Monsieur Crochet had also enjoyed the tiling.

‘I like the sound of the hammer,’ he said, ‘there is a syncopated rhythm. Like jazz.’

Another sprightly octogenarian (there must be something in the water here) had joined him on the green. This was the former Madame Crochet. Appropriately enough she had her knitting on her knees.

‘Do you share your husband’s enthusiasm for jazz?’ I asked.

‘I cannot say, Monsieur,’ she answered, ‘I do not talk to him, since the divorce.’

She spoke the word ‘divorce’ with a hiss, then spat on both her hands and rubbed them together.

I knew something of the history of their troubles. The Crochets had apparently been approaching their golden wedding harmoniously enough when he insisted that he should now be allowed to take a mistress.

‘In France,’ he said, ‘it is perfectly normal. You get married, you make a home, you have children, they grow up, they get married, you take a mistress. Every respectable French man has a mistress, Monsieur. Even Monsieur Le President.’

‘It is disgusting,’ said Madame Crochet, ‘for a man of his age.’

‘But the President is not old,’ said Monsieur Crochet.

‘I was talking about my former husband,’ she said.

‘And I was talking to Monsieur Johnson.’

The Crochets still lived together. They certainly spoke – well at least they shouted – to each other. They could well be sleeping in the same bed and Monsieur Crochet had never taken a mistress. The divorce however clearly represented a matter of principle.

‘It is not that I ever wanted another woman, Monsieur. It is just that now I can, if I change my mind.’

‘There is not a woman in the whole of France who would become the mistress of that man,’ she said.

‘I used to be the most handsome young man in the village,’ he said. ‘There are those that remember. Why don’t you ask the Widow Lambert?’

Madame Crochet made sniffling noises. Then she picked up her knitting and made two stitches.

‘That is for the bicycle,’ she said.

‘Bicycle?’ I asked.

‘Yes, the one that has just come down the street. Two wheels. Two stitches. A car is four stitches. A lorry is six. This way I know how many vehicles are using our street. For one hour each day I do the count. Not the same hour but one hour. At the end of the month I count the stitches and write down the information for Monsieur le Maire. It is important work, Monsieur. One day perhaps they will make a new road – a bypass. It is now very dangerous.’

I had always considered the local traffic flow to be insignificant – rush hour was two cars following each other up the village street. From the perspective of someone who had grown up when horse-drawn vehicles were more common than motorised ones it would seem very different.

Our next job was to replace the two front doors – one of which, in what we call the barn, was previously the access to Celestine Toutanu’s restaurant bar.

Both doors were big – a metre wide and a metre and a half high. These were not sizes we could pick up from the local bricolage. Then, by coincidence I am sure, a double glazing scout arrived.

In France door-to-door selling is highly regulated. Before you agree to a sales visit you set the ground rules. The salesman was to have no more than 45 minutes of our time and we were going to talk doors only – two large ones.

On the appointed day the salesman arrived. It must be that lightweight Italian suits and slip-on suede shoes are the international uniform of door and glazing salesmen

We explained what we wanted – two big oak doors. He consulted charts and tables and tapped figures into his calculator. First one door, then the other, then the sub total, then the sub total plus VAT. Then he wrote down the figure. It was exactly €20,000. We said we’d think about it.

There had to be a cheaper solution. We borrowed a van and set off for Brico Dépot where we found two solid oak doors of the correct size. One opened right and the other left. The total cost was a touch under €1,000. Ricky fitted them both in two days. We were learning.

Perhaps it was the spring sap rising, but I noticed that I had begun to take a particular interest in kissing. Certainly the French embrassades – the peck on each cheek – is a custom of which I wholly approve.

A word of warning: the verb ‘baiser’ is to kiss, but it also means to screw. To confuse matters more, a second verb ‘baisser’ can mean to drop, go down or lower, whilst its reflexive derivative ‘se baisser’ is to bend down. There is much embarrassment potential here and the words are best avoided. ‘Embrasser’ is the safe alternative.

The procedure itself can also become complicated. Take the school crossing patrol for instance. Madame the Lollipop Lady will bend down and kiss every child as they prepare to cross the road. It is so wonderful to watch and great fun. The Health and Safety people in the UK would ban it immediately.

But there are rules – let’s call them the pecking protocols. The big questions to be resolved are ‘who?’, ‘where?’, ‘when?’, and ‘how often?’ I have, for the sake of international relations, researched this.

I began with the principle that the younger and prettier the lady, the more likely it was that the custom would be applied. Not so. As Doris observed of my own pecking preferences at one village function, a particularly attractive middle aged lady received my puckering attentions on four or five occasions. I put this down to my English sense of chivalry; why should it only be the younger ladies who get lucky?

But what does it all amount to? Well, you start by kissing friends, and like many other British expats I have fully embraced this. With the Brits who kisses whom first is not important, but when international puckering is involved it is best to let French friends make the first move.

The number of kisses may also seem arbitrary. Again not so. In most of rural France it is four kisses, in the towns it is either four or three apart from Paris where the norm is two.

The other thing to remember is always start with the left cheek. It is amazing to watch children as young as two proffering the left cheek.