White line, white heat

On the face of it, the village of Fa doesn't have a lot to do with The Velvet Underground, whose song title I have borrowed and modified for a cheap-thrill headline in the finest traditions of what was once Fleet Street.

Indeed this is a clean-living blog which doesn't make routine hip references to dangerous drugs. The only speed around here is the ubiquitous blonde belle of Fa making another lightning sortie through the village in her souped-up green Kangoo. If we fitted the bridge over the Faby with an angled flight-deck, the results could be spectacular. wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

We have got the white lines though; they're bloomin' everywhere. Fa seems to be having a prolonged outbreak of neat-and-tidy-respectable-villageness. I mustn't knock it; the place was, it has to be said, endearingly shambolic when I came here seven years ago. "They don't spend a lot on paint, do they," an early visitor remarked tersely.

Well, they've been making up for lost time; signboards, plant pots, lots of flowers and enough road markings to confuse a Parisien commuter with amnesia. My own modest contribution is a couple of basil pots outside the front door, for the entirely selfish reason that it tastes so good cut straight off the plant.

Masterminding the white (and yellow) lines operation, with a gigantic set-square thriftily constructed from old planks, is Councillor Maniak. I kid you not, though I should reassure those of a nervous disposition that our Stanislas is a very nice man who can safely be allowed to roam the streets, armed with a gigantic set-square.

As I understand it, frequently being vague and lazy on these matters, Councillor Maniak is a retired maths teacher or mathematician, definitely something figurative anyway. This accounts for the surreal precision of our brand new parking bays, stop lines and the piéce de resistance zebra crossing outside the café.

I say surreal because in rural French architecture the equerre or right-angle is very, very rare indeed. Over many centuries, otherwise highly-skilled craftsman have developed an aversion to the 90° angle which is now a dominant gene, inevitably inherited. There is no obvious reason why this should be so. Perhaps the number 90 has a Satanic significance, which eludes me? Most things to do with numerology strike me as being utterly barking.

All other Mediterranean cultures have been able to lay out right-angles for thousands of years by doing strange things with knotted ropes, though perhaps that's more an area for a more specialised form of blog . . . And it's not as if France is short of classy mathematicians. Fermat, of Last Theorem fame, lived as near as Toulouse so he's practically the local boy dun good.

I must admit to being a bit worried about the sinister onslaught of traffic calming measures round here. It's depressingly like England for a start and it's not as if we need them. Now that the camper van invasion has slackened off, we have the vendange with all its little, squashed Postman Pat tractors and the strange praying mantis-like grape-harvesting machines. And of course you're not allowed to start swearing when you get stuck behind them unless you're teetotal. The vine-growers, just like you, live and work here and are entitled to make a living.

Actually it's about now that we often find the real praying mantis, a very weird and wonderful sight; a bit like grape-harvesting machines.

Female PM: "You never want sex." Male PM: "OK, don't bite my head off."