Well, here we are: back in the full countryside, as they say in France. The sun is gently kissing our bodies, and as always this region of fruit and nuts seems to me inestimably benign and sublime. But we’re discovering that it isn’t always thus. As the locals have been telling us – and the dead plants bear witness – the last was the most severe winter they’ve had in many decades.

Our Chilean potato tree didn’t make it. I’ve been growing these beggars for close on forty years, and this is the first one I’ve ever lost. Normally, napalm is the only way you’d get rid of one. Not that you’d ever want to: their delicate white and yellow flowers keep on bursting forth from April to October, and they’re evergreen. Except that this one is now dark brown and shrivelled. Gone too (more predictable) are the young olive tree, half a dozen pot shrubs, and my Union Jack. The last isn’t a plant of course, but it is gone with the wind. Perhaps some emerging French maquis tore it down after David Cameron’s phantom opposition to Fiskalpakt.

As always, the rosemary, mint and other perenniel herbs have come through with flying colours. But both the halyana honeysuckle and the  eucalyptus tree are looking sick, the mirabelle and greengage trees are bare of fruit, and both of my transplanted shumachs are dead sticks. And yet, and yet…some things have thrived on the diamond-hard frost: the periwinkle has gone mad (such that our rockery is now a periwinklery) the three baby walnut cuttings have shot up, and the bloody rabbits are everywhere.

Nothing kills a mixamatosis outbreak more quickly than temperatures at 18 degrees below freezing. So after two years largely free of Braer Rabbit, we now have small white fluffy bottoms running in all directions on exiting the house each morning. As I am very partial to slowly casseroled rabbit, were it up to me alone I’d be shooting and freezing, but Mrs Slog forbids such carnivorous barbarity. So it’s up to the dogs to see them off.

Our middle dog Tiggy is very much up for that, and although much of this prey-chasing is new to the puppy Coco, she barks loudly in an act of insouciant solidarity. Both of these two have arrived at summer with longer hair than would be normal. The neglect of dog-stripping is down to some family health problems of late, such that they both look like California hippies circa 1967. But Coco’s discovery of two acres to run about in means she’s completely exhausted by around 8 pm, and I have to see that as a massive blessing.

The French are different to us in a myriad of ways. They do packet/boxed soups rather than canned, a fact that amazes me – but only as much as their ability to use that packaging form to pleasing advantage. And (a cliche music-hall joke this one) they tend to take it up the arse when it comes to medication. However, while many older Brits might giggle about this, the practice is logical: for things like non-steroidal painkillers, using such an insertion method means irritation of the GI tract is largely avoided. Plus, of course, painkillers are not called analgaesics for nothing.

But when it comes to lagered beer, despite the catcalls about French gnat’s piss, no nation in the world achieves a balance between alcoholic strength and great taste like them. The outstanding brand in this sense is the Alsation brew Kronenbourg – not the 1664 of UK infamy, but rather the reasonably fortified 4.2% everyday product. You can’t get it in Britain, but it is always a delight for me to rediscover it every year.

It always feels a long, long way from England here. From the French viewpoint, it is also a long way from Paris. But perhaps what I mean to say is that it is a million light years away from the unreality of Brussels hubris, debt derivatives, G20 summits, the Obama White House, and Chinese hard landings. Here in protectionist, anti-Islamist, traditionalist rural France, all such things are part and parcel of the carnival that takes place d’ailleurs – ‘elsewhere’ in the metropolitan world where the vast majority of people are mad. Ask the locals why they pay little or no tax, and the response is almost always the same: “Paying tax only encourages them”.

Those who think this attitude is restricted to Italy and Greece simply don’t get out enough. My neighbours here have felt this way since the Sun King demanded taxes until the People’s pips squeaked, and his grandson’s wife told them to replace bread with cake. The uses to which their tax money is put remains as daft in the 2012 EU banking crisis as it was in 1665, when France’s attack on the Spanish Netherlands was excused as an objection to the devolution of land in the question of inheritance. Nobody understood that devolution argument then, and they don’t begin to grasp the European Union debt meltdown today.

But they do know how to nurture and market crops. This is surely infinitely more important than Jamie Dimon’s ability to lose $2bn (and not know how) or Lloyd Blankfein’s desire to die at his desk (and not know why). Yes, the French farmer is a truculent and greedy member of the community. But at least he feeds that community. The likes of Bob Diamond know only how to be rich, and desire that everyone else might be poor.