A Polish chap has joined our merry band of wreckers here at Sloggers’ Roost. I don’t speak Polish and he doesn’t speak English, and so we communicate through our shared second language – French. I’ve no idea what he makes of my accent, but I can tell you that he speaks French in the manner of two Dutch politicians having an argument while eating spaghetti.

That description shouldn’t be taken the wrong way: he is charming, intelligent and astonishingly hard-working, but I grasp very little of what he’s on about. Easy to grasp, however, is that he is bloody good at what he does (tiling and plastering) and requires no monitoring at all. His initiative, in fact, fills me with a sense of depressing awe…for I know that we Brits simply do not have his hunger, enthusiasm and diligence.

Today was mainly a wood, skip and emptying day. Yesterday was primarily about stones, soil and grass. Tomorrow will be more of a plumbing and electrics thing. I potter from the cellar (trying to dry it out) to the barn (running water and electric power down there) to the pool’s surrounding walls (ready to receive large stone boulders) and thence to grass clippings.

Where there is rain and mild humidity, there will be grass clippings. In its wisdom, the French government has passed a law forbidding any fires in the garden at all, ever. Predictably, the reaction of most of my neighbours has been to ignore it, but with one of the wettest and warmest Winter-into-Springs on record, something has to be done with the mountain range of grass clippings. My solution has been to construct a discreet compost heap in the far bottom of the property here, underneath the disguising branches of a young oak tree.

For others with more trees than I (whose weaker branches cave in under the strong winds of Lot et Garonne) the solution is not quite so straightforward. The result has been attempts at heavy disguise when entering communal recycing centres, followed in turn by such centres becoming increasingly censorious about what they will and won’t take.

And so battle has now been joined at the poubelles level – those more local bins made available for household waste. These are, come Sunday evening, bedecked with tree trunks, garden swings, and twisted metal bits to do with lawnmowers. The presence of such items now rivals the most favoured dumping object of all: the pram.

It is in the nature of MPs and bureaucrats (particularly the French versions assailed 24/7 by the farming lobby) to  be incapable of envisaging even the simplest consequence of their actions. Not that any of this will bother the farming community……for they are exempt from the law about garden fires. Les fermiers see their role as being threefold: to spend every penny of the bottomless pit of subsidies open to them; to grow as much food and wine as possible; and to block every autoroute in France when the Government forgets how things work.

I can’t say I blame them. Although I do think they deserve a severe reprimand now and then, we must remember that it is thanks to the intransigence of French farmers that this country remains the best equipped to survive disaster…and the least dependent of all EU countries on food imports.

The really good electrician who’s working at my place, the impeccable maconnier, the indefatigable Polish plasterer, and the very talented craftsman woodworker are all able to make a living by offering good value, talent and commitment. But they do so in spite of bureaucracy, not because France values what they have to give. Such favouritism is saved for the farmer and – from time to time – the powerful trade union.

That said, France works better than Britain because there is tolerance rather than appeasement. The French shrug philosophically on the subject of privileged interest groups; but whenever the core values of the French way of life are questioned or threatened, they are quick to fight their corner.

It’s the main reason why I still think France will be the pivotal country when it comes to the demise of the EU. For Brussels-am-Berlin buys into the globalist, mercantile neoliberal theory of life – but the French very obviously don’t.

Earlier at The Slog: Does universal suffrage help cause universal suffering?