You have been looking forward to your holiday in France for some time….as winter crawls into spring and the ‘little ways ‘ of the colleagues at the office become less and less endearing, the idea of sitting on the terrace of a cafe, enjoying the sight of the busy market spread out before you, becomes almost an obsession –  a complete change from your stressful working environment.

You will go out for croissants for breakfast at the local bakery, you will stroll through stalls of fresh produce at the market, you will go out to a local restaurant in the evening after looking in at a village fete in the afternoon…you will take your time and enjoy living the slow life in France.

Well, if you come any time between September and June, you might just stand a chance of living your dream. Depending on the region you can cut out the months between November and April as being too nippy to sit out on a terrace anywhere unless you bring your own greatcoat and mittens, so that leaves September, October, May and June….though be careful of all the public holidays in May, which, depending on which day of the week they fall,  can be extended over several days…making what the French call ‘le pont’…the ‘bridge’ until the next weekend or public holiday. When one of these holidays falls on a weekend, great is the wailing and gnashing of teeth as the populace at large sees itself deprived of a  legitimate way to turn one day off into three or more. One local firm – Machin et Cie – is renowned for its’ ‘ponts’…so much so that when one of its’ machines was spotted on the road two days after Victory in Europe Day unkind tongues were heard to remark that they  had probably not updated their calendar from the year before.

However, you are stuck with the school holiday period, July and August. You arrive at your holiday cottage safely, you settle in for a quiet night and when you emerge into the peace of the French countryside you set the ladies to making the coffee while you drive into the village for the baguette and croissants. You find the bakery…no problem, it has a whopping plastic sign over the door announcing that it harbours a proper baker…but you find the blinds down on the door and windows and a small handwritten sign announcing that it is closed for the holidays…

You head for the superette…if such a thing still exists in your village…hoping to find bread but…no, they’ve sold out already. Monsieur understands how difficult it is in the holiday period to know how much to stock…

You try the next village….bakery closed and no superette….

You try the next and then, in despair, nip into town to the supermarket. The coffee is long cold by the time of your return and the ladies might well have broken bulk and started on the duty free gin.

Now, while doctors and chemists…and even dentists where they still exist in the wilds of rural France…have rotas to ensure basic cover, bakers are under no obligation to follow suit except in Paris, where the authorities rightly fear a replay of the storming of the Bastille if the populace is deprived not only of bread but also of cake, so one is dependent on bakers having the kindness and good sense to put a little addition to their ‘closed for the holidays’ sign…telling you which local baker is still open. Some do, most don’t, being geared not to the tourist trade but to their locals who all know that if Monsieur Escampette has gone off to La Rochelle on his ill gotten gains, then you have to go to Monsieur Meunier down the road. This is the sort of information holiday cottage owners need to put in their ‘welcome’ books rather than the usual suggestions as to which tourist traps to visit during your stay.

In deepest France, where no one over forty ever leaves their house for more than a day at a time, there may well be local fetes, but anywhere moderately civilised the population rises as one to depart for the seaside or to take to the hills, so there is no one left to organise anything even vaguely festive. Even the old age pensioners’ club closes to allow the lady who cleans the village hall to take her holiday, so if you want excitement you will have to go to the town, where public money pays for music festivals, face painting and clowns…which is what public money pays for in the U.K., thus keeping the dubiously talented sons and daughters of the lower middle class in beer money…so it will be the same rubbish, only in French.

The local market, much vaunted in your cottage’s ‘welcome’ book, has a distinct lack of stands  - ‘the holidays, you know’ – and most of the cafes overlooking it bear a similar notice to that displayed in the baker’s window, just leaving the one serving the drink made from the Robusta bean well mixed with ground chicory root which is served under the pseudonym of coffee. If it doesn’t take the enamel off your teeth it may well take the lining off your stomach so a quick visit to the closed door of a chemist’s shop to check which of his colleagues is on duty might well be a good idea.

You’re giving up on rural France? You’ll go to the seaside instead?

Well, book your hotel in advance or you risk seeing what I saw when visiting a well known seaside village on the Brittany coast at the height of summer. The door of the one and only hotel was closed and bore a notice

‘Closed for the holidays.’

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