours a week at the chalk-face, which you can multiply by three if you add on preparation, marking, meetings and so on. But we don’t have to go in when we’re not actually teaching, so this year Mme Masstairmann has at least half the day off every day except Monday. As for me, I wasn’t so lucky in the great annual timetable lottery, but I still get Wednesday and Friday afternoons off. Well, all schools are closed on Wednesday afternoons, anyway.

And we did get another unexpected day off last Tuesday, albeit unpaid, pounding Dinan’s cobblestones when we all went on strike to complain about the government’s continuing austerity measures in education.

Between 2007 and 2012, 160,000 baby-boomer teachers and other education personnel will have retired, but only 80,000 of them will be replaced under the government’s two-out-one-in rule for civil servants, and that’s despite steadily rising pupil numbers.

This autumn, the 60,000 extra pupils in the state system are being taught by 16,000 fewer staff than last year, and the 15,600 teachers starting their careers may indeed all have a Master’s degree, but they no longer have any professional training whatsoever. Lord help them.

Not only that, but 20 years ago the basic pay for a new teacher was twice the national minimum salary, which is around 1,100 euros a month today, compared to the minimum plus 20% now.

Things are no different in the direct-grant private school that I work in here in Dinan. We’ve got 1,400 students, which is 400 up on 2008, but the number of teachers hasn’t changed since then, so class sizes are inevitably rising. Whether we’re talking state or private, primary school, junior secondary or even sixth form, climbing into the ring with 30 to 40 kids is nothing unusual now.

All of which creates extra wear and tear in a profession where the stress levels are second only to those of air traffic controllers, apparently.

But it’s just been announced that teachers absent short-term won’t be replaced at all this year either, because the whole of the nation’s equally reduced reserve of stand-ins has already been assigned to cover for long-term absentees.

Mme Masstairmann has a colleague who is off work for chemotherapy and the local job centre sent along this unemployed graduate, a museum curator with no teacher training or experience. She survived for just three days before being led sobbing into the head’s office displaying symptoms that another colleague, an ex-army man, described as being very similar to shell-shock.

NOR was the September SAD chez Masstairmann lightened by our two daughters returning to university, Morgane in Lisbon and Fleur in London, after both being in Paris last year.

Mind you, under some reciprocal agreement, we only have to pay the tuition fees due in their home country and uni free in France, so their living expenses only cost us one of our two salaries.

And of course it’ll soon be Christmas, which regular readers of these letters may remember is one of my more reliable mantras whatever the time of year whenever I need a wry pick-me-up.

Nor have I got some Prefect telling me to demolish the family home and move on, either, eh!

Kenavo!