Concrete pencil

The shops were shut on Sunday! And most of the week! The workers were probably snoozing or playing petanque.

No one remained at their workstation.

The people we met seemed relaxed. They were, for the most part, nice. We pitied them. Where is that scowl that drags you round the day, nose first?

Of course, France isn’t some paradise where we could all go and live and open vineyards and be relaxed and say “bof” a lot. For a start, wherever we go we ruin it for everyone else. We start eyeing up the vineyards next door for strategic expansion.

And their telly’s rubbish. And the state’s pretty nasty. And it’s, you know, France.

And it is easy to mock the British middle class’s gallic obsessions.

“Oh the way of life, the mystique, the shrug, the cuisine”.

But one thing that does seem genuinely better over there is they don’t seem to have fully developed our grasping need to squeeze every last Euro out of every foot of land.

To develop, commodify, carve up, exploit, outsource, buy-to-let, equity release, monster, rip off, charge, overcharge, surcharge on everything we do. It seems, for the moment, blessedly free of the horrendous maximising we have in absolute abundance.

They seem to have capitalism with a bit of moderation: people make stuff. People buy stuff. Everyone goes for a crepe.

Whereas we scratch and pinch and cut until people make more stuff, scream until people buy more stuff and then people only have time to eat crepes at their workstations.

It’ll come to France too, of course – it just takes one person to hog the communal bogroll and the whole system falters. In fact, it surely has come there at least a bit. I’m a middle-class Englishman abroad: I idealise where I am. That’s what I do.

But it’s not quite like here yet. Here, where strategic thinking has been rolled out over all the counties until they lie flat. Frappaccino?