The weather has changed here. When I say it’s changed, what I mean is that it was weather, but now it’s not. It’s a sort of experiment involving wind tunnels, and how long rain can be carried down them at 40 mph without freezing in arctic temperatures. It’s probably a joint CIA/Pentagon dry-run for one of the many climate-change scenarios we face. If only it was a bit drier.

This often happens in South West France before summer finally takes hold. A week ago everyone was in shorts and reading the pool thermometer in preparation for the first plunge. Now we’re all in pullovers and socks again. The range and uncertainty of weather in Aquitaine is without question part of its appeal for the English.

We drove up to Issigeac last Sunday to buy some salad seedlings and herbs to be planted in the informally arranged plot I’ve created down by our two vines. These steadfastly refuse to produce grapes. They were totally organic vines, but then our neighbour sprayed the field adjoining ours; so now they’re organically pest-free rich-in-chemical-nutrient vines.

Issigeac market is fun, but something of a confection. The cheese, saucissons and spices are horrendously overpriced – but then, producers screwed by the supermarkets have to get their money back somehow. There is something illogically and yet sensibly French about all this: ‘our Gallic multiples are profiteering bastards, so we will invisibly export ripoffs via the unsuspecting Rosbif tourist’.

Being half Franglais, I’m ok with this – but I draw the line at being overcharged 400% for a measly slice of Tome cheese. Fifteen Euros a kilo it said, so the jolly lady in the Bio (organic) shop sliced me off a lump and said “Twelve Euros”. Distracted by other stuff, I smiled back, engaged in some badinage and felt full of my ability these days to exchange gags in French. It wasn’t until we got home I discovered I’d been charged the 800 grams price for 180 grams of cheese. I have German friends who tell me they’ve been suffering from this idea for the last fifty-five years. It’s called the Common Agricultural Policy.

As part of his increasingly weedy attempt to wean the French of this sort of banditry, President Sarkozy is considering a proposal to start taxing the lunchtime meal vouchers that many French companies give out to their employees. French opposition to L’anglo-saxonisme is as strong as ever, and speaking as one who benefits from the Gallic devotion to lunch, I have to say I agree with them. Your Johnny Frog has many eccentric ideas about health, but one of his soundest convictions is the belief that one should eat well in the middle of the day and then semi-starve for supper. This and this alone reduced Michael Winner from being half the surface area of Israel to slightly smaller than a Notting Hill restaurant.

The Sarko idea is evoking fierce opposition from public sector workers, many of whom have a daily twelve Euro allowance for lunch. A tax on lunch is about the most directly inflationary thing one could introduce in France. More to the point, it will reduce the trade available to the country’s forty billion restaurants – and push the workers in the direction of that barbarian invention, le sandwich.

Nicolas Sarkozy displays the same insensitivity to innate Frenchness as that displayed by The Mad Handbag to quintessential Englishness. His idea for a Lunch Tax is a direct parallel of Mrs Thatcher’s Poll Tax. The French worship food in the same way as we are in awe of property. Politicians mess with cultural dictates at their peril.