Vide grenier trauma - Poubelle turns in own grave

Got your poubelles at the ready? No? Well it's your own fault that your home is about to be inundated with total crap (ref dear old G. Ratner). This because it's the vide grenier season, when all and sundry in virtually every village en l'haute vallée and far beyond, both in kilometres and all reason, "empty their attics". Or as they say en Angleterre: 'Ave a car boot sale.

You may become arrested by trop de veng, trop de soleil and great overloadings of general picture-skewness as in this leafy, tranquil scene at agreeable Arques of a peaceful Sunday morning. Actually it's trop de vin but I'm rashly trying to imitate our local impenetrable brogue (veng demeng peng etcetera). In all such words, the non-existent G at the end, for non-existentialists, is sounded out fully.

Be afraid, be very afraid. All those innocent faces of the young, not so young and the positively antediluvian, lined up behind their cute assortments of artefacts are mad, bad and dangerous to know.

If you succumb to these sirens, you will return home, wiser, sadder, much skinter and driving an exhausted vehicle in dire need of new springs, clutch and back axle. Such will be its burden. In total crap terms, the average VG can definitely give Ratner, G. a run for his argent. The Chief Anti-tat Meister, Monsieur Eugène Poubelle himself would be struck dumb by horror, could he but see us now.

There are ways to avoid buying overwhelming quantities of other people's rubbish. One of them is to try selling it instead. Personally I'm not convinced by this, observing that most merde de VG remains unsold at the end of the day. My own grenier is two floors up and the last thing I would ever want to have to do is to cart all my tat back up there again.

I sometimes give stuff to the stand for the village school. They get the sous if they sell it but under no circumstances will any of my merde come back to me again . . . I have disowned it forever. More beguiling is the idea of perception: They're not trash, they're . . . treasures. Don't believe a word of it, I say.

It's certainly more effective to specialise in some particular form of tat. I have personally narrowed myself down to Tintin hardbacks in French and in pristine condition; large blue plates and cast iron trivets because new ones cost a fortune and I've got a glass dining room table top.

Actually wanting these items means that you will never see them at a vide grenier ever again and you will become totally tat-proof. Except . . . just now and then you do find a genuine and irresistible bargain: Aside from a copy of Waiting for Godot in the original French for a mere 50 centimes, I found four decent matching pint beer glasses for €3 the lot at Arques.

So why pint glasses? I always try to avoid virulent English ex-pat syndrome as I find it a real pain, but none of us can ever completely deny where we come from, and nor should we try to: You can't change the fact of who you are.

And we all have little things that remind us of our roots. For me it's PG Tips, Cooper's Oxford Marmalade, Branston pickle and an unshakeable gut feeling that beer always tastes nicer in pints. After all, I believe that the Danes still drink beer in a measure that has been illegal since 1695 so I figure these little things must matter somehow.

But here we are, always still in SW France, so let us remind ourselves with the choicest idiom that has come my way in a long time via girlfriend Claire: Il a le cul bordé de nouilles, which literally means: His arse is edged in noodles. No-one has a clue where it comes from but the French say it as we would say: He lives a charmed life. Perhaps we do . . .